ᐸ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?ᐳ
ᐸsamples n="ENG18720"ᐳ
ᐸsampleᐳᐸp n="ENG18720340"ᐳ“I thought Joshua would find her out in time,” was Mary's comment. “I took stock of her from the first, and saw she was no good.”ᐸ/pᐳ
ᐸp n="ENG18720341"ᐳI HAVE said so much of the personal charities of Joshua that I seem to have thrown into the shade, by comparison, his political life and action; and yet this was the more important of the two. The extreme section of republican working men, though they did not go in for his religious views, made use of his political zeal; and when work was bad to get, sometimes he was sent as a delegate, sometimes he went of his own accord, to the various towns that needed either encouragement or awakening; where he gave lectures on the necessity of labour keeping a close front against the serried ranks of capital; on the lawfulness and desirability of trades' unions and strikes, when occasion demands; on the political worth of a republic that grows naturally out of monarchy and oligarch, as manhood grows out of childhood; on the need of the working classes raising themselves to a higher level in mind and circumstance than that which they occupy now; on the beauty of social and moral freedom; and on the right of each man to a fair share of the primary essentials for good living. And all this was mixed up with that fervid practical Christianity of his, which gave a new and holier aspect to every question he handled.ᐸ/pᐳ
ᐸp n="ENG18720342"ᐳJoshua believed in the religion of politics. He often said that, were Christ to come again in this day, He would be more of a politician than a theologian; and that he would teach men to work for the coming of the kingdom of heaven on earth, rather through the general elevation of the material condition of the masses than by either ritual or dogma.ᐸ/pᐳ
ᐸp n="ENG18720343"ᐳ“You can't make a man a saint in mind,” I have heard him say more than once, “when you keep him like a beast in body;” and “higher wages, better food, better lodgment, and better education will do more to make men real Christians than all the churches ever built.”ᐸ/pᐳ
ᐸp n="ENG18720344"ᐳNo man was more convinced than he that sin and misery are the removable results of social circumstances, and that poverty, ignorance, and class-distinctions consequent, are at the root of all the crimes and wretchedness ness afloat. The evil lying in that great curse of partial civilisation—that upas tree of caste—by which this Christian world of ours, with its religion of brotherhood and socialism, is overshadowed, pained him most of all. The caste of the rich, with its product, the class antagonism of the poor—what a sorry satire on the religion of Jesus of Nazareth, that poor, unlearned man of the people, whom we have exalted into God and now worship with gorgeous ceremonial, while despising every one of the social doctrines He and His disciples preached! However, Joshua did his best to rouse men to a consciousness of Christ, and to the acceptance of His teaching of human equality; and though steadily closed to all doctrines of violence, was always the passionate upholder of the doctrine of duty on the one side and the theory of rights on the other.ᐸ/pᐳ
ᐸ/sampleᐳ
ᐸsampleᐳᐸp n="ENG18720250"ᐳThe different reasons given by the various sectarians who came along, when any of his failures were afloat, were what I have said before. The Evangelicals said it was because he did not teach the Gospel; the Church people, because he was consecrated to the task; the Unititarians asked him, in calm disdain, how he could expect to do good, if he made no difference between vice and virtue but treated both alike? while the Charity Organization people talked of prosecuting him for his encouragement of mendicity dicity, and spoke of him as the pest of the district and the cause of half the pauperism about, because he helped the poor in their need without enquiring into the merits of the case. And they all agreed that the weak spot in his system, and the cause of his failures, was just this—he was not a Christian.ᐸ/pᐳ
ᐸp n="ENG18720251"ᐳIn the midst of all Mary Prinsep came back on our hands. You may perhaps remember that her mistress had made a point of concealing her former life from every one; in which she was justified, and for Mary's sake as much as for her own. Things had gone very well so far, and Mary had satisfaction and worked hard to deserve it, when unfortunately that man who had known her only too well in the sorrowful days of her sin, came with his family to the house, on a visit of a day or two. All the servants were marshalled into prayers morning and evening; and naturally Mary with them; face to face with the guests. So there it was—on the one side a dignified, handsome, well-to-do gentleman, with respectable white hair and a gold eye-glass, a wife and a fine young family, a character to lose, and a reputation for piety; on the other, a poor ignorant girl, abandoned by society, driven by want into bad ways, but now doing her best to get out of them.ᐸ/pᐳ
ᐸp n="ENG18720252"ᐳIt was an awkward meeting for him, and he was afraid maybe of Mary's establishing a claim, or telling what she knew. There he was, a guest in her master's house, with his wife and eldest daughter, and under his own name which she had never known, and his private and official addresses both to be got at. It was an instinct of self-preservation tion, no doubt; but it was cowardly all the same; and, as usual, the weak one had to go to the wall. He made up an excellent story to explain how it was that he knew the girl's former life. It was a story to his credit as a Christian gentleman somehow, and he told it out of sheer regard for his good friends who had been so shamefully imposed on. And even when the lady confessed, as she did, that she had known the main fact of Mary's history, she was urged so strongly to get rid of her that she consented, partly in a vague kind of belief that she had been imposed on and that Mary was worse than she appeared and capable of all manners of unknown crimes, partly by the force of respectability and the need of keeping up blameless appearances. So, as the right thing to do considering her position and what she owed her family and her own character, this lady—good Christian as she was, going to church regularly twice on Sunday, and taking the sacrament once a month—turned the poor creature out of doors again and she, keeping the gentleman's secret loyally, came back to us, as the only friends she had.ᐸ/pᐳ
ᐸ/sampleᐳ
ᐸsampleᐳᐸp n="ENG18720374"ᐳAnd at the word half-a-dozen men and women, shrieking, and gesticulating, laid hands on us and roughly thrust us out. I thought it fortunate we left with our lives, for indeed, the wild, surging crowd was in no mood for mercy just then; and a couple of lives, more or less, were of small account at that moment. Howbeit, we were flung out with many a blow and bitter word; and just as we were going through the gateway a loud yell burst forth, a volley was fired, and we knew that the policy of Versailles had triumphed.ᐸ/pᐳ
ᐸp n="ENG18720375"ᐳA few Parisians—not the Commune—had fallen into the snare prepared for them; and the blood was shed which was to cover Liberty with shame, until men can hear and learn the truth.ᐸ/pᐳ
ᐸp n="ENG18720376"ᐳThe last day came. The guns of our forts were silent; the men were fighting in the streets, desperate, conquered, but not craven. The Versaillists were pouring in like wolves let loose; Paris was drenched with blood, and in flames. And then the cry of the pétroleuses went up like the fire that shot against the sky. What mattered it that it was a lie? It gave the Party of Order another reason, if they had wanted any, to excuse their lust of blood. It was their saturnalia, and they did not stint themselves. The arms, that had served them so ill against the Prussians, served them but too well against their countrymen; and the short hour of a nation's hope was at an end in the bloody reprisals of brothers, that exceeded all we have ever heard or read of in a victorious foreign army.ᐸ/pᐳ
ᐸp n="ENG18720377"ᐳI had been separated from my friends for more than twenty-four hours. The house where we had lodged was in flames; and when I went to seek information at a Communist munist friend's, De Lancy, I found a group of three by the concierge door—himself, his young wife, and a little daughter not two years old, lying as if asleep, save for the blood that was their bed. They had been bound together and shot. Not one, but hundreds and thousands of such cases stand recorded in the history of that terrible moment, when the victorious Versaillists marched into Paris, and society revenged itself on the men who had dared to dream of redressing its wrongs; and among the terrible sights that met me, the evidences of brutal, wanton, sickening murder, I had a shuddering dread that I should find Joshua and Mary. I was never so nearly mad as I was that day when I wandered about the bloody-streets of Paris, looking for my friends; sorrow for the lost cause, horror at the scenes I encountered, and fear for those I loved, all combining to render life in that hour simply torture.ᐸ/pᐳ
ᐸ/sampleᐳ
ᐸsampleᐳᐸp n="ENG1872059"ᐳ“No, sir; neither church nor chapel,” answered Joshua.ᐸ/pᐳ
ᐸp n="ENG1872060"ᐳ“What! a new light on your own account, hey?” and he laughed as if he mocked him.ᐸ/pᐳ
ᐸp n="ENG1872061"ᐳ“No sir, only a seeker.”ᐸ/pᐳ
ᐸp n="ENG1872062"ᐳ“The old paths not good enough for you?—the light that has lightened the Gentiles these eighteen hundred years and more not pure enough for an unwashed Cornish lad, planing wood at a carpenter's bench and not able to speak two consecutive words of good English?”ᐸ/pᐳ
ᐸp n="ENG1872063"ᐳ“I must answer for my conscience to God, sir,” said Joshua.ᐸ/pᐳ
ᐸp n="ENG1872064"ᐳ“And your clergyman, appointed by God and the State to be your guide, what of him? Has he no authority in his own parish?” cried Mr. Grand warmly. “Does it never strike you, my fine fellow, that in thinking for yourself, as you call it, you are flying in the face both of Divine ordinances and the laws of man, and that you are entering on the sin of schism on the one hand, and of rebellion on the other?”ᐸ/pᐳ
ᐸp n="ENG1872065"ᐳ“Look here, sir,” said Joshua with earnestness, but quite respectfully; “if I speak plainly, I mean it for no offence; but my heart burns within me and I must speak out. I deny your appointment as a God-given leader of souls. The Church is but the old priesthood as it existed in the days of our Lord, and is, as much as that was, the blind leading the blind. There are good and kind gentlemen among you, but not Christians according to Christ. I see no sacrifice of the world, no brotherhood with the poor—”ᐸ/pᐳ
ᐸp n="ENG1872066"ᐳ“The poor!” interrupted Mr. Grand disdainfully; “what would you have, you young fool? The poor have the laws of their country to protect them, and the Gospel preached to them for their salvation.”ᐸ/pᐳ
ᐸp n="ENG1872067"ᐳ“Yes, and in preaching that—that is, in giving two full services on Sundays, and reading the marriage-service and the burial-service and the like of that when you are wanted—you discharge your conscience of all other obligations towards them, and think you have done enough. You never seem to remember that when Christ preached the Gospel to the poor it was to make them equal with the rich. Why, sir, the poor of our day are the lepers of Christ's; and who among you, Christian priests, consorts with them? Who ranks the man above his station, or the soul above the man?”ᐸ/pᐳ
ᐸp n="ENG1872068"ᐳ“Now, we have come to it!” cried Mr. Grand. “I thought I should touch the secret spring at last! And you would like us to associate with you as equals?—Is that it, Joshua? Gentlemen and common men hob-and-nob together, and no distinctions made? You to ride in our carriages, and perhaps marry our daughters?”ᐸ/pᐳ
ᐸ/sampleᐳ
ᐸsampleᐳᐸp n="ENG1872079"ᐳ“No,” he used to say, “some kinds of anger are righteous; and this was of them.”ᐸ/pᐳ
ᐸp n="ENG1872080"ᐳBut Mr. Grand made old Davidson, Joshua's father, suffer for his son; for he took away his own custom from him, and did him what harm in the neighbourhood a gentleman's ill-word can do a working man. It was a bad thing for the old man. The Trevalga schools were being built, and St. Juliot's church was under repair, and Davidson, as the best workman thereabouts, would have been sure to have been head man at both jobs. But Mr. Grand, he put his spoke in that wheel; and one day when I took courage to speak and plead, all I got was a recommendation to mind my own business, and not interfere where I was not wanted. And then as if in consideration—a kind of condescending consideration—for my being a “canter,” Mr. Grand wound up with saying that I must see he was justified according to the law of God.ᐸ/pᐳ
ᐸp n="ENG1872081"ᐳWhen I challenged him hotly, I daresay intemperately, I daresay even impertinently, for his proof—for you see I was but a poor uneducated artisan, and he was a gentleman and a scholar—he laughed, and said he did not argue with carpenters' lads; and when I answered back, he ordered me out of the house, saying I was as pestilent a fellow as my friend;—I replying angrily that I did not think the pestilence rested with Joshua. Which ended the interview; not without loss of temper and dignity on both sides, and no good done to anyone.ᐸ/pᐳ
ᐸp n="ENG1872082"ᐳThe night before we left for London Joshua had a kind of vision or waking dream, which he told me as we were on our way to Launceston, walking up the hill from Boscastle, while the omnibus toiled after us. He was on the cliff by Long Island, when suddenly he seemed to be caught away to a wide plain, where many men were gathered. In the centre of the plain was a hill, like Brown Willy out there by Camelford, and on this hill sat two kingly figures who ruled over the swarming multitudes below. They sat together hand in hand, and he saw that they were in some mysterious manner inseparable. The one was dressed as a high priest, and was Ecclesiastical Christianity; the other as a king, and was Society; and both were stern, forbidding, and oppressive. The only persons to whom they showed favour were the well-dressed and the subservient—rich people dressed in gold and jewels, and the poor and undistinguished who were submissive and conforming; who accepted all that the high priest taught without questioning the truth of any part, and who obeyed what the king ordained without even so much as a wish to resist. These were called Believing Christians and Respectable Members of Society; and, in consideration of their obedience, both the high priest and the king smiled on them, and spoke them fair. Yet they were scarcely friendly to their adherents. The one surrounded them with the most monstrous shapes of demons cast by magic lanterns and in every way unreal, of which they were in continual fear—GOD, whom yet they labelled “Our Father,” and the “God of Love,” the most terrible looking demon of all; and the more they were afraid, and the more cruel they believed Our Father to be, the more Ecclesiastical Christianity was content. The other bound them round and round with chains and swathing bands, till they were scarcely able to move or breathe. And when they submitted to the stifling torture with a good grace—some of them even drawing the links tighter, and buckling up the thongs more home of their own accord, and all declaring the pattern of each particular bandage to have been sent down direct from heaven, and in no wise invented as an experiment by Society—then the king smiled on them kindly, and praised them with many flattering words; and the poor atrophied wretches were quite content with the barren honour of their reward.ᐸ/pᐳ
ᐸ/sampleᐳᐸ/samplesᐳ