let it be distinctly understood that nothing that i shall now say is addressed to the crowd. to the crowd it would probably do more harm than good. it is intended only for a single individual; and he, i think, will understand. i am told that there is a unique secret by means of which a wireless message from the british navy can be transmitted to the admiralty office without risk of interception. at the admiralty a superlatively sensitive and superlatively secret instrument is most carefully attuned to the instrument of the battleship from which the message is expected. then, when all is ready, every wireless operator in the grand fleet pulls out all the stops and bangs on all the keys of his instrument, and the inevitable result is the creation of a din that is almost deafening to all listeners at ordinary receivers. but through the crash and the tumult the specially delicate instrument at the admiralty office can distinctly hear its mate, and the priceless syllables penetrate the thunder of senseless sound without the slightest loss or leakage. i am about to attempt a similar experiment. i 124have a message for a certain man. it is important that he, and he alone, should get it. it would do untold damage if it were heard at other receivers. let him therefore take some pains to attune his instrument to mine.
now it is usual, and it is altogether good, to encourage people to entertain lofty ambitions, high ideals, and great expectations. it is a most necessary injunction, and i have not a word to say against it. it stirs the blood like a trumpet-blast. it rouses us like a challenge. but, however excellent the medicine may be, it cannot be expected to suit every ailment. no one drug is a panacea for all our human ills. and even the stimulating tonic to which i have referred does not at all meet the need of the man for whom i am now prescribing. john sheergood is a friend of mine, and a really capital fellow. but i should not call him a happy man. his trouble is that his ambitions are too lofty, his expectations too great, and his ideals, in a sense, too high. he is crying for the moon, and breaking his heart because he can’t get it. i am profoundly sorry for this morbid friend of mine, and should dearly like to comfort him. his ideal is perfection, nothing less; and whenever he falls short of it he is in the depths of despair. if, as a student, he entered for a competition, he felt that he was in disgrace unless he secured the very first place. if he sat for 125an examination, he counted every mark short of the coveted hundred per cent. as an indelible stain upon his character. he is in abject misery unless he can strike twelve at every hour of the day. i both admire him and pity him at the same time. his parents once told me that when he was a very small boy he contracted measles. the illness went hardly with him, and left him frail and debilitated. the doctor ordered a prolonged holiday by the seaside, with plenty of good food, plenty of fresh air, and, above all, plenty of bathing. he was only a little fellow, and when he approached the bathing-sheds for the first time his father accompanied him.
‘i don’t want to go in, dad,’ he cried appealingly; ‘it’s cold, and i’m cold, and i don’t like it!’
‘it will make you grow up into a big man, sonny!’ his father replied persuasively.
now this touched jack on a very tender spot, for, although his father was tall, and he himself cherished an inordinate admiration for tall men, he was himself almost ridiculously small. he had several times contrasted himself with other small boys of the same age, and had felt shockingly humiliated.
‘will it really, dad; honour bright?’ he asked anxiously, carefully scrutinizing his father’s face.
‘it will indeed, sonny; that is why the doctor ordered it.’
126poor little jack submitted with a wry face to the process of disrobing, and, with a shiver, bravely approached the water. summoning all his reserves of courage, he waded in until the water was up to his knees, to his waist, and at last to his neck. the excruciating part of the ordeal was by this time over; and, for the sake of the benefit so confidently promised him, he tolerated the caress of the waves for the next five minutes. then he rushed out of the water. as soon as he was beyond the reach of the foam he stopped abruptly, surveyed himself carefully from top to toe, and straightway burst into tears. his mother, who was sitting knitting on the beach, at once ran to his assistance.
‘why, whatever’s the matter, jack? what are you crying for?’
‘oh, mum, just look how wee i am! and dad said that if i went into the water it would make a big man of me!’
he has often since joined in the laugh, whenever the story of his childish adventure has been related in his hearing. but it is worth recording as being so eminently characteristic of him. he has never outgrown that boyish peculiarity. he is always setting his heart on instantaneous maturity. he seems to think that the world should have been built on a sort of jack-and-the-beanstalk principle. he is continually sowing seeds overnight, and 127feeling depressed if he cannot gather the fruit as soon as he wakes in the morning. many of us have watched the indian conjurer sow the seed of a mango-tree; throw a cloth over the pot; mutter mysterious charms and incantations; and then hit the cloth. and, behold, a full-grown mango-tree! he replaces the cloth, mutters further incantations, again removes the covering, and, lo, the mango-tree is in full flower! and when a third time he uncovers the plant, the mango-tree stands forth, every bough freighted with a heavy load of fruit! i have no idea as to how the trick is done. i only know that poor john sheergood seems to be everlastingly lamenting the misfortune that ordained him to any existence other than that of an indian conjurer. he is grievously disappointed, not because he was born with no silver spoon in his mouth, but because he was born with no magic wand in his hand. his mango-trees come to fruition very, very slowly. john believes in quick returns and lightning changes; and he is irritated and annoyed by the tardiness of that old-fashioned process called growth. it is good for a man to have lofty ideals; but i am sure that john sheergood would be a happier man, and make us all more happy, if he would only break himself of his inveterate habit of crying for the moon.
in justice to john i am bound to say that, as 128on the sands years ago, his principal disappointment is with himself. i have done my best to persuade him that a man should be infinitely patient with himself. nothing is to be gained by getting out of temper with yourself. you may scold yourself and scourge yourself unmercifully; but i doubt if it does much good. a man must win his self-respect; and you can only learn to respect yourself by being very gentle and very considerate and very patient with yourself. a man’s self-culture is his first and principal charge; and he will never succeed unless he both loves himself and treats himself lovingly. a man should be as gentle with himself as a gardener is with his orchids; as a nurse is with her patient; as a mother is with her troublesome child. a gardener who lost all patience with his delicate plants; a nurse who treated her poor patient peevishly; or a mother who met ill-temper with ill-temper could only expect to fail. i have urged john sheergood to treat himself with a softer hand, and to greet himself with a smile. i lent him henry drummond’s lovely essay on the lilies, taking the precaution, before doing so, to underline the following sentences: ‘growth must be spontaneous. a boy not only grows without trying, but he cannot grow if he tries. the man who struggles in agony to grow makes the church into a workshop when god meant it to be a beautiful 129garden.’ there is a good deal in the chapter that will have a special interest for my poor self-castigated friend.
but, although his lash falls principally upon his own back, he is not the only sufferer. i shall never forget when, as a young fellow, he joined the church. his conversion was a very radiant experience, and, in the ecstasy of it all, he formed a brightly rose-tinted conception of what the fellowship of the church must be. the idea of being admitted to the society of numbers of people as happy as himself! they would be able to tell of experiences as glorious as his own; they would be sure to congratulate him on his inexpressible joy, and to help him in relation to the difficulties that beset his daily path. they would encourage him by their sympathy and stimulate him by their example. their conversation would illumine for him the sacred page; their vivid testimonies to answered prayer would give him greater confidence in approaching the throne of grace; the very atmosphere that he expected to breathe would, he felt sure, inflame his own devotion to the highest and holiest things.
he has often since told me of his disillusionment. it happened to be a wet night when he was received into membership, and there were fewer members present than were usually there. as soon as the service was over they broke up into knots. he 130overheard one group discussing a wedding; and heard a man with a strident voice say that it was a beastly night to be out without an umbrella. but nobody took any notice of john, and he left the building. to complete his discomfiture he mistook the step as he passed out of the church and stumbled awkwardly into the street. ‘the whole thing was an awful come-down,’ he told me afterwards, ‘the greatest surprise i had ever known. i felt as if the bottom had dropped out of everything.’ he got over it, of course; and learned by happy experience that the people who treated him so coyly on that memorable night are not half as bad as they seemed. many of them are now among his dearest and most intimate friends; whilst even with the man who growled at the weather he has since spent some really delightful times. one of the oddest things in life is the dread that some people feel of appearing as good as they really are. and john has found out now that, in spite of the cold douche administered to him that night, there is in the church a glow of genuine enthusiasm and a wealth of spirituality that in those days he never suspected. but it did not reveal itself all at once. the best things never do. and because the church did not put on her beautiful garments as soon as he entered, john was mortified and confounded. he felt just as he felt that day on the sands when he 131discovered with disgust that, under the spell of the sea, he had not immediately assumed gigantic proportions. as i say, he has got over it now, and smiles at it, just as he smiles when his adventure by the seaside is recounted.
he was a great favourite in the church, but his ingrained peculiarity betrayed itself with unfailing regularity in one particular direction. oddly enough, in view of his own experience, he was a little severe with new members. i do not mean that he treated them coldly or distantly; nobody was more genial. but he expected too much of them. he was disappointed unless the convert of yesterday proved himself the full-blown saint of to-day. to satisfy him, they had to be raw recruits one day and hardened veterans the next. it was merely another phase of his jack-and-the-beanstalk philosophy. it was the magician and the mango-tree over again. in a way it was very fine to see how he grieved over the slightest lapse on the part of these new members. the smallest inconsistency in their behaviour filled him with remorse, and he was afflicted with the gravest suspicions as to our wisdom in welcoming such people into fellowship. he failed, it seemed to me, to distinguish between the raw material and the finished article. the church evidently had some very raw material in her membership when the 132pauline epistles were written; and it is a mercy for john that he was not born some centuries earlier.
john afterwards left us and entered the ministry. we were exceedingly sorry to lose him. a man more generally honoured, respected, and beloved i have seldom seen. the church was distinctly poorer after he left, although we were all glad that he had given himself to so great a work. but he carried his old characteristic up the pulpit steps with him. he has often told me the story of that first sermon and the way it was received. such confidences between one minister and another are sacred, and i shall not betray this one. but i never hear john refer to that experience without thinking of mark rutherford. in his autobiography, mark rutherford tells how, on settling at his first pastorate, he put all his soul into his first sermon. he was elated by the solemnity and grandeur of his calling, and spoke out of the very depths of his heart. ‘after the service was over,’ he says, ‘i went down into the vestry. nobody came near me but the chapel-keeper, who said that it was raining, and immediately went away to put out the lights and shut up the building. i had no umbrella, and there was nothing for it but to walk home in the wet. when i got to my lodgings i found that my supper, consisting of bread and cheese, was on the table, but there was no fire. i was overwrought, and paced 133about for hours in hysterics. all that i had been preaching seemed the merest vanity.’ and so on. john sheergood’s experience was not unlike it. it was the sudden descent from the glowingly romantic ideal to the brutally prosaic reality. it nearly killed john just as it nearly killed mark rutherford. but he is getting over it. he is learning gradually, i think, that a minister can only get the best out of his people by being very patient with them, just as the people can only get the best out of their minister by being very patient with him. the world has evidently been built that way. jack and the beanstalk is only a fairy-story and the mango-tree is a piece of oriental trickery; there is no room for such prodigies in a world like this. like the lilies, we begin in a very modest way, and grow very slowly; we must therefore exercise infinite patience with each other. i have fancied lately that some inkling of this has at length entered into the mind even of john sheergood, and he has seemed a very much happier man in consequence.
