We listened to Dr. Arnold, as all boys in their better moods will listen (aye, and men too for the matter of that,) to a man whom we felt to be, with all his heart and soul and strength, striving against whatever was mean and unmanly and unrighteous in our little world. It was not the cold, clear voice of one giving advice and warning from serene heights to those who were struggling and sinning below, but the warm, living voice of one who was fighting for us by our sides, and calling on us to help him and ourselves and one another. And so, wearily and little by little, but surely and steadily on the whole, was brought home to the young boy the meaning of his life; that it was no fool’s or sluggard’s paradise into which he had wandered by chance, but a battle-field ordained from of old, where there are no spectators, but the youngest must take his side, and the stakes are life and death. And he who roused this consciousness in them, showed them at the same time, by every word he spoke in the pulpit, and by his whole daily life, how that battle was to be fought; and stood there before them their fellow-soldier and the captain of their band. The true sort of a captain, too, for a boys’ army, one who had no misgivings and gave no uncertain word of command, and, let who would yield or make truce, would fight the fight out (so every boy felt) to the last gasp and the last drop of blood. Other sides of his character might take hold of and influence boys here and there, but it was this thoroughness and undaunted courage which more than anything else won his way to the hearts of the great mass of those on whom he left his mark, and made them believe first in him, and then in his Master.
XVI.
To stand by what our conscience witnesses for as truth, through evil and good report, even against all opposition of those we love, and of those whose judgment we look up to and should ordinarily prefer to follow; to cut ourselves deliberately off from their love and sympathy and respect, is surely one of the most severe trials to which we can be put. A man has need to feel at such times that the Spirit of the Lord is upon him in some measure, as it was upon Christ when he rose in the synagogue of Nazareth and, selecting the passage of Isaiah which speaks most directly of the Messiah, claimed that title for himself, and told them that to-day this prophecy was fulfilled in him.
The fierce, hard, Jewish spirit is at once roused to fury. They would kill him then and there, and so settle his claims once for all. He passes through them, and away from the quiet home where he had been brought up—alone, it would seem, so far as man could make him so, and homeless for the remainder of his life. Yet not alone, for his Father is with him; nor homeless for he has the only home of which man can be sure, the home of his own heart shared with the Spirit of God.
XVII.
We have been told recently, by more than one of those who profess to have weighed and measured Christianity and found it wanting, that religion must rest on reason, based on phenomena of this visible, tangible world in which we are living.
Be it so. There is no need for a Christian to object. We can meet this challenge as well as any other. We need never be careful about choosing our own battlefield. Looking, then, at that world as we see it, laboring heavily along in our own time—as we hear of it through the records of the ages—I must repeat that there is no phenomenon in it comparable for a moment to that of Christ’s life and work. The more we canvass and sift and weigh and balance the materials, the more clearly and grandly does his figure rise before us, as the true Head of humanity, the perfect Ideal, not only of wisdom and tenderness and love, but of courage also, because He was and is the simple Truth of God—the expression, at last, in flesh and blood of what He who created us means each one of our race to be.
XVIII.
“My father,” said Hardy, “is an old commander in the royal navy. He was a second cousin of Nelson’s Hardy, and that, I believe, was what led him into the navy, for he had no interest whatever of his own. It was a visit which Nelson’s Hardy, then a young lieutenant, paid to his relative, my grandfather, which decided my father, he has told me; but he always had a strong bent to sea, though he was a boy of very studious habits.
“However, those were times when brave men who knew and loved their profession couldn’t be overlooked, and my dear old father fought his way up step by step—not very fast, certainly, but still fast enough to keep him in heart about his chances in life.
“He was made commander towards the end of the war, and got a ship, in which he sailed with a convoy of merchantmen from Bristol. It was the last voyage he ever made in active service; but the Admiralty was so well satisfied with his conduct in it that they kept his ship in commission two years after peace was declared. And well they might be, for in the Spanish main he fought an action which lasted, on and off, for two days, with a French sloop-of-war, and a privateer, either of which ought to have been a match for him. But he had been with Vincent in the Arrow, and was not likely to think much of such small odds as that. At any rate, he beat them off, and not a prize could either of them make out of his convoy, though I believe his ship was never fit for anything afterwards, and was broken up as soon as she was out of commission. We have got her compasses, and the old flag which flew at the peak through the whole voyage, at home now. It was my father’s own flag, and his fancy to have it always flying. More than half the men were killed or badly hit—the dear old father among the rest. A ball took off part of his knee-cap, and he had to fight the last six hours of the action sitting in a chair on the quarter-deck; but he says it made the men fight better than when he was among them, seeing him sitting there sucking oranges.
“Well, he came home with a stiff leg. The Bristol merchants gave him the freedom of the city in a gold box, and a splendidly-mounted sword with an inscription on the blade, which hangs over the mantel-piece at home. When I first left home, I asked him to give me his old service-sword, which used to hang by the other, and he gave it me at once, though I was only a lad of seventeen, as he would give me his right eye, dear old father, which is the only one he has now; the other he lost from a cutlass-wound in a boarding party. There it hangs, and those are his epaulettes in the tin case. They used to be under my pillow before I had a room of my own, and many a cowardly down-hearted fit have they helped me to pull through; and many a mean act have they helped to keep me from doing. There they are always; and the sight of them brings home the dear old man to me as nothing else does, hardly even his letters. I must be a great scoundrel to go very wrong with such a father.
“Let’s see—where was I? Oh, yes; I remember. Well, my father got his box and sword, and some very handsome letters from several great men. We have them all in a book at home, and I know them by heart. The ones he values most are from Collinwood, and his old captain, Vincent, and from his cousin, Nelson’s Hardy, who didn’t come off very well himself after the war. But my poor old father never got another ship. For some time he went up every year to London, and was always, he says, very kindly received by the people in power, and often dined with one and another Lord of the Admiralty who had been an old mess-mate. But he was longing for employment, and it used to prey on him while he was in his prime to feel year after year slipping away and he still without a ship. But why should I abuse people and think it hard, when he doesn’t? ‘You see, Jack,’ he said to me the last time I spoke to him about it, ‘after all, I was a battered old hulk, lame and half-blind. So was Nelson, you’ll say; but every man isn’t a Nelson, my boy. And though I might think I could con or fight a ship as well as ever, I can’t say other folk who didn’t know me were wrong for not agreeing with me. Would you, now, Jack, appoint a lame and blind man to command your ship, if you had one?’ But he left off applying for work soon after he was fifty (I just remember the time), for he began to doubt then whether he was quite so fit to command a small vessel as a younger man; and though he had a much better chance after that of getting a ship (for William IV. came to