I believe in Sleepy Hollow! I do not live there; I only wish I did. But I believe in it. Sleepy Hollow is a capital place. I know that everybody laughs at it; but that is partly why I believe in it; for everybody has laughed, some time or other, at all the things in which I most steadfastly believe. Everybody laughed at Noah; everybody laughed at Nehemiah; everybody laughed at the prophets; everybody laughed at the martyrs; everybody is always laughing. Galileo and Columbus were laughed to scorn, and so is Sleepy Hollow. But they laugh best who laugh last. That is where Noah and Nehemiah, Galileo and Columbus, score. And that is precisely the point at which poor Sleepy Hollow will triumph over its feverish and neurasthenic deriders. Once more, therefore, I set boldly down this fine and fundamental article in my personal creed: I believe in Sleepy Hollow. The world would be a poor place without it. Even Washington Irving, who first awakened in us a desire to explore the drowsy valley, and who told us the worst that there is to be told, confessed to a lingering fondness for the quiet spot. ‘ I mention this peaceful place with all possible laud,’ he says, ‘for it is in such retired little valleys that population, manners, and customs are preserved from destruction.’ And he likens them to little nooks of still water, on the border of a rapid stream, where we may see the straw and bubble riding quietly at anchor, or slowly revolving in their mimic harbour, undisturbed by the rush of the current. Yes, I believe in Sleepy Hollow. Indeed, I not only believe in it but I require others to believe in it. If a man applies for membership in a Christian church the minister of that church should get to close quarters with him by asking him one pertinent and penetrating question. ‘Do You sleep well?’ he should inquire. It is no good going on to discuss matters of detail until that cardinal and essential point has been settled. ‘Do you sleep well?’ let the minister ask, looking steadily the while into the eyes of the candidate. Everything hinges on the response to that one searching and spiritual inquiry. I do not go so far as to say that an unsatisfactory reply to that question should doom his application. But if he is compelled to confess that his home does not stand in Sleepy Hollow, he should be regarded as a weaker brother, and should be carefully watched, admonished, and ministered to until he is able to assure his minister that he can sleep like a top. 

  Why do we send missionaries to the heathen? Why, indeed, but to teach the people how to sleep? The essential difference between a Christian and a cannibal is that a Christian knows how to go to sleep, and a cannibal doesn’t. If I want a good laugh I turn to Punch or Boswell – it matters little which. If Boswell happens to be the handier I turn to the page on which the poor biographer, never afraid of making himself the ridiculous foil against which his hero may show to advantage, tells us how he once submitted to the great man the proposition that a savage life was happier than a civilized one. The doctor simply roared in his fury, and almost drove his companion from the room. A savage life, he declared angrily, was animalism, misery, and sleeplessness; and whoever dared to affirm the contrary was a fool and was talking nonsense. Boswell pleaded piteously that Rousseau talked such nonsense, ‘Yes, sir,’ stormed the doctor, ‘but Rousseau knew that he was talking nonsense, and laughed at the world for staring at him!’ One feels very sorry for poor little Boswell, cowering beneath this terrible outburst; but at the same time one is bound to  recognize that he richly deserved his castigation The men who know are all on the doctor’s side. Here is James Chalmers, the apostle of New Guinea. If any man knew savagery at first hand, he did. ‘A savage seldom sleeps well,’ he says, hitting off the whole situation, as it now concerns us, in five plain words. ‘A savage seldom sleeps well at night. The state of terror in which he lives is truly pitiful. He dreads ghosts and hobgoblins. He is startled by leaves falling, lizards chirping, birds singing; and, besides, there are embodied spirits he has good cause to fear. Savage life is not the joyous hilarity that many writers would have us to understand.’ Livingstone was impressed by the same thing in Central Africa. The natives wore a haunted look, and their eyes were furtive with suspicion. They were enslaved by the terror that walketh by night, and restfulness was out of the question. ‘Give us sleep, sleep, SLEEP!’ they seemed to cry. The chief Monze begged Livingstone to send a white man to live among his frightened people; and his sister seconded him, exclaiming that it would be a joy beyond expression ‘to sleep without dreaming of any one pursuing one with a spear.’ Here, then, from New Guinea: and from Central Africa, and from all the wilds of the world, comes that pitiful, pathetic, heartrending cry: ‘Give us sleep, sleep, SLEEP!’ Did I exaggerate when I said that our missionaries go to the heathen to teach them how to sleep? Be sure that a cannibal would never laugh at Sleepy Hollow. To him Sleepy Hollow would seem to be next door to Paradise.

  The moral and spiritual significance of sleep can scarcely be overestimated. I fortify myself at this point by an appeal to Victor Hugo, and Victor Hugo was a philosopher. He is describing Jean Valjean in the act of robbing the good bishop who had pitied him in his distress, and had admitted him to the hospitality of his home and the confidence of his hearL In creeping through the silent and’ darkened house, the culprit came to the bed on which the bishop slept. ‘ A moonbeam passing through the tall window suddenly illuminated the bishop’s pale face. He was sleeping peacefully, his head thrown back on the pillow in an easy attitude of repose, and his hand, which had done so many good deeds, hung out of the bed. His entire face was lit up by a vague expression of satisfaction, hope, and beatitude—it was more than a smile, and almost a radiance. He had on his forehead the inexpressible reflection of an invisible light, for the soul of a just man contemplates a mysterious heaven during sleep; A reflection of this heaven was cast over the bishop, but it was at the same time a luminous transparency; for the heaven was within him, and was conscience. Jean Valjean was standing in the shadow, with his crowbar in his hand, motionless and terrified by this luminous old man. He had never seen anything like this before, and such confidence horrified him. ‘The moral world has no greater spectacle than this, a troubled, restless conscience, which is on the point of committing a bad action, contemplating the sleep of a just man.’ The moral world, says the brilliant Frenchman, has no greaters pectacle than this! No statement that I have made is half so sweeping as that!

  I have quoted Victor Hugo for the sake of the philosophy of that golden sentence. The illustration in itself is inconclusive, seeing that it is taken from romance. And so, beside that scene taken from French fiction, I place an almost identical scene taken from English history. An hour or two before the execution of the Earl of Argyle, one of the traitor lords came to the castle and asked to see his lordship. ‘He was told,’ Macaulay says, ‘that he was asleep. The visitor thought this was a subterfuge, and insisted on entering. The door of the cell was softly opened, and there lay Argyle on the bed, sleeping, in his irons, the placid sleep of infancy. The conscience of the renegade smote him. He turned away sick at heart, ran out of the castle, and took refuge in the dwelling of a lady of the family living hard by. There he flung himself on a couch, and gave himself up to an agony of remorse and shame. His kinswoman, alarmed by his looks and groans, thought that he had been taken with some serious illness, and begged him to drink a cup of sack. “No, no,” he said, “that will do me no good.” She prayed him to tell her what had disturbed him. “I have been,” he said, “in Argyle’s prison. I have seen him, within an hour of eternity, sleeping as sweetly as ever a man did! But as for me—’” Now is not this an exact counterpart to the scene in Les Misérables? And is it not an abundant confirmation of Victor Hugo’s affirmation that ‘the moral world has no greater spectacle than this, a troubled, restless conscience, which is on the point of committing a bad action, contemplating the sleep of a just man’? That golden saying should be learned by heart.

   The Church, of course, is the true Sleepy Hollow. She has excelled in the production of heroic and magnificent sleepers. That is why I insist, that every candidate for her membership should be searchingly questioned as to his ability to sleep. We must not imperil her great reputation. Think of David, in the most heartrending crisis of his eventful life, flying from the sword of his ownrebellious son, yet flinging his tired body on the hard ground and sleeping like a little child!’ I will both lay me down in peace and sleep,’ he saysovernight, ‘for Thou, Lord, only, makest me to dwell in safety.’ And in the morning he rubs his eyes, refreshed, and says, ‘I laid me down and slept; I awaked, for the Lord sustained me.’ And what shall we say of Daniel, sleeping among his lions, or of Peter, chained to his guards, awaiting execution, but slumbering deliciously until theangel awoke him? And surely that lovely picture of the Divine Sleeper in the fishing-boat on Galilee, at rest in the midst of the storm, is intended tobe typical of much. I like to remember, also, that the night before Latimer and Ridley lit at Oxfordthat candle which has never been put out, Ridley’sanxious brother offered to spend that last terrible night with them. ‘No, no, brother,’ smiled the Bishop, ‘I mean to lie down and sleep as gently as ever I did!’ And, to the amazement of the warders who kept guard, he was as good as his word, rising in the morning from his quiet slumber to greet the flames that bore his soul to the skies! Great sleepers, these! Poor George Stephenson, when he was building the Menai Tubular Bridge, used to say that he went to bed at night with those gigantic tubes and girders, and was still staggering under them when he rose in the morning. We are too prone to that sort of thing. We need to take lessons of Sir William Cecil, once Lord Treasurer of England, who, on throwing off his gown at night, used to say to it, ‘Lie there, Lord Treasurer!’ and forgot all the cares of State until he resumed his official garb in the morning. We are such poor sleepers because we are such poor saints.

   The best things all come to Sleepy Hollow. Among the piles of ponderous military traditions that cluster about the personality of Frederick the Great of Prussia is one rather pretty little story. The Emperor one day rang his bell, but it was .not answered. The King went out and found the boy who should have answered the summons fast asleep. Beside the lad was a letter from his mother. ‘My dear boy,’ it said, ‘thank you for the money you have sent me. God will bless you for it.’ Frederick was pleased, went to his room, brought back a handful of ducats, and slipped them into the pocket of the sleeping page. When the little fellow woke up and felt the coins in his pocket, he was very frightened, and went and told the King. ‘It is all right,’ said Frederick; ‘it is for your mother and yourself. In your little Bible there is a text that says that God gives to His beloved in their sleep. Now you understand what it means!’ And so I believe in Sleepy Hollow. They may laugh at its repose who laughed at the great souls who slumbered there; but I am convinced that, if I can learn its restful secret, there will enter into my life a great and wonderful enrichment.

F.W. Boreham