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Chapter X

The Spoiled Child

A LITTLE child! Is there anything under the stars more beautiful? A little child, with all his wondering innocence, his exquisite simplicity, his delicious charm! Jesus took a little child and set him in the midst of His disciples, not to tell the little child that he must become like Peter and James and John, but to tell Peter and James and John that they must become like that little child. Except, He said, except ye become as this little child, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. 

But a spoiled child! Is there anything under the sun more repulsive? A spoiled child with all his poutings and his simperings, his hectorings and his bullyings, his arrogance and his tantrums! A spoiled child, consumed by passion and selfwill, is a spectacle for men and angels. A spoiled child is one of life’s consummate tragedies. He who spoils a little child is an outlaw against society. 

With a great fondness in his heart and a great fear at the back of his mind, Paul once wrote a very tender letter to his converts, his spiritual children. Beware, he says, lest any man spoil you! 

I

There are no people like the unspoiled people. Speaking generally, our literature contains two classes of men. There are the men whose works we admire without giving more than a passing thought to the writers themselves; and there are the men who win our affection quite apart from our attachment to their works. To take, almost at random, the names of an Englishman, an Irishman, and a Scotsman, there are Charles Lamb, Thomas Moore, and Robert Burns. They are literature’s most lovable men; we like to think of them and to read of them and to talk of them; their very names stir a warmth in our hearts: but why? 

They were all three of them unspoiled and unspoilable. Each knew heart-rending sorrows and crushing disappointments; each experienced moments of delirious exultation and rapturous triumph; yet each emerged from both ordeals unsoured and unspoiled, In the trough of adversity and on the crest of prosperity Charles Lamb was always Charles Lamb; he remained his modest pathetic, whimsical self; nothing weakened his faith, impaired his humility, or affected his perfect poise. 

The haunting melodies that won for Thomas Moore so amazing a popularity are as enchanting as anything in the realm of poesy but what of his letters to his mother? In one of them, written when all London was at his feet, he tells her that he is feeling; little tired of the drawing-rooms of duchesses, and would love to be sitting with her in a cosy little cabin enjoying a good old-fashioned dinner of salt fish and Irish stew! 

And everybody knows how, to the end of his days, Robert Burns was just Robert Burns-the same everywhere and to everybody. Has not Dr. Maclean Watt told us that Sartor Resartus was inspired by Carlyle’s admiration for the way in which Burns would a any time excuse himself from the company of one of his aristocratic friends in Princes Street, Edinburgh, in order to shake hands with a ploughboy from Ayrshire whom they chanced to meet. 

Or, turning from history to fiction, and from one sex to the other, why is Lorna Doone recognized as one of the most engaging heroines of romance? From the first page to the last we have to take John Ridd’s word for it that she was indescribably beautiful and unutterably sweet; the author never actually sets her before us in such a light that we behold her charms with our own eyes and feel our hearts capitulate to her loveliness. Yet she is dear to all of us. Why? 

When first John Ridd meets her, she is a little girl beside a babbling Devonshire stream, surrounded by a riot of primroses. When they meet again, years afterwards, she is still among the primroses, but she has ripened into a luscious young maidenhood. Perhaps discovering, with womanly instinct, that she has awakened a dangerous sensitiveness in John’s youthful breast, she reveals to him her origin. John learns to his horror that she is a child of the Doones—the most desperate and most dreaded brigands in the country. 

‘All around me’, she explains, ‘is violence and robbery, coarse delight and savage pain, reckless joke and hopeless death. There is none to lead me forward; there is none to teach me right; I live beneath a curse that lasts for ever.’ 

Surely so sinister an environment must leave some hideous taint on her gentle and impressionable spirit! But did it? Every reader knows that Lorna was like a lily growing in a coalmine. Her corrupt surroundings utterly failed to defile her. She was unsullied, unsoiled, unspoiled. 

Later on, when John and Lorna are acknowledged lovers, Lorna discovers that, in reality, she is not a Doone at all! She is the Lady Dugal, one of the loftiest ladies in the land! She is suddenly summoned to London, and, her beauty bewitching the court, she is compelled to spend her days among princesses and palaces. Poor John is almost distracted. To him she is lost in a golden haze; she has vanished in a blaze of splendour, He feels that she is hopelessly beyond his reach; how can he ever hope to possess her? At last, in sheer desperation, unable any longer to endure the terrible strain, he sets out in search of her. 

I have no space in which to tell of John’s experiences in London. Let those who are so disposed read for themselves the sixty-seventh chapter of Blackmore’s stately romance. It must suffice for my present purpose to say that the chapter ends with a sound of kissing, kissing, kissing on the palace stairs; that John returns to Devonshire with his face shining like the sun; and that the chapter is entitled ‘Lorna is still Lorna’. That is the point. Lorna is for ever Lorna, Therein lies the elusive secret of her resistless charm. She can be spoiled neither by the revolting atmosphere of the robber-caves nor by the perfumed atmosphere of courts and castles.

II

Obviously, then, the lovable children are the unspoiled children the lovable people are the unspoiled people: the lovable Christian are the unspoiled Christians. 

A spoiled child is usually a petted and pampered child, a child that has known no correction or discipline: a child that has been too much sheltered and indulged: a child that has lost the spirit of a child. 

As I write, it is blue-bell time in England. There rush back to my mind visions of woods all carpeted with blue; streams fringed with blue; hills draped in blue. On my study wall, so placed that my eye rests upon them whenever I lift it from my manuscript, are three coloured pictures of English landscapes in blue-bell time Is there anything in the world more enchanting? I have known Australians to visit England, and, fascinated by the beauty of the blue-bells, resolve that they will transfer the loveliness to their own land. ‘We will take the blue-bells back with us’, I have heard them ecstatically exclaim, ‘and we will cover the slopes of Mount Dandenong and Mount Macedon and Mount Martha!’ But it all came to nothing. The blue-bells were planted and almost immediately perished. The Australian climate is no climate for them. They were slain by too much sunshine! 

I once visited one of my people on his death-bed. He had lived a hard life, with many sorrows and many losses, but he did not complain. 

‘I was brought up in East Melbourne,’ he said, ‘and was led to Christ there. A revival had broken out in the church and quite ; number of us young fellows made the great decision. We used to meet early on Sunday morning for prayer: we studied our Bibles together of an evening: and nothing could keep us from the Sunday services. Religion was a perfect revelry to us. In due course we all went into business and most of them prospered. Some of them are merchant-princes in Melbourne at this very hour. But,’ he added, and his voice was husky with emotion, ‘very few of them now take any interest in churches or in spiritual things. If I had become wealthy, as they have done, I, too, might have drifted away. So perhaps it’s as well’, he concluded with a smile, ‘that money and I haven’t seen much of each other!’ It is easy, like the child, to be spoiled by too much indulgence: it is easy, like the blue-bells, to be spoiled by ceaseless sunshine. 

III

And the pity of it is that the damage can very seldom be repaired. Do spoiled children, I wonder, ever grow up to be unselfish, considerate, chivalrous, and kind? Perhaps! I do not know: it would be interesting to learn. I only know that the cracked vase can never be mended; the bloom can never be restored to the peach; the bird with the broken pinion never soars so high again. 

Yet I must not generalize: the application of the principle must not be made too sweeping. Jeremiah tells us how he saw the vessel that had been marred in the making pressed by the potter into a lump of clay from which his deft fingers fashioned the shapely vessel of his dreams. I have seen something of the same kind happen again and again. 

I have known a man to drift away from his first faith. The fires on the altar of his soul have died down. The vision has faded. The world, the flesh, and the devil have been too much for him. Spoiled! 

I have known a young fellow, aflame with spiritual intensity and evangelistic passion, enter a theological college. There is no reason why, with the reading of many books, the pursuit of many studies, and the learning of many languages, his ardour should cool, Such things should not be; but, just now and again, they do occur. I have seen a man lose in spirituality what he gained in intellectuality. Spoiled! 

‘I feel,’ says Donald McFillan, minister of Aberfeldie, in a letter written after he had been thirty years in the ministry, ‘I feel that I am doing all that I used to do: I am reading and writing and preaching and visiting. I am working as hard as ever and working in the same way. Yet something has gone out of my life; I scarcely know what it is; but it is that which, thirty years ago, made my work so delightful and effective.’ Spoiled! 

Yet, I have known the man who had drifted to return to his first anchorage; he sought his Saviour afresh and regained the joy of his early faith. I have known the student, recognizing that he was squandering more than he was gathering, kneel anew at his Master’s feet in a passion of re-consecration; and, as they know who have read Mr. McFillan’s Memoirs, that sorrowing minister discovered the real character of his loss and entered upon a period of prosperity and fruitfulness such as, in earlier years, he had never known. 

That is precisely the point of Paul’s argument. Beware, lest any man spoil you, he pleads. But how can I prevent this spoiling process? And how, if spoiled, can I regain the treasure I have lost. 

In reply, Paul points his converts to Jesus, for, he says, in Him dwelleth all the fullness of the godhead bodily. Draw heavily on Him cleave closely to Him: lean hard on Him: make much of Him and, the greater the hold that He establishes upon your heart, says Paul, the smaller will be the danger of your being numbered among God’s spoiled children. 

-F.W. Boreham