V

SEASIDE LODGINGS

I AM writing on a hot Australian summer afternoon. The children are at home from school. The cities are sultry and stifling. The delicious seclusion of the fields and the refreshing cool of the seaside beckon us away. The bush and the beach call loudly. And even the solitudes seem to feel that their time has come. The wilderness blossoms like the rose. Settlements that all through the winter have been dreary desolations of mud and monotony become transformed into fairylands of poetry and romance. The great bush silences are broken by shouts of merriment and peals of laughter. Columns of smoke curl upwards, and bear witness to picnics and camp-fires. Boats dart in and out of every quiet creek and cove. Birds that have twittered and piped on dripping boughs throughout the winter without an audience are frightened hither and thither by a rush of white blouses and straw hats. It is all very refreshing and very delightful. But, with the return of the holiday season, comes back the old problem of seaside lodgings and holiday accommodation. Which reminds me.

Lovers of Mark Rutherford and the number includes all who know him will never forget Mary Mardon. She casts her tender spell over every fascinating page. And not least among her charms is her description of her visit, with her father, to the seaside. ‘The railway station was in a disagreeable part of the town, and when we came out we walked along a dismal row of very plain-looking houses. There were cards in the window with “Lodgings” written on them, and father wanted to go in and ask the terms. I said I did not wish to stay in such a dull street, but father could not afford to pay for a sea-view, and so we went in to inquire. We then found that what we thought were the fronts of the houses were the backs, and that the fronts faced the bay. They had pretty gardens on the other side, and a glorious, sunny prospect over the ocean.’

So much for Mark Rutherford and Mary Mardon. I fancy this kind of thing is more common than we often think. The lodgings from which we eventually obtain our loveliest views are frequently rather forbidding than prepossessing. They ban rather than beckon. We dub those dwellings dull from whose windows we afterwards catch glimpses of radiant glory.

For the most obvious application of this homely truth we need not go beyond the delightful characters whom we have already introduced. Turn back a few pages to Mark’s first meeting with Mary. Whilst he debated vigorously with her father she sat silently by. He mentally accused her of intellectual paucity, of possessing a small mind, and of a stupid inability to discuss important themes. He looked upon her exactly as she had looked upon the repulsive houses by the seaside. But he was as utterly mistaken as was she. It turned out that she was being tortured that evening by a maddening neuralgia. He then penitently reflected that, had such anguish been his, he would have let all the world know of it. And, he says, ‘thinking about Mary as I walked home, I perceived that her ability to be quiet, to subdue herself, to resist for a whole evening the temptation to draw attention to herself by telling us what she was enduring, was heroism, and that my contrary tendency was pitiful vanity. I perceived that such virtues as patience and self-denial which, clad in russet dress, I had often passed by unnoticed when I had found them amongst the poor or the humble were more precious and more ennobling to their possessor than poetic yearnings or the power to propound rhetorically to the world my grievances or agonies.’ This experience of Mark Rutherford in relation to Mary Mardon is clearly the precise social counterpart of her own experience in relation to the seaside lodgings. And later on, as every reader knows, she gave to him, as the lodgings gave to her, many a glorious outlook upon the infinite and the sublime.

All this is, of course, true of the Church. The men of Jerusalem looked up at the spacious and splendid proportions of the Temple. It was a stately pile of quarried stone. That was the outside view. But those who were permitted to stand amidst the awful sanctities of the Most Holy Place saw that, within, all was of finest gold. It is a parable. Readers of Bunyan’s immortal allegory must have noticed that the illustrious dreamer took no pains to give an attractive impression of the exterior of the Palace Beautiful. But, like the king’s daughter, it was ‘all glorious within.’ And notice this: ‘When the morning was up they had Christian to the top of the palace, and bid him look south. And, behold, at a great distance, he saw a most pleasant, mountainous country, beautified with woods, vineyards, fruits of all sorts, flowers also, with springs, and fountains, very delectable to behold. Then he asked the name of the country; they said it was IMMANUEL’S LAND.

We have no word to say in disparagement of those who devote their best efforts to the attempt to render the Church attractive and alluring. But we venture to suspect that their most strenuous exertions will never meet with more than a very moderate success. After you have insisted, and rightly insisted, that there should be no oratory to compare with pulpit oratory, and no music that can hold its own beside church music, you have still to admit that, so long as the Church sternly adheres to that spiritual programme for which alone she stands, she will always appear, like Mary Mardon’s seaside lodgings, somewhat forbidding and repellent. Christian worship is too exquisitely modest for gaudy display. Sin, righteousness, and judgement are not themes that lend themselves to merriment. There is nothing wildly exciting about a prayer-meeting. Yet, like the seaside lodgings and the Palace Beautiful, the Church has her own peculiar and compensating charms. She quickly dispels all unhappy illusions caused by superficial impressions. To those who enter her portals she offers coigns of vantage from which they may inhale the delicious fragrance of the fairest flowers and enjoy a prospect that ravishes the vision and captivates the heart.

And, after all, it is just that view for which we are all hungry. I have amused myself, since taking Mark Rutherford down from my shelf for the purposes of this article, by turning over the pages hastily, and noticing his constant references to star-lit walks. Now he is worried, and that sight of the stars that sense of the infinite ‘extinguishes all mean cares.’ On another occasion he is oppressed by the conviction that ‘there is nothing in him.’ He walks beneath the stars and feels that, in a universe of such incomprehensible immensity, there is room for every worm that crawls, and, therefore, a place for him. Again, he is aflame with anger. He walks beneath the stars, and, ‘reflecting on the great idea of God, and on all that it involves, his animosities are softened and his heat against his brother is cooled.’ We have found at least a dozen such passages in this one book. They are suggestive. Mark Rutherford surely means that the infinite cures everything. He means that, to conquer our besetments, to subdue our passions, to realize our best selves, we need the window open toward Jerusalem, the sunny outlook on the eternal. And he means, too, that to obtain that vision splendid we dare not despise the most uninviting ministries. ‘A dismal row of plain-looking houses’ so they seemed. ‘What we thought were the fronts were the backs, and the fronts faced the bay. They had pretty gardens on the other side, and a glorious sunny prospect over the ocean’ so they actually – were.

Somebody has said that God must be very fond of commonplace folk He makes so many of them. Life is full of dingy-looking places and shabby- looking people. But we shall do well to think the thing all over again before, on that ground, we exclude them from our affections and our confidence. As the years come and go we learn that the best and most satisfying springs are those from which, on their discovery, we expected least. Our most treasured friends are not always those with whom we fell in love at first sight. In his wonderful Life of the Bee Maeterlinck tells us at least one thing to which we may do well to take heed. At one time, he says, it was almost impossible to introduce into a hive an alien queen. The myriad toilers would at once assume that she was an enemy, and set about her destruction. But now the apiarist introduces the new queen in an iron cage, with a door skilfully constructed of wax and honey. The bees immediately commence to gnaw their way through the door to murder the intruder; but, in the tedious process, they are compelled carefully to observe the royal prisoner. And, by the time that the waxen palisade is demolished, they have learned to love her; and they finish up by doing her homage and becoming her devoted slaves. So true is it that the forbidding may eventually become the fascinating; the repulsive may end in the romantic; the prose may kindle into poetry; the sombre shadows may dissolve into radiant reality; the dingy lodgings may open to us dazzling horizons; life’s mocking mirages often pass into most satisfying streams.

If it comes to attractive exteriors and enticing advertisements, theology cannot hold a candle to theatricals, nor prayer-meetings to picture-shows. But they have most radiant outlooks for all that. And have we not somewhere read of One who is spoken of by those who are happy enough to know Him as the fairest among ten thousand and the altogether lovely? Yet, when first they saw Him, He was to them as a root out of a dry ground, having no beauty that they should desire Him! But I have said enough by this time to show that the experiences of Mark Rutherford and Mary Mardon have warnings of the gravest moment for us all.

F. W. Boreham