176

USE OF DIFFICULTIES

Our moral progress can be made only by resistance; as we do not oil the railway lines to make the locomotive run easy, but sand them to increase the grip, so Divine Providence, instead of making our path through life of a dead-level smoothness, has placed difficulties and roughnesses in our way that we may overcome them, and gain strength in the process. Love has often denied us the oil we have passionately prayed for.

CHAPTER XI

HEREDITY

BROWNING'S arch-criminal Guido, awaiting execution in his dungeon, casts aside at last his hypocrisy, finesse, and laboured excuses, and in the face of approaching death tries to deal honestly with himself; but it is a hard matter, and Browning has finely drawn for us the picture of an ingrain villain, who having all his life deceived the world and worn a mask, at last finds the mask has so grown to his face that for the life of him he cannot tear it off, and see what manner of man he really is. He exclaims to the priests who come to prepare him for death

"Oh, how I wish some cold, wise man

Would dig beneath the surface which you scrape,
Deal with the depth, pronounce on my desert,
Groundedly!"

What is he to say to God? He can only ask
Him to wipe out the being of him, to smear his
soul from off His white of things he blots.
He recognizes that he is one huge and sheer

N

178 THE INFINITE VALUE OF THE PRESENT mistake. "Whose fault?" he asks, and hypocrite as he is, declares it is

"Not mine at least, who did not make myself!" So he falls back on the doctrine of heredity, a very favourite theory with our scientific men now-a-days. There are no crimes now, only blunders. Guido will only admit that at the worst he stood in doubt at a cross-road, took one of many paths; the one he unfortunately selected leads him to the scaffold. Ah! if there had been one primrose the less on the bank, one singing-bird the less on the bough, it would have warned him from the fatal road!

But that is just the dreadful test of life. It always does depend on that choice of the moment. It is this which invests the moments of life with their immense importance, an importance which no poet has estimated so fully as Browning.

"Oh, moment one and infinite!"

How all we perceive and know in the world just tends to some moment's product, so that we are named and known for ever by that moment's feat! 1

The way in which Browning urges upon us the infinite importance of the "Now" is terrible. Nature is so imperious with us, brings us to a 1 By the Fireside.

"" THE MOMENT ETERNAL

179

point in our lives where we have to make in an instant a decision of eternal importance. "The moment eternal," the poet calls it.

"Out of your whole life give but a moment!

All of your life that has gone before,

All to come after it, so you ignore,

So you make perfect the present." 1

"This tick of our life-time" to decide all for us-it seems horrible, cruel. Yet is it not so? There is no getting away from the fact, and be we Atheist or Theist, Sceptic or Believer, the Now brooks no delay. Yet if we reflect a little it is not so unjust as it seems. Man's whole life and training is to fit him to do the right thing at the critical moment; he who fails at this juncture fails not because he by mere accident took the wrong path, or made a bad guess, or lost his stake; he fails because he has not so ordered his previous life that he might instinctively do the right thing at a push. Psychology teaches us that "consciousness has not one-tenth part of the function it is usually assumed to have in the ordinary mental operations of each waking hour."

Guido ought not to have had any doubt when he stood at the cross-ways, a true instinct should have warned him of the "red thing" at the end of the road he chose, primrose-decked and birdcarolled though it was at the outset. But this

1 Now.

180

THE SAVING AUTOMATISM

saving automatism does not come by lucky inspiration, it has to be acquired; heredity does a good deal, it is true, but the habit of selfrestraint, of purity of intention, and singleness of eye, is a life's-work to gain, and when acquired we need not count primroses and singing-birds when choosing roads-we shall know without counting. How does the workman acquire his trick of the tool, and the blind man obtain sight at his practised finger-ends? Is it not by habitude? Guido regretted that he had no one to advise him when he took the first false step. The problem would be in such a life as his to discover which was the first false step. He protests that as he did not make himself, he cannot see where his fault lies.

He seems to have done his utmost to unbosom himself in the presence of death. He says

"I have gone inside my soul,
And shut its door behind me."

Till the last moment he brags of his hate, his defiance of God and Church, is proud that it is not in him to unhate his hates, and declares that he uses his last strength to re-murder in his heart the victims he did to death before. To the last minute he did not know himself; then he hears the voices of the death-chant as the Brethren of the Misericordia descend the