nature, they say, abhors a vacuum. for the life of me, i do not know why. but then, for the matter of that, i do not know why i myself love many of the things that i love, and loathe many of the things that i abhor. nature, however, is not usually capricious. some deep policy generally prompts her strange behaviour. i must go into this matter a little more carefully. first of all, what is a vacuum? what is nothing?
i was at a prize distribution not long ago, and as i came out into the street i came upon a little chap crying as though his heart would break. he was quite alone. his parents had not thought it worth their while to accompany him to the function, and thus show their interest in his school life. perhaps it was owing to the same lack of sympathy on their part that he was among the few boys who were bearing home no prize.
‘hullo, sonny,’ i exclaimed,‘what’s the matter?’
‘oh, nothing!’ he replied, between his sobs.
‘then what on earth are you crying for?’
‘oh, nothing!’ he repeated.
80i respected his delicacy, and probed no farther into the cause of his discomfiture, but i had collected further evidence of my contention that there is more in nothing than you would suppose. nor had i gone far before still further corroboration greeted me. for, at the top of the street, i came upon a group of lads in the centre of which was a boy with a very handsome prize. i paused and admired it.
‘and what was this for?’ i asked.
‘oh, nothing!’ he answered, with a blush.
‘but, my dear fellow, you must have done something to deserve it!’
‘oh, it was nothing!’ he reiterated, and it was from his companions that i obtained the information that i sought. but here again it was made clear to me that there is a good deal in nothing. nothing is worth thinking about. it is a huge mistake to take things at their face value. nothing may sometimes represent a modest contrivance for hiding everything; and we must not allow ourselves to be deceived.
an old tradition assures us that, on the sudden death of one of frederick the great’s chaplains, a certain candidate showed himself most eager for the vacant post. the king told him to proceed to the royal chapel and to preach an impromptu sermon on a text that he would find in the pulpit on arrival. 81when the critical moment arrived, the preacher opened the sealed packet, and found it—blank! not a word or pen-mark appeared! with a calm smile the clergyman cast his eyes over the congregation, and then said, ‘brethren, here is nothing. blessed is he whom nothing can annoy, whom nothing can make afraid or swerve from his duty. we read that god from nothing made all things. and yet look at the stupendous majesty of his infinite creation! and does not job tell us that nothing is the foundation of everything? “he hangeth the world upon nothing,” the patriarch declares.’ the candidate then proceeded to elaborate the wonder and majesty of that creation that emanated from nothing, and depended on nothing. i need scarcely add that frederick bestowed upon so ingenious a preacher the vacant chaplaincy. and in the years that followed he became one of the monarch’s most intimate friends and most trusted advisers.
we must not, however, fly to the opposite extreme, and make too much of nothing. for the odd thing is that, twice at least in her strange and chequered history, the church has fallen in love with members of the nothing family, and, after the fashion of lovers, has completely lost her head over them. on the first occasion she became deeply enamoured of doing nothing, and on the second occasion 82she went crazy over having-nothing. i must tell of these amorous exploits one at a time. the adoration of doing-nothing had a great vogue at one stage of the church’s history. who that has once read the thirty-seventh chapter of gibbon’s decline and fall—the chapter on ‘the origin, progress, and effects of the monastic life’—will ever cease to be haunted by the weird, fantastic spectacle therein presented? men suddenly took it into their heads that the only way of serving god was by doing nothing. they swarmed out into the deserts, and lived solitary lives. they took vows of perpetual silence, and ceased to speak; they ate only the most disgusting food; they lived the lives of wild beasts. ‘even sleep, the last refuge of the unhappy, was rigorously measured; the vacant hours rolled heavily on, without business and without pleasure; and, before the close of each day, the tedious progress of the sun was repeatedly accursed.’ here was an amazing phenomenon. it was, of course, only a passing fancy, the merest piece of coquetry on the church’s part. it is unthinkable that she thought seriously of doing-nothing, and of settling down with him for the rest of her natural life. the glamour of this casual flirtation soon wore off. the church discovered to her mortification that there was nothing in nothing. saint anthony, of alexandria, who felt that the life of the city was too full of incitement to 83frivolity and pleasure, fled to the desert, to escape from these temptations. he became a hermit. but he gave it up, and returned to alexandria. the abominable imaginations that haunted his mind in the solitude were far more loathsome and degrading than anything he had experienced in the busy city. fra angelico, who also fell in love with doing-nothing, says that he heard the flapping of the wings of unclean things about his lonely cell. and francis xavier has told us of the seven terrible days that he spent in the tomb of thomas at malabar. ‘all around me,’ he says, ‘malignant devils prowled incessantly, and wrestled with me with invisible but obscene hands.’ it is the old story, there is nothing in nothing; and he who falls in love with any member of that family will live to regret the adventure. i remember being greatly impressed by a sentence or two in nansen’s farthest north. he is describing the maddening monotony of the interminable arctic night. ‘ah!’ he exclaims suddenly, ‘life’s peace is said to be found by holy men in the desert. here indeed is desert enough; but peace!—of that i know nothing. i suppose it is the holiness that is lacking.’ the explorer was simply discovering that there is nothing in nothing but what you yourself take into it.
one would have supposed that, after this heart-breaking affair with doing-nothing, the church 84would have been on her guard against all members of the nothing family. but no! she was deceived a second time—in this instance by the wiles of having-nothing. i allude, of course, to the story of the mendicant orders. we all know how francis d’assisi fell in love with poverty. one day, to the consternation of his friends, they received a letter from the gay young soldier, telling them of his intention to lead an entirely new life. ‘i am thinking of taking a wife more beautiful, more rich, more pure than you could ever imagine.’ the wife was the lady poverty; and giotto, in a fresco at assisi, has represented francis placing the ring on the finger of his bride. the feminine figure is crowned with roses, but she is arrayed in rags, and her feet are bruised with stones and torn with briars. francis borrowed the tattered and filthy garments of a beggar, and sought alms at the street corners that he might enter into the secret of poverty; and then he and dominic founded those orders of mendicant monks which became one of the most potent missionary forces of the middle ages.
but once again the church found out that her affections were being played with. there is no more virtue in having-nothing than in doing-nothing. they are both good-for-nothing. it may be that some of us would be better men if we had less money; but then, others of us would be better men 85if we had more. it may be that, here and there, you may find a silas marner who has been saved by sudden poverty from miserly greed and hardening self-absorption. but, for one such case, it would be easy to point to hundreds of men who have been driven by poverty from the ways of honour, and to hundreds of women who have been forced by poverty from the paths of virtue. it all comes back to this: there is nothing in nothing. doing-nothing and having-nothing are deceivers—the pair of them; and the church must not be beguiled by their blandishments. work and money are both good things. even william law saw that. his serious call has often almost made a monk of me, but a sudden flash of common sense always breaks from the page just in time. ‘there are two things,’ he says in his fine chapter on ‘the wise and pious use of an estate,’ ‘there are two things which, of all others, most want to be under a strict rule, and which are the greatest blessings both to ourselves and others, when they are rightly used. these two things are our time and our money. these talents are the continual means and opportunities of doing good.’ beware, that is to say, of doing-nothing, of having-nothing, and of the whole family of nothings. it is not for nothing that nature abhors them.
and now it suddenly comes home to me that i am playing on the very verge of a tremendous 86truth. there is nothing in nothing. let me remember that when next i am at death-grips with temptation! cupid is said to have complained to jupiter that he could never seize the muses because he could never find them idle. and i suppose that our everyday remark that ‘satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do’ has its origin in the same idea. john locke, the great philosopher, used to say that, in the hour of temptation, he preferred any company rather than his own. if possible, he sought the companionship of children. anything rather than nothing. it reminds us of hannibal. the great carthaginian led his troops up the alpine passes, but he found that the heights were strongly held by the romans. attack was out of the question. hannibal watched closely one night, however, and discovered that, under cover of darkness, the enemy withdrew for the night to the warmer valley on the opposite slope. next night, therefore, hannibal led his troops to the heights, and, when the roman general approached in the morning, he found that the tables had been turned upon him. there is always peril in vacancy. the uncultivated garden brings forth weeds. the unoccupied mind becomes the devil’s playground. the vacant soul is a lost soul. there is nothing in nothing.
but for the greatest illustration of my present 87theme i must betake me to mark rutherford. the incident occurred at the most sunless and joyless stage of mark’s career. from all his wretchedness he sought relief in nothing. he kept his own company, wandered about the fields, abandoned himself to moods, and lost himself in vague and insoluble problems. but one day a strange thing happened. ‘i was walking along under the south side of a hill, which was a great place for butterflies, when i saw a man, apparently about fifty years old, coming along with a butterfly net.’ they soon chummed up. ‘he told me that he had come seven miles that morning to that spot, because he knew that it was haunted by one particular species of butterfly; and, as it was a still, bright day, he hoped to find a specimen.’ at first mark rutherford felt a kind of contempt for a man who could give himself up to so childish a pastime. but, later on, he heard his story. years before he had married a delicate girl, of whom he was devotedly fond. she died in childbirth, leaving him completely broken. and, by some inscrutable mystery of fate, the child grew up to be a cripple, horribly deformed, inexpressibly hideous, as ugly as an ape, as lustful as a satyr, and as ferocious as a tiger! the son, after many years, died in a mad-house; and the horror of it all nearly consigned his poor father to a similar asylum. ‘during those dark days,’ he told mark rutherford, ‘i went on 88gazing gloomily into dark emptiness, till all life became nothing for me.’ gazing into emptiness, mark you! then there swept across this aching void of nothingness a beautiful butterfly! it caught his fancy, interested him, filled the gap, and saved his reason from uttermost collapse. he began collecting butterflies. he was no longer gazing into emptiness. and the moral of the incident is stated in a single sentence. ‘men should not be too curious in analysing and condemning any means which nature devises to save them from themselves, whether it be coins, old books, curiosities, fossils, or butterflies.’
‘any means which nature devises.’ we are back to nature again.
‘nature abhors a vacuum’; it was at that point that we set out.
i see now that nature is right, after all. i can never be saved by nothing. the abstract will never satisfy me. i want something; aye, more, i want some one; and until i find him my restless soul calls down all the echoing corridors of nothingness, ‘oh that i knew where i might find him!’
