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Chapter VI 

They Kept it Close! 

THEY kept it close! It is a strange phrase and it occurs in a strange place. For it is part of the glowing record of the Transfiguration. Peter and James and John-the inner circle-had held rapt converse with Moses, the representative of the Law, with Elijah, the representative of the prophets, and with their own glorified Lord. And they kept it close! 

They kept it close! It is a wartime phrase. They knew when a certain ship was to sail; but they kept it close. They knew the destination of certain troops about to march; but they kept it close. They knew of certain military plans that were being laid; but they kept it close. They kept it close! 

The words represent, however, not merely a wartime virtue, but an all-time virtue. Nature has always practised it with meticulous assiduity. For ages men gazed upon the stars. What were they? Where were they? But the heavens held their secret. The kept it close. And it was not until Copernicus and Galileo and Kepler and Newton and Herschell tore their story from them that astronomy and meteorology began to be. 

The waves, too. What are the wild waves saying? Nobody knew. The waves that broke upon the shores of Europe laved vast continents and scattered islands in the West and in the South. But they kept it Close. And it was not until men like Christopher Columbus and Captain Cook sailed daringly into the sunset that the silence of the centuries was broken. 

The rocks and the reefs were equally silent. What happened on this planet before our history books began? This baffling mystery teased the imagination of man until he set to work to dig up the stony records. It was hard and trying work, for the rocks hugged their secret: they kept it close. 

I

But, in contradistinction with all this, man is essentially and fundamentally and basically a talker. The destiny of empires may depend upon a talk: in our time princes, presidents, and prime ministers have flown about the world under the most hazardous conditions that they might talk to one another. Talking is often our business; it is sometimes our hobby; it is invariably our relaxation. Talking is frequently our duty and usually our delight. The fact that we speak of the brute creation as dumb animals shows how sharply, in this vital respect, we differentiate between them and ourselves. When we refer to these furry and feathered things in such terms, we unconsciously divide creation into two sections-talkers and non-talkers. 

Man owes more than he sometimes recognizes to the fact that he is instinctively a talker. In Mikkelsen’s account of the months that he and Iversen spent amidst Arctic snows-lost, and lost with very little prospect of ever being found-the gallant Captain says that but for one inestimable source of relief they must have lost their sanity. ‘Our only remedy’, Mikkelsen says, ‘was talk. talk, talk, and plenty of it. Iversen and I discussed continually subjects that would never have interested us under any other conditions.’ Being eating animals, they ate; and, being talking animals, they talked. By eating they saved their bodies and by talking they saved their minds. 

II

Now, since this facility for conversation is one of man’s master-prerogatives, it follows that, like all his other prerogatives, it must be kept under severe restraint. There is such a thing as silvery eloquence; but there is also such a thing as dignified reticence. 

No man’s equipment is complete unless he is furnished with a fair stock of secrets. The man who can air all his knowledge to everybody knows nothing worth imparting to anybody. A man’s wealth must be measured, not by what he pays away, but by what he still possesses after all his obligations are discharged. A water supply must be measured, not by the flow at the tap, but by the depth and fullness of the reservoir. And similarly a man’s knowledge must be gauged, not by his conversation, but by his reserves. A wise man knows more than he ever tells. He may share much of his knowledge with the multitude; he may divide some of his best things among his intimates and companions; he may keep a few of his priceless treasures for the wife of his bosom; but, even then, he will reserve a few choice morsels for himself, and for himself alone. As Robert Burns says in his Epistle To a Young Friend; 

Aye free, aff han’ your story tell,
  When wi’ a bosom crony;
But still keep something to yoursel’
  Ye scarcely tell to ony. 

Every man must therefore divide his intellectual store into two divisions— the things about which he talks and the things about which he doesn’t. And, of the two, the latter are invariably the more important. Silence has its eloquence as well as speech. 

If you see a tall fellow ahead of a crowd,
A leader of men marching fearless and proud,
And you know of a tale whose mere telling aloud
Would cause that fine head to be instantly bowed
     It’s a jolly good thing to forget it! 

If you know of a skeleton hidden away
In a cupboard, close guarded, and kept from the day,
A dark, horrid secret, whose sudden display
Would cause shame and heartbreak and lifelong dismay,
     It’s a pretty good thing to forget it! 

Every man is entitled to his doubts. How, if he be transparently honest, can he escape an occasional gust of uncertainty. But, so long as they are merely doubts, let him keep them to himself. There is all the difference in the world between an undemonstrable positive and a demonstrable negative. If his undemonstrable positive develops into a demonstrable negative, it may become his duty to proclaim it from the housetops. Until then, however, he will be wise to keep it close. 

They kept it Close! It is a bad sign when a man becomes prodigal of his secrets. When he feels that he must take everybody into his confidence, and tell everybody everything, he should instantly send for a doctor. 

A man is never so poor as when his stock of secrets has run low. For the matter of that, it is a bad sign when the public becomes garrulous and talks about everything. There are some subjects that are too sacred to be exposed to the glare of the footlights. They do not fit the flicker of a film. They are too majestic to be bandied to and fro in the course of a newspaper controversy. Humanity has a few secrets, and when humanity is quite healthy and sane, it does not drag those secrets on to the stage or discuss them in the Press. There is something wrong somewhere when a people is prepared to talk about everything.

The soul, too, has its secrets. They kept it close, the inspired record tells us. And why not? Had Peter and James and John returned to their fellow men proclaiming excitedly that they had been spending an hour with Moses and Elijah, they would have invited the incredulity and even the derision of the multitude. The story might easily have prejudiced their evangelistic witness. When they stood up to preach the everlasting Gospel, men would have shrugged their shoulders and would have whispered to one another that these were the men who kept appointments on the hilltops with prophets who had been dead for centuries. They were probably about to unfold another fairy tale!

Faith, as Newman finely said, has large reserves. The New Testament likens the relationship existing between the soul and its Saviour to the relationship existing between a bride and her bridegroom. A proud young wife may draw aside the veil in order to permit her bosom friends to peep for a moment at her felicity; but what she reveals is as nothing compared with what she conceals. She lives on her blissful secrets. Like her, the soul derives her sweetest and richest satisfactions from a holy and beautiful relationship the mystic character of which no tongue can ever tell.

III

Still, there are times—times of poignant emotion; times of maddening excitement; times of tremendous passion—when all such control breaks down. A stage has been reached at which silence is impossible. Speech is involuntary, almost compulsory. It is notorious that murderers feel an irreducible craving to discuss their crime. They do not, of course, associate themselves with the dreadful deed; but they feel drawn to the scene of the horror and like to elicit the thoughts of men concerning it.

‘May I see you for a few minutes?’ she asked. ‘But please do no light up the room.’ I drew her in and awaited her story.

‘I suppose you’ve been reading in the papers about the jewel robbery at Constantine Creek,’ she hazarded. I confessed that, in common with most people, I had given some attention to the matter.

‘Well,’ she went on, ‘I committed that robbery!’

‘You!’ I exclaimed in bewilderment; and then added: ‘You must go straight to the police and tell them!’

‘Oh, I couldn’t do that,’ she replied; ‘it would be madness!’

‘Well, then,’ I answered, ‘I shall probably have to do it myself!’

‘Oh, you couldn’t, you couldn’t!’ she cried, staring incredulously. ‘I trusted you!’

‘But why on earth did you come to me and tell me all about it?’ I asked. 

Well,’ she replied, ‘I could bear it no longer. I just had to tell somebody. I have often been to hear you preach, and I felt that I could trust you, And I realize that, unless I tell somebody whom I can trust, I shall soon be telling somebody whom I can’t!’

Let me lay another experience-a very different one-beside this, I spent yesterday in the city. At midday I entered a popular dining-room and found it crowded. The little waitress who usually attends to my requirements inquired apologetically:

‘Would you mind sitting at a table with three other people?’

‘Oh, no,’ I replied, seeing that I had no chance of securing the privacy to which I have been accustomed, I shall be able to enjoy the conversation without having to take part in it!’ I did. 

Facing me, at this table set for four, was a young airman. On my right and on my left were two daintily-dressed and nicely-spoken young ladies. The girl on my left wore an engagement ring: she was obviously the sweetheart of the airman. The girl on my right wore a wedding ring, and I soon discovered that she was the bride of a young soldier who had vanished in the war. As to what had become of him, whether he was dead, wounded, or a prisoner, she had no idea. The girl with the engagement ring was leaving, a little later in the day, for Sydney. 

‘If,’ she said to the girl with the wedding ring, ‘if you get news whilst I’m away, you’ll send me a wire, won’t you?’

‘Send you a wire!’ replied the other with tremulous emotion, ‘My dear, if I get news of Ron, I shall send no wire, I shall rush to the nearest post-office and put through a trunk-fine call. I shall want to talk, talk, talk!’ 

Exactly! There are moments, and they are among life’s most magnificent moments, at which the soul must become articulate. Perhaps if we felt more deeply concerning the things that pertain to God and the Cross and Eternity, we should speak of them more frequently. I confess that I like one inspired record of flagrant disobedience to a divine command. Jesus charged them that they should tell no man: but the more He charged them, so much the more a great deal they published it. 

The man who has learned exactly when to speak and when to be silent, when to proclaim his experience and when to keep it dose, has mastered one of the highest arts of the Christian life. There is another story in the New Testament that evokes my admiration. It is the story of the Woman of Samaria. After her unforgettable adventure at the well, she went straight to her fellow townsmen to testify to them of her newly-found Saviour. He told me, she exclaimed, all things that ever I did. That strikes me as a masterpiece of revelation and of reticence. She did not say what those things were. She did not glory in her shame. She revealed all that it was needful to reveal; she concealed all that it was womanly to conceal. And, because of that perfectly-poised admixture of brave revelation and of modest reticence she led her fellow citizens to the Saviour’s feet. It may be that our greatest evangelistic triumphs will come to us when we learn to model our articulate and our silent testimony on hers. 

-F.W. Boreham