VII

THE PRUDENTIALITIES OF LIFE

BENEATH cloudless Italian skies Paul is painfully but patiently enduring, in a stifling cell, the suffocating fervours of the sultry summer days. And, with the fierce heat at its insufferable maximum, he casts a prudent thought ahead of him, and contemplates the severe rigours of a stern Roman winter. ‘Do thy best,’ he writes to Timothy, ‘to come to me before winter; and the cloke which I left at Troas bring with thee.’ Superficial observers have often considered these personal trivialities beneath the dignity of Scripture. The trifling is subjective; it is not objective. It is their criticism that lacks dignity. ‘Eyes have they, but they see not.’ The microscopic is often as eloquent and as revealing as the majestic. Divinity often trembles in a dewdrop. A trifling incident may reflect a tremendous principle. A psychologist would at least discover in the story of Paul and his summer call for his winter cloke a fine instance of the amazing detachment of which the human mind is capable.

It is a strange and wonderful thing that we are able, amidst summer scenes, to project our thoughts so realistically into the coming cold that we give an involuntary shiver and cast our eyes over our wardrobes. The same power, of course, enables us to project our minds, not merely from our summer cells to our winter wardrobes, but from our own summers to other people’s winters. It is by this extraordinary faculty of the mind that we sympathize. My lady, wrapped snugly in rugs and furs, detaches herself from herself, and projects herself into the wretched rags of her sister in the slums. No one can read Charles Dickens without feeling that, even as he sat in his comfortable room and wrote, he endured all the agonies of the poverty which he so passionately portrayed. Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe could never have written Uncle Tom’s Cabin unless she had first projected herself, in uttermost detachment from herself, into the anguish of Cassy and Eliza. The iron entered into her own soul by this weird and awful power of intellectual abandonment. It makes even loftier flights: it explores moral territories. Lovers of Oliver Twist will remember how the pure, sweet girlhood of Rose Maylie came into touch with the soiled soul of poor Nancy, and for one awful moment the mind of Rose projected itself into the sins and sorrows of Nancy; and, in the presence of that marvel, Nancy burst into tears. ‘O, lady, lady!’ she cried, clasping her hands passionately before her face, ‘if there were more like you, there would be fewer like me there would, there would!’ And, travelling along this road, we should soon come to that culminating example of mental and moral detachment by which the redemption of a lost world was effected. From the summer-time of His glory and holiness He detached Himself from Himself emptied Himself and wept with us in the winter of our raggedness and shame. ‘He had compassion’! The ages can know no greater miracle or mystery than that.

But the purely psychological phenomenon presented by Paul’s summer call for his winter cloke has led us a little astray. A wayfaring man will recognize it as an illustration of the prudentialities of life. Paul anticipates in summer the demands of winter. Such prudentialities are everywhere. The great mountain heights store up in winter their millions upon millions of tons of snow; and when early summer suns have dried up the lower springs, and when otherwise the plains would be scorched beneath a pitiless glare, the welcome streams come flowing down from the heights, and the grateful cattle quench their thirst. In the same way, the soft green mosses along the banks of the rivulet saturate themselves with moisture like sponges, conserving and protecting it, and in the later days of drought, when else the bed of the stream would be dry, they release their precious burthen, and the thirsty bless them. In animate creatures the faculty is, of course, much more pronounced. Everybody knows how ants and beetles make elaborate preparations for days as yet far ahead of them. The mice and the squirrels make hay while the sun shines, and lay up in store against frost and snow. The bee provides her honey when the earth is gay with flowers with the intention of living upon her hoard when no blossoms are to be seen. We remember reading in Parkman’s Conspiracy of Pontiac, of the folly of the Algonquin Indian who, ‘in the hour of plenty, forgets the season of want,’ until, ‘stiff and stark, with haggard cheek and shrivelled lip, he lies among the snow-drifts; till, with tooth and claw the famished wild cat strives in vain to pierce the frigid marble of his limbs.’ There is a more excellent way. And Paul, following the example of mice and squirrels and bees, thinks of winter cold while as yet he perspires beneath summer suns. The most obvious application of the principle is, naturally, the most practical one. Those who are too dense to catch our meaning had better inquire for an interpretation of it at a savings bank, a building society, or an insurance office. It is true, of course, that, concerning many things, to-morrow must not obtrude upon to-day; but the future has its certainties, and it would be both impious and absurd to neglect them. Since it is certain that winter must follow summer, it is certain that it is the duty of Paul to arrange for his cloke. A man must provide for his home whilst as yet he is single; he must make his will whilst in the best of health the applications are simply innumerable. But the truth has its deeper aspects. In the heyday of spiritual prosperity we must lay up in store against days of darkness and doubt. In the days of opened heavens and answered prayers let us record the experience on the tablets of memory, to feed upon when the heavens are as brass and prayer as a tinkling cymbal. ‘When infidel thoughts come knocking at my door,’ wrote good old Thomas Shepard, ‘I send them away with this answer: Why should I question that truth which I have both seen ‘and known in better days?’ There is a world of sagacity and shrewdness there!

It was an awful night in Scotland. The snow was deep; the wind simply shrieked around the little hut in which a good old elder lay dying. His daughter brought the family Bible to his bedside.

‘Father,’ she said, ‘will I read a chapter to ye?’

But the old man was in sore pain, and only moaned. She opened the book.

‘Na, na, lassie,’  he said, ‘the storm’s up noo; I theekit [thatched] my hoose in the calm weather!’

We can learn no loftier philosophy than that from the story of Paul’s summer call for his winter cloke. We must thatch our houses in the calm weather, and, later on, smile at the storm. Life’s truest prudentiality lies just there!

F. W. Boreham