His father was a captain
in the Royal Artillery; the boy grew up therefore in the atmosphere
of the military life, and imbibed not a few of its nobler ideals.
in the Royal Artillery; the boy grew up therefore in the atmosphere
of the military life, and imbibed not a few of its nobler ideals.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v21 - Rab to Rus
Roberts's prose possesses the same imaginative quality as his
verse, though its manifestation is along different lines. In Earth's
Enigmas,' a volume of unique short stories, there is contained some
very subtle work. The scenes of these tales are nearly all laid out
of doors, in Canadian regions with which the author is familiar:
nature is less a background in them than a wild, disturbing element,
a gigantic actor in the scene itself. In two of them, 'The Young
Ravens that Call upon Him,' and 'Strayed,' there is no trace of a
human footstep. The wandering lonely winds of the wilderness are
the very spirit of these stories. In 'The Perdu' and 'The Stone
Dog' there is a certain weird imagination, which seems unlike any-
thing but the strange quality which informs the works of Poe. The
former has a mysterious beauty which impels a re-reading, although
the tale seems nothing in itself. In this entire collection, Mr. Roberts
exhibits a high degree of sensitiveness to nature, although not always
without that mixture of the pathetic fallacy which seems inevitable in
the attitude of the present-day generation towards the natural world.
Mr. Roberts's latest book, "The Forge in the Forest,' is an Aca-
dian romance; being the narrative of the Acadian ranger, Jean de
Mer, Seigneur de Briart. Like his short stories, it is instinct with
the spirit of the wilderness.
## p. 12297 (#343) ##########################################
CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS
12297
•
STRAYED
From 'Earth's Enigmas. Copyright 1895, by Lamson, Wolffe & Co.
N THE Cabineau Camp, of unlucky reputation, there was a
young ox of splendid build, but of a wild and restless nature.
He was one of a yoke, of part Devon blood, large, dark-
red, all muscle and nerve, and with wide magnificent horns. His
yoke-fellow was a docile steady worker, the pride of his owner's
heart; but he himself seemed never to have been more than half
broken in. The woods appeared to draw him by some spell.
He wanted to get back to the pastures where he had roamed un-
trammeled of old with his fellow-steers. The remembrance was
in his heart of the dewy mornings when the herd used to feed
together on the sweet grassy hillocks; and of the clover-smelling
heats of June, when they would gather hock-deep in the pools
under the green willow shadows. He hated the yoke, he hated
the winter; and he imagined that in the wild pastures he remem-
bered, it would be forever summer. If only he could get back
to those pastures!
One day there came the longed-for opportunity; and he seized
it. He was standing unyoked beside his mate, and none of the
teamsters were near. His head went up in the air, and with a
snort of triumph he dashed away through the forest. For a little
while there was a vain pursuit. At last the lumbermen gave it
up. "Let him be! " said his owner, "an' I rayther guess he'll
turn up ag'in when he gets peckish. He kaint browse on spruce.
buds an' lungwort. "
Plunging on with long gallop through the snow, he was soon
miles from camp. Growing weary, he slackened his pace. He
came down to a walk. As the lonely red of the winter sunset
began to stream through the openings of the forest, flushing
the snows of the tiny glades and swales, he grew hungry, and
began to swallow unsatisfying mouthfuls of the long moss which
roughened the tree-trunks. Ere the moon got up he had filled
himself with this fodder, and then he lay down in a little thicket
for the night.
But some miles back from his retreat a bear had chanced
upon his footprints. A strayed steer! That would be an easy
prey. The bear started straightway in pursuit. The moon was
high in heaven when the crouched ox heard his pursuer's ap-
proach. He had no idea what was coming, but he rose to his
feet and waited.
## p. 12298 (#344) ##########################################
12298
CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS
The bear plunged boldly into the thicket, never dreaming of
resistance. With a muffled roar the ox charged upon him, and
bore him to the ground. Then he wheeled, and charged again,
and the astonished bear was beaten at once. Gored by those
keen horns, he had no stomach for further encounter, and would
fain have made his escape; but as he retreated, the ox charged
him again, dashing him against a huge trunk. The bear dragged
himself up with difficulty beyond his opponent's reach; and the
ox turned scornfully back to his lair.
At the first yellow of dawn, the restless creature was again
upon the march. He pulled more mosses by the way; but he
disliked them the more intensely now, because he thought he
must be nearing his ancient pastures, with their tender grass and
their streams. The snow was deeper about him, and his hatred
of the winter grew apace. He came out upon a hillside, partly
open, whence the pine had years before been stripped, and where
now grew young birches thick together. Here he browsed on
the aromatic twigs; but for him it was harsh fare. As his hun-
ger increased he thought a little longingly of the camp he had
deserted; but he dreamed not of turning back. He would keep
on till he reached his pastures, and the glad herd of his com-
rades, licking salt out of the trough beside the accustomed pool.
He had some blind instinct as to his direction, and kept his course
to the south very strictly, the desire in his heart continually lead-
ing him aright.
That afternoon he was attacked by a panther, which dropped
out of a tree and tore his throat. He dashed under a low branch,
and scraped his assailant off; then, wheeling about savagely, put
the brute to flight with his first mad charge. The panther sprang
back into his tree, and the ox continued his quest.
Soon his steps grew weaker; for the panther's cruel claws had
gone deep into his neck, and his path was marked with blood.
Yet the dream in his great wild eyes was not dimmed as his
strength ebbed away. His weakness he never noticed or heeded.
The desire that was urging him absorbed all other thoughts,-
even, almost, his sense of hunger. This however it was easy for
him to assuage, after a fashion; for the long, gray, unnourish-
ing mosses were abundant.
----
By-and-by his path led him into the bed of a stream, whose
waters could be heard faintly tinkling on thin pebbles beneath
their coverlet of ice and snow. His slow steps conducted him
far along this open course. Soon after he had disappeared around
## p. 12299 (#345) ##########################################
CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS
12299
a curve in the distance, there came the panther, following stealth-
ily upon his crimsoned trail. The crafty beast was waiting till
the bleeding and the hunger should do its work, and the object of
its inexorable pursuit should have no more heart left for resist-
ance.
This was late in the afternoon. The ox was now possessed
with his desire, and would not lie down for any rest.
All night
long, through the gleaming silver of the open spaces, through
the weird and checkered gloom of the deep forest, heedless even
of his hunger,- or perhaps driven the more by it as he thought
of the wild clover bunches and tender timothy awaiting him,-
the solitary ox strove on. And all night, lagging far behind in
his unabating caution, the panther followed him.
At sunrise the worn and stumbling animal came out upon the
borders of the great lake, stretching its leagues of unshadowed
snow away to the south before him. There was his path, and
without hesitation he followed it. The wide and frost-bound
water here and there had been swept clear of its snows by the
wind, but for the most part its, covering lay unruffled; and the
pale dove-colors and saffrons and rose-lilacs of the dawn were
sweetly reflected on its surface.
The doomed ox was now journeying very slowly, and with
the greatest labor. He staggered at every step, and his beau-
tiful head drooped almost to the snow. When he had got a
great way out upon the lake, at the forest's edge appeared the
pursuing panther, emerging cautiously from the coverts. The
round tawny face and malignant green eyes were raised to peer
out across the expanse. The laboring progress of the ox was
promptly marked. Dropping its nose again to the ensanguined
snow, the beast resumed his pursuit, first at a slow trot, and then
at a long elastic gallop. By this time the ox's quest was nearly
done. He plunged forward upon his knees, rose again with
difficulty, stood still, and looked around him. His eyes were
clouding over, but he saw dimly the tawny brute that was now
hard upon his steps. Back came a flash of the old courage, and
he turned, horns lowered, to face the attack. With the last of
his strength he charged, and the panther paused irresolutely; but
the wanderer's knees gave way beneath his own impetus, and his
horns plowed the snow. With a deep bellowing groan he rolled
over on his side, and the longing and the dream of the pleasant
pastures faded from his eyes. With a great spring the panther
## p. 12300 (#346) ##########################################
12300
CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS
was upon him, and
knew naught of it.
quered him.
the eager teeth were at his throat,— but he
No wild beast, but his own desire, had con-
When the panther had slaked his thirst for blood, he raised
his head and stood with his fore-paws resting on the dead ox's
side, and gazed all about him.
To one watching from the lake shore, had there been any one
to watch in that solitude, the wild beast and his prey would have
seemed but a speck of black on the gleaming waste. At the
same hour, league upon league back in the depth of the ancient
forest, a lonely ox was lowing in his stanchions, restless, refusing
to eat, grieving for the absence of his yoke-fellow.
THE UNSLEEPING
From 'Book of the Native. ' Copyright 1896, by Lamson, Wolffe & Co.
SOOTHE to unimagined sleep
The sunless bases of the deep;
And then I stir the aching tide
That gropes in its reluctant side.
I heave aloft the smoking hill;
To silent peace its throes I still.
But ever at its heart of fire
I lurk, an unassuaged desire.
I wrap me in the sightless germ
An instant or an endless term;
And still its atoms are my care,
Dispersed in ashes or in air.
I hush the comets one by one
To sleep for ages in the sun;
The sun resumes before my face
His circuit of the shores of space.
The mount, the star, the germ, the deep,
They all shall wake, they all shall sleep.
Time, like a flurry of wild rain,
Shall drip across the darkened pane.
Space in the dim predestined hour
Shall crumble like a ruined tower.
I only, with unfaltering eye,
Shall watch the dreams of God go by.
## p. 12301 (#347) ##########################################
CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS
12301
AN EPITAPH FOR A HUSBANDMAN
From Book of the Native. Copyright 1896, by Lamson, Wolffe & Co.
E WHO Would start and rise
Before the crowing cocks,—
No more he lifts his eyes,
Whoever knocks.
HⓇ
He who before the stars
Would call the cattle home,-
They wait about the bars
For him to come.
Him at whose hearty calls
The farmstead woke again,—
The horses in their stalls
Expect in vain.
Busy and blithe and bold,
He labored for the morrow;
The plow his hands would hold
Rests in the furrow.
His fields he had to leave,
His orchards cool and dim;
The clods he used to cleave
Now cover him.
But the green, growing things
Lean kindly to his sleep; -
White roots and wandering strings,
Closer they creep.
Because he loved them long,
And with them bore his part,
Tenderly now they throng
About his heart.
Β΄
THE LITTLE FIELD OF PEACE
From Book of the Native. ' Copyright 1896, by Lamson, Wolffe & Co.
Y THE long wash of his ancestral sea
He sleeps how quietly!
How quiet the unlifting eyelids lie
Under this tranquil sky!
## p. 12302 (#348) ##########################################
12302
CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS
The little busy hands and restless feet
Here find that rest is sweet; -
-
For, sweetly from the hands grown tired of play
The child-world slips away,
With its confusion of forgotten toys
And kind, familiar noise.
Not lonely does he lie in his last bed,
For love o'erbroods his head.
Kindly to him the comrade grasses lean
Their fellowship of green.
The wilding meadow companies give heed:
Brave tansy, and the weed
That on the dike-top lifts its dauntless stalk,—
Around his couch they talk.
The shadows of the oak-tree flit and play
Above his dreams all day.
The wind that was his playmate on the hills
His sleep with music fills.
Here in this tender acre by the tide
His vanished kin abide.
Ah! what compassionate care for him they keep,
Too soon returned to sleep!
They watch him in this little field of peace
Where they have found release.
Not as a stranger or alone he went
Unto his long content;
But kissed to sleep and comforted lies he
By his ancestral sea.
MARSYAS
From 'Songs of the Common Day. By permission of Mr. Roberts and his
publishers
LITTLE gray hill-glade, close-turfed, withdrawn
Beyond resort or heed of trafficking feet,
Ringed round with slim trunks of the mountain-ash.
Through the slim trunks and scarlet bunches flash
Beneath the clear, chill glitterings of the dawn —
Far off, the crests where down the rosy shore
-
The Pontic surges beat.
The plains lie dim below. The thin airs wash
The circuit of the autumn-colored hills,
A
## p. 12303 (#349) ##########################################
CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS
12303
And this high glade whereon
The satyr pipes, who soon shall pipe no more.
He sits against the beech-tree's mighty bole;
He leans, and with persuasive breathing fills
The happy shadows of the slant-set lawn.
The goat-feet fold beneath a gnarlèd root,
And sweet and sweet the note that steals and thrills
From slender stops of that shy flute.
Then to the goat-feet comes the wide-eyed fawn
Hearkening: the rabbits fringe the glade, and lay
Their long ears to the sound;
In the pale boughs the partridge gather round,
And quaint hern from the sea-green river reeds;
The wild ram halts upon a rocky horn
O'erhanging; and unmindful of his prey,
The leopard steals with narrow lids to lay
His spotted length along the ground.
The thin airs wash, the thin clouds wander by,
And those hushed listeners move not.
He pipes, soft swaying, and with half-shut eye
In rapt content of utterance,—
All the morn
Nor heeds
The young god standing in his branchy place;
The languor on his lips; and in his face
Divinely inaccessible, the scorn.
THE FLIGHT OF THE GEESE
From Songs of the Common Day. By permission of Mr. Roberts and his
publishers
HEAR the long wind wash the softening snow,
I
The low tide loiter down the shore. The night,
Full filled with April forecast, hath no light;
The salt wave on the sedge-flat pulses slow.
Through the hid furrows lisp in murmurous flow
The thaw's shy ministers; and hark! the height
Of heaven grows weird and loud with unseen flight
Of strong hosts prophesying as they go!
High through the drenched and hollow night their wings
Beat northward hard on winter's trail. The sound
Of their confused and solemn voices, borne
Athwart the dark to their long arctic morn,
Comes with a sanction and an awe profound,
A boding of unknown, foreshadowed things.
## p. 12304 (#350) ##########################################
CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS
12304
BESIDE THE WINTER SEA
From Book of the Native. ' Copyright 1896, by Lamson, Wolffe & Co.
S ONE who sleeps and hears across his dream
The cry of battles ended long ago,
Inland I hear the calling of the sea.
I hear its hollow voices, though between
AⓇ
My wind-worn dwelling and thy wave-worn strand
How many miles, how many mountains are!
And thou beside the winter sea alone
Art walking with thy cloak about thy face.
Bleak, bleak the tide, and evening coming on;
And gray the pale, pale light that wans thy face.
Solemnly breaks the long wave at thy feet;
And sullenly in patches clings the snow
Upon the low, red rocks worn round with years.
I see thine eyes, I see their grave desire,
Unsatisfied and lonely as the sea's,-
Yet how unlike the wintry sea's despair!
For could my feet but follow thine, my hands
But reach for thy warm hands beneath thy cloak,
What summer joy would lighten in thy face,
What sunshine warm thy eyes, and thy sad mouth
Break to a dewy rose and laugh on mine!
THE DESERTED CITY
From 'Songs of the Common Day. By permission of Mr. Roberts and his
publishers
HERE lies a little city leagues away;
Its wharves the green sea washes all day long,
Its busy sun-bright wharves with sailor's song
And clamor of trade ring loud the livelong day.
Into the happy harbor hastening gay
With press of snowy canvas, tall ships throng.
The peopled streets to blithe-eyed Peace belong,
Glad housed beneath these crowding roofs of gray.
THER
'Twas long ago the city prospered so;
For yesterday a woman died therein,
Since when the wharves are idle fallen, I know,
And in the streets is hushed the pleasant din;
The thronging ships have been, the songs have been.
Since yesterday it is so long ago.
## p. 12305 (#351) ##########################################
12305
FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON
(1816-1853)
MONG the souls which refused the haven where Newman had
found peace, because they dreamed of longer voyages and
of undiscovered lands, few so suffered in the lonelier seas
of their choice as did Frederick William Robertson. His short intense
life was spent in a spiritual isolation from his fellows, which was
partly the result of temperament, partly of his ability to see clearer
and farther than most men into the mysteries of existence. He never
found home. It seemed, indeed, as if a divine nostalgia drew him
out of the world. He left it still young,
struggling, the questions upon his lips,
the desire in his heart; faring forth into
the lands of God as one who could not mis-
trust the divine Lover, and would fain learn
of himself the meaning of the confused
earthly existence, which had only deepened
his dejection. He was indeed the embodi-
ment of the religious spirit of the end of
the century. He exhibited its most strik-
ing characteristics: its dependence upon
conduct rather than emotion; its glorifi-
cation of morality; its humanism, its hun-
ger for God, hidden under a pantheistic
composure; its adoration of Jesus, as the
one wholly comforting figure in the bleak perspectives of human
history; finally, he held its conception of Christianity as a life, not a
creed. The man who wrote, "The religion of Christ is not a law
but a spirit, not a creed but a life," had felt within him the forces
of a new realization of religion as yet unperceived by his generation.
He suffered in consequence the pangs of those who travail to bring
forth the new which will supplant the old.
His short life of thirty-seven years was lived in a transitional
period of England's spiritual development, when through the pray-
ers of both ritualist and evangelical might be heard strange voices
speaking of strange things,-of a universe emptied of God, of man
without a soul.
XXI-770
F. W. ROBERTSON
## p. 12306 (#352) ##########################################
12306
FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON
Robertson was born in 1816, in London.
His father was a captain
in the Royal Artillery; the boy grew up therefore in the atmosphere
of the military life, and imbibed not a few of its nobler ideals. Until
he was five years old he was at Leith Fort, where his father was
stationed. In 1821 the latter retired to Beverley; there Robertson
attended the grammar school, going later to Tours for the sake of
learning the French tongue. After a year he returned home, contin-
uing his education at the Edinburgh Academy and then at the Uni-
versity. His elevation of character, his nobility of mind, led to a
proposal from his father that he should enter the church; but he re-
fused on the ground of his unworthiness. At the age of eighteen he
was articled to a solicitor in Bury St. Edmunds; but a year's study
so undermined his health that he was obliged to give up the project
of studying the law. His name was then entered on the list of the
3d Dragoons. He spent two years in preparation for military service;
but on the eve of receiving his commission, in 1837, he matriculated
at Brasenose College, Oxford. There he read extensively, coming
under the influence of Plato and Aristotle, of Butler and Jonathan
Edwards. With the Tractarian movement he seems to have had
little sympathy, his temper at that stage of his development being
evangelical. He was being drawn gradually into the church: in July
1840, he was ordained by the Bishop of Winchester, and immediately
entered upon ministerial work in that place. His enthusiasm led
him, however, into excesses of self-denial and of religious exercises,
so that his health being undermined, he was obliged to go abroad
within a year.
It was during his sojourn in Switzerland that he met and married
Helen, third daughter of Sir George William Denys. Upon his return
to England in 1842 he accepted the curacy of Cheltenham, where he
remained for four years; a period of great importance in his life, for
his religious views were gradually undergoing a radical change. Of
a temperament characterized by its reasonableness and by its sen-
sitiveness to reality, what he considered the extravagance and the
cant of the extreme evangelical party filled him with repugnance.
Moreover he had come under the influence of Carlyle and Emerson,
and was beginning to think that dogma occupied too large a place
in religion. He himself was too much of a man of the world in the
best sense, to remain long fettered by what he believed to be pro-
vincial in a church party. He cut loose therefore from his moorings,
and ventured out upon that sea which stretches beyond the limits
of the world. At first he was to encounter only night and the terror
of the unknown.
"It is an awful moment," he writes, "when the soul begins to find that the
props on which it has blindly rested so long are many of them rotten, and
## p. 12307 (#353) ##########################################
FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON
12307
begins to suspect them all; when it begins to feel the nothingness of many of
the traditionary opinions which have been received with implicit confidence, and
in that horrible insecurity begins also to doubt whether there be anything to
believe at all. It is an awful hour-let him who has passed through it say
how awful - when this life has lost its meaning, and seems shriveled into a
span; when the grave appears to be the end of all, human goodness nothing
but a name, and the sky above this universe a dead expanse, black with the
void from which God himself has disappeared.
I know of but one
way in which a man may come forth from his agony scathless; it is by hold-
ing fast to those things which are certain still,- the grand, simple landmarks
of morality. If there be no God and no future state, yet even then it is bet-
ter to be generous than selfish, better to be chaste than licentious, better to be
true than false, better to be brave than a coward. »
Like many other noble spirits of the time, he found in right con-
duct, in the keeping of the commandments, that "upon which his soul
might assuredly rest and depend"; despite the suffering incident upon
his growth, he entered through this new hope into a conception of
Christianity as being primarily not a theological system but a life,
not a religion of emotion but one of principle. He believed that
under this aspect of it only could it become a universal religion,
making its appeal not to the changing intellect but to the eternal
conscience of the race.
―――
These new phases in Robertson's development led to his giving up
the curacy of Cheltenham, and after a short residence abroad, and
a few subsequent months at Oxford - to entrance upon his famous min-
istry at Trinity Chapel, Brighton. There he preached sermons which
attracted the attention of all England, and there he endeavored to
realize his new conception of Christianity, which seemed little short
of heretical to his generation. He founded a workingman's institute,
and was called a socialist; he preached the religion of holiness, and
was accused of heresy: yet his sermons seem wholly reasonable and
beautiful to this generation. They exhibit a remarkable clearness of
spiritual insight, profound knowledge of human nature, and a sweet-
ness, born of strength, most winning in its warm humanity. Never-
theless his teachings were misunderstood; in obscure ways he was
persecuted. His sensitive spirit, which could expand only in the at-
mosphere of sympathy, drew into itself in pain. He suffered likewise
from religious doubt and terror. He had chosen the eternal rather
than the finite; but its vastness struck a chill to a nature made for
the uses of love, for the intimacy and definiteness of affection.
He died on the 15th of August, 1853, knowing that his unfinished
life could be completed only in the lives of his spiritual children,
breathing the air of a time more friendly to a wider interpretation
of the gospel.
## p. 12308 (#354) ##########################################
12308
FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON
THE EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF CHRIST
From Sermons Preached in Trinity Chapel'
IN
N THE case of all rare excellence that is merely human, it is the
first object of the biographer of a marvelous man to seek for
surprising stories of his early life. The appetite for the mar-
velous in this matter is almost instinctive and invariable. All
men, almost, love to discover the early wonders which were pro-
phetic of after greatness. Apparently the reason is that we
are unwilling to believe that wondrous excellence was attained by
slow, patient labor. We get an excuse for our own slowness and
stunted growth, by settling it, once for all, that the original dif-
ferences between such men and us were immeasurable. There-
fore it is, I conceive, that we seek so eagerly for anecdotes of
early precocity.
In this spirit the fathers of the primitive Church collected
legends of the early life of Christ, stories of superhuman infancy,
what the Infant and the Child said and did. Many of these
legends are absurd; all, as resting on no authority, are rejected.
Very different from this is the spirit of the Bible narra-
tive. It records no marvelous stories of infantine sagacity or
miraculous power, to feed a prurient curiosity. Both in what
it tells and in what it does not tell, one thing is plain, that the
human life of the Son of God was natural. There was first the
blade, then the ear, then the full corn. In what it does not
say; because, had there been anything preternatural to record,
no doubt it would have been recorded. In what it does say; be-
cause that little is all unaffectedly simple. One anecdote, and two
verses of general description,- that is all which is told us of the
Redeemer's childhood.
-
The child, it is written, grew. Two pregnant facts: He was
a child, and a child that grew in heart, in intellect, in size, in
grace, in favor with God. Not a man in child's years. No hot-
bed precocity marked the holiest of infancies. The Son of Man
grew up in the quiet valley of existence,-in shadow, not in sun-
shine,—not forced. No unnatural, stimulating culture had devel-
oped the mind or feelings; no public flattery, no sunning of
infantine perfections in the glare of the world's show, had brought
the Temptation of the Wilderness, with which his manhood grap-
pled, too early on his soul. We know that he was childlike, as
## p. 12309 (#355) ##########################################
FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON
12309
other children; for in after years his brethren thought his fame
strange, and his townsmen rejected him. They could not be-
lieve that that one who had gone in and out, ate and drank and
worked, was He whose Name is Wonderful. The proverb, true
of others, was true of him: "A prophet is not without honor
but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own
house. " You know him in a picture at once, by the halo round
his brow: there was no glory in his real life to mark him. He
was in the world, and the world knew him not. Gradually and
gently he woke to consciousness of life and its manifold mean-
ing; found himself in possession of a self; by degrees opened his
eyes upon this outer world, and drank in its beauty. Early he
felt the lily of the field discourse to him of the Invisible Love-
liness, and the ravens tell of God his Father. Gradually, and not
at once, he embraced the sphere of human duties, and woke to
his earthly relationships one by one,-the Son, the Brother, the
Citizen, the Master.
It is a very deep and beautiful and precious truth that the
Eternal Son had a human and progressive childhood. Happy the
Ichild who is suffered to be and content to be what God meant
it to be, a child while childhood lasts. Happy the parent who
does not force artificial manners, precocious feeling, premature
religion. Our age is one of stimulus and high pressure. We live,
as it were, our lives out fast. Effect is everything,— results
produced at once; something to show and something that may
tell. The folio of patient years is replaced by the pamphlet
that stirs men's curiosity to-day, and to-morrow is forgotten.
"Plain living and high thinking" are no more. The town with
its fever and its excitements, and its collision of mind with mind,
has spread over the country; and there is no country-scarcely
home. To men who traverse England in a few hours, and spend
only a portion of the year in one place, "home" is becoming a
vocable of past ages. The result is that heart and brain, which
were given to last for seventy years, wear out before their time.
We have our exhausted men of twenty-five, and our old men of
forty. Heart and brain give way: the heart hardens and the
brain grows soft.
Brethren, the Son of God lived till thirty in an obscure vil-
lage of Judea unknown, then came forth a matured and perfect
Man,—with mind, and heart, and frame, in perfect balance of
humanity. It is a divine lesson! I would I could say as strongly
## p. 12310 (#356) ##########################################
12310
FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON
as I feel deeply. Our stimulating artificial culture destroys depth.
Our competition, our nights turned into days by pleasure, leave
no time for earnestness. We are superficial men. Character in
the world wants root. England has gained much; she has lost
also much. The world wants what has passed away (and which
until we secure, we shall remain the clever, shallow men we are),
a childhood and a youth spent in shade a home.
Now, this growth took place in three particulars.
I. In spiritual strength. "The child waxed strong in spirit. "
Spiritual strength consists of two things,-power of will, and
power of self-restraint. It requires two things, therefore, for its
existence, strong feelings, and strong command over them.
Now it is here we make a great mistake: we mistake strong
feelings for strong character. A man who bears all before him,—
before whose frown domestics tremble, and whose bursts of fury
make the children of the house quake,- because he has his will
obeyed, and his own way in all things, we call him a strong man.
The truth is, that is the weak man: it is his passions that are
strong; he, mastered by them, is weak. You must measure the
strength of a man by the power of the feelings which he subdues,
not by the power of those which subdue him.
And hence composure is very often the highest result of
strength. Did we never see a man receive a flagrant insult, and
only grow a little pale, and then reply quietly? That was a man
spiritually strong. Or did we never see a man in anguish stand
as if carved out of solid rock, mastering himself? or one bear-
ing a hopeless daily trial, remain silent, and never tell the world
what it was that cankered his home peace? That is strength.
He who with strong passions remains chaste,—he who, keenly
sensitive, with manly power of indignation in him, can be pro-
voked and yet refrain himself and forgive,- these are strong
men, spiritual heroes.
-
The child waxed strong: spiritual strength is reached by
successive steps. Fresh strength is got by every mastery of self.
It is the belief of the savage that the spirit of every enemy he
slays enters into him and becomes added to his own, accumu-
lating a warrior's strength for the day of battle; therefore he
slays all he can. It is true in the spiritual warfare. Every sin
you slay, the spirit of that sin passes into you transformed into
strength; every passion, not merely kept in abeyance by asceti-
cism, but subdued by a higher impulse, is so much character
## p. 12311 (#357) ##########################################
FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON
12311
strengthened. The strength of the passion not expended is yours.
still. Understand, then, you are not a man of spiritual power
because your impulses are irresistible. They sweep over your
soul like a tornado,-lay all flat before them,-whereupon you
feel a secret pride of strength. Last week, men saw a vessel
on this coast borne headlong on the breakers, and dashing itself
with terrific force against the shore. It embedded itself, a mis-
erable wreck, deep in sand and shingle. Was that brig, in her
convulsive throes, strong? or was it powerless and helpless?
No, my brethren: God's spirit in the soul,—an inward power
of doing the same thing we will and ought,- that is strength,
nothing else. All other force in us is only our weakness,— the
violence of driving passion. "I can do all things through Christ,
who strengtheneth me," - that is Christian strength. "I cannot
do the things I would," - that is the weakness of an unredeemed
slave.
I instance one single evidence of strength in the early years
of Jesus: I find it in that calm, long waiting of thirty years be-
fore he began his work. And yet all the evils he was to redress
were there, provoking indignation, crying for interference,-the
hollowness of social life, the misinterpretations of Scripture, the
forms of worship and phraseology which had hidden moral truth,
the injustice, the priestcraft, the cowardice, the hypocrisies: he
had long seen them all.
All those years his soul burned within him with a divine
zeal and heavenly indignation. A mere man-a weak, emotional
man of spasmodic feeling, a hot enthusiast would have spoken
out at once, and at once been crushed. The Everlasting Word
incarnate bided his own time,-"Mine hour is not yet come,"
matured his energies, condensed them by repression; and then
went forth to speak, and do, and suffer. His hour was come.
This is strength: the power of a Divine Silence; the strong will
to keep force till it is wanted; the power to wait God's time.
"He that believeth," said the wise prophet, "shall not make
haste. "
――――
-
## p. 12312 (#358) ##########################################
12312
FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON
THE UNIVERSAL NATURE OF CHRIST
From Sermons Preached in Trinity Chapel'
NOT
JOTHING, in the judgment of historians, stands out so sharply
distinct as race, national character; nothing is more
ineffaceable. The Hebrew was marked from all mankind.
The Roman was perfectly distinct from the Grecian character;
as markedly different as the rough English truthfulness is from
Celtic brilliancy of talent. Now, these peculiar nationalities are
seldom combined. You rarely find the stern old Jewish sense of
holiness going together with the Athenian sensitiveness of what
is beautiful. Not often do you find together severe truth and
refined tenderness. Brilliancy seems opposed to perseverance.
Exquisiteness of taste commonly goes along with a certain amount
of untruthfulness. By "humanity" as a whole, we mean the
aggregate of all these separate excellences. Only in two places
are they all found together,-—in the universal human race and in
Jesus Christ. He, having as it were a whole humanity in him-
self, combines them all.
Now, this is the universality of the nature of Jesus Christ.
There was in him no national peculiarity or individual idiosyn-
crasy. He was not the son of the Jew, nor the son of the car-
penter, nor the offspring of the modes of living and thinking
of that particular century. He was the son of Man. Once in
the world's history was born a MAN. Once in the roll of ages,
out of innumerable failures, from the stock of human nature one
bud developed itself into a faultless flower. One perfect speci-
men of humanity has God exhibited on earth.
The best and most catholic of Englishmen has his prejudices.
All the world over, our greatest writer would be recognized
as having the English cast of thought. The pattern Jew would
seem Jewish everywhere but in Judea. Take Abraham, St. John,
St. Paul, place them where you will,-in China or in Peru,-
they are Hebrews: they could not command all sympathies;
their life could not be imitable except in part. They are foreign-
ers in every land, and out of place in every century, but their
own. But Christ is the king of men, and "draws all men,"
because all character is in him, separate from nationalities and
limitations. As if the life-blood of every nation were in his
## p. 12313 (#359) ##########################################
FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON
12313
veins, and that which is best and truest in every man, and that
which is tenderest and gentlest and purest in every woman, in
his character. He is emphatically the son of Man.
Out of this arose two powers of his sacred humanity,— the
universality of his sympathies, and their intense particular per-
sonality.
The universality of his sympathies: for, compare him with
any one of the sacred characters of Scripture. You know how
intensely national they were-priests, prophets, and apostles-
in their sympathies. For example, the apostles "marveled that
he spake with a woman of Samaria"; just before his resurrec-
tion, their largest charity had not reached beyond this,— “Lord,
wilt thou at this time restore the kingdom unto Israel? » Or
to come down to modern times, when his spirit has been mold-
ing men's ways of thought for many ages: now, when we talk
of our philanthropy and catholic liberality, here in Christian Eng-
land, we have scarcely any fellow-feeling, true and genuine, with
other nations, other churches, other parties, than our own: we
care nothing for Italian or Hungarian struggles; we think of
Romanists as the Jew thought of Gentiles; we speak of Ger-
man Protestants in the same proud, wicked, self-sufficient way in
which the Jew spoke of Samaritans.
Unless we bring such matters home, and away from vague
generalities, and consider what we and all men are, or rather are
not, we cannot comprehend with due wonder the mighty sympa-
thies of the heart of Christ. None of the miserable antipathies.
that fence us from all the world bounded the outgoings of that
Love, broad and deep and wide as the heart of God. Wherever
the mysterious pulse of human life was beating, wherever aught
human was in struggle, there to him was a thing not common or
unclean, but cleansed by God and sacred. Compare the daily,
almost indispensable, language of our life with his spirit. —"Com-
mon people"? point us out the passage where he called any
people that God his Father made, common. - "Lower orders"?
tell us when and where he, whose home was the workshop of
the carpenter, authorized you or me to know any man after the
flesh as low or high. - To him who called himself the Son of
Man, the link was manhood. And that he could discern even
when it was marred. Even in outcasts his eye could recognize
the sanctities of a nature human still. Even in the harlot, "one
of Eve's family; " a son of Abraham even in Zaccheus.
-
## p. 12314 (#360) ##########################################
12314
FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON
Once more, out of that universal, catholic nature rose another
power, the power of intense, particular, personal affections. He
was the brother and savior of the human race; but this because
he was the brother and savior of every separate man in it.
Now, it is very easy to feel great affection for a country as a
whole; to have, for instance, great sympathies for Poland, or Ire-
land, or America, and yet not to care a whit for any single man
in Poland, and to have strong antipathies to every single indi-
vidual American. Easy to be a warm lover of England, and
yet not love one living Englishman. Easy to set a great value
on a flock of sheep, and yet have no particular care for any one
sheep or lamb. If it were killed, another of the same species
might replace it. Easy to have fine, large, liberal views about
the working classes, or the emancipation of the negroes, and yet
never have done a loving act to one. Easy to be a great philan-
thropist, and yet have no strong friendships, no deep personal
attachments.
For the idea of a universal Manlike sympathy was not new
when Christ was born. The reality was new. But before this,
in the Roman theatre, deafening applause was called forth by
this sentence:-"I am a man: nothing that can affect man is
indifferent to me. " A fine sentiment that was all. Every pre-
tense of realizing that sentiment, except one, has been a failure.
One, and but one, has succeeded in loving man and that by
loving men. No sublime high-sounding language in his lips
about educating the masses, or elevating the people. The char-
latanry of our modern sentiment had not appeared then; it is
but the parody of his love.
What was his mode of sympathy with men? He did not sit
down to philosophize about the progress of the species, or dream
about a millennium. He gathered round him twelve men.
verse, though its manifestation is along different lines. In Earth's
Enigmas,' a volume of unique short stories, there is contained some
very subtle work. The scenes of these tales are nearly all laid out
of doors, in Canadian regions with which the author is familiar:
nature is less a background in them than a wild, disturbing element,
a gigantic actor in the scene itself. In two of them, 'The Young
Ravens that Call upon Him,' and 'Strayed,' there is no trace of a
human footstep. The wandering lonely winds of the wilderness are
the very spirit of these stories. In 'The Perdu' and 'The Stone
Dog' there is a certain weird imagination, which seems unlike any-
thing but the strange quality which informs the works of Poe. The
former has a mysterious beauty which impels a re-reading, although
the tale seems nothing in itself. In this entire collection, Mr. Roberts
exhibits a high degree of sensitiveness to nature, although not always
without that mixture of the pathetic fallacy which seems inevitable in
the attitude of the present-day generation towards the natural world.
Mr. Roberts's latest book, "The Forge in the Forest,' is an Aca-
dian romance; being the narrative of the Acadian ranger, Jean de
Mer, Seigneur de Briart. Like his short stories, it is instinct with
the spirit of the wilderness.
## p. 12297 (#343) ##########################################
CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS
12297
•
STRAYED
From 'Earth's Enigmas. Copyright 1895, by Lamson, Wolffe & Co.
N THE Cabineau Camp, of unlucky reputation, there was a
young ox of splendid build, but of a wild and restless nature.
He was one of a yoke, of part Devon blood, large, dark-
red, all muscle and nerve, and with wide magnificent horns. His
yoke-fellow was a docile steady worker, the pride of his owner's
heart; but he himself seemed never to have been more than half
broken in. The woods appeared to draw him by some spell.
He wanted to get back to the pastures where he had roamed un-
trammeled of old with his fellow-steers. The remembrance was
in his heart of the dewy mornings when the herd used to feed
together on the sweet grassy hillocks; and of the clover-smelling
heats of June, when they would gather hock-deep in the pools
under the green willow shadows. He hated the yoke, he hated
the winter; and he imagined that in the wild pastures he remem-
bered, it would be forever summer. If only he could get back
to those pastures!
One day there came the longed-for opportunity; and he seized
it. He was standing unyoked beside his mate, and none of the
teamsters were near. His head went up in the air, and with a
snort of triumph he dashed away through the forest. For a little
while there was a vain pursuit. At last the lumbermen gave it
up. "Let him be! " said his owner, "an' I rayther guess he'll
turn up ag'in when he gets peckish. He kaint browse on spruce.
buds an' lungwort. "
Plunging on with long gallop through the snow, he was soon
miles from camp. Growing weary, he slackened his pace. He
came down to a walk. As the lonely red of the winter sunset
began to stream through the openings of the forest, flushing
the snows of the tiny glades and swales, he grew hungry, and
began to swallow unsatisfying mouthfuls of the long moss which
roughened the tree-trunks. Ere the moon got up he had filled
himself with this fodder, and then he lay down in a little thicket
for the night.
But some miles back from his retreat a bear had chanced
upon his footprints. A strayed steer! That would be an easy
prey. The bear started straightway in pursuit. The moon was
high in heaven when the crouched ox heard his pursuer's ap-
proach. He had no idea what was coming, but he rose to his
feet and waited.
## p. 12298 (#344) ##########################################
12298
CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS
The bear plunged boldly into the thicket, never dreaming of
resistance. With a muffled roar the ox charged upon him, and
bore him to the ground. Then he wheeled, and charged again,
and the astonished bear was beaten at once. Gored by those
keen horns, he had no stomach for further encounter, and would
fain have made his escape; but as he retreated, the ox charged
him again, dashing him against a huge trunk. The bear dragged
himself up with difficulty beyond his opponent's reach; and the
ox turned scornfully back to his lair.
At the first yellow of dawn, the restless creature was again
upon the march. He pulled more mosses by the way; but he
disliked them the more intensely now, because he thought he
must be nearing his ancient pastures, with their tender grass and
their streams. The snow was deeper about him, and his hatred
of the winter grew apace. He came out upon a hillside, partly
open, whence the pine had years before been stripped, and where
now grew young birches thick together. Here he browsed on
the aromatic twigs; but for him it was harsh fare. As his hun-
ger increased he thought a little longingly of the camp he had
deserted; but he dreamed not of turning back. He would keep
on till he reached his pastures, and the glad herd of his com-
rades, licking salt out of the trough beside the accustomed pool.
He had some blind instinct as to his direction, and kept his course
to the south very strictly, the desire in his heart continually lead-
ing him aright.
That afternoon he was attacked by a panther, which dropped
out of a tree and tore his throat. He dashed under a low branch,
and scraped his assailant off; then, wheeling about savagely, put
the brute to flight with his first mad charge. The panther sprang
back into his tree, and the ox continued his quest.
Soon his steps grew weaker; for the panther's cruel claws had
gone deep into his neck, and his path was marked with blood.
Yet the dream in his great wild eyes was not dimmed as his
strength ebbed away. His weakness he never noticed or heeded.
The desire that was urging him absorbed all other thoughts,-
even, almost, his sense of hunger. This however it was easy for
him to assuage, after a fashion; for the long, gray, unnourish-
ing mosses were abundant.
----
By-and-by his path led him into the bed of a stream, whose
waters could be heard faintly tinkling on thin pebbles beneath
their coverlet of ice and snow. His slow steps conducted him
far along this open course. Soon after he had disappeared around
## p. 12299 (#345) ##########################################
CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS
12299
a curve in the distance, there came the panther, following stealth-
ily upon his crimsoned trail. The crafty beast was waiting till
the bleeding and the hunger should do its work, and the object of
its inexorable pursuit should have no more heart left for resist-
ance.
This was late in the afternoon. The ox was now possessed
with his desire, and would not lie down for any rest.
All night
long, through the gleaming silver of the open spaces, through
the weird and checkered gloom of the deep forest, heedless even
of his hunger,- or perhaps driven the more by it as he thought
of the wild clover bunches and tender timothy awaiting him,-
the solitary ox strove on. And all night, lagging far behind in
his unabating caution, the panther followed him.
At sunrise the worn and stumbling animal came out upon the
borders of the great lake, stretching its leagues of unshadowed
snow away to the south before him. There was his path, and
without hesitation he followed it. The wide and frost-bound
water here and there had been swept clear of its snows by the
wind, but for the most part its, covering lay unruffled; and the
pale dove-colors and saffrons and rose-lilacs of the dawn were
sweetly reflected on its surface.
The doomed ox was now journeying very slowly, and with
the greatest labor. He staggered at every step, and his beau-
tiful head drooped almost to the snow. When he had got a
great way out upon the lake, at the forest's edge appeared the
pursuing panther, emerging cautiously from the coverts. The
round tawny face and malignant green eyes were raised to peer
out across the expanse. The laboring progress of the ox was
promptly marked. Dropping its nose again to the ensanguined
snow, the beast resumed his pursuit, first at a slow trot, and then
at a long elastic gallop. By this time the ox's quest was nearly
done. He plunged forward upon his knees, rose again with
difficulty, stood still, and looked around him. His eyes were
clouding over, but he saw dimly the tawny brute that was now
hard upon his steps. Back came a flash of the old courage, and
he turned, horns lowered, to face the attack. With the last of
his strength he charged, and the panther paused irresolutely; but
the wanderer's knees gave way beneath his own impetus, and his
horns plowed the snow. With a deep bellowing groan he rolled
over on his side, and the longing and the dream of the pleasant
pastures faded from his eyes. With a great spring the panther
## p. 12300 (#346) ##########################################
12300
CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS
was upon him, and
knew naught of it.
quered him.
the eager teeth were at his throat,— but he
No wild beast, but his own desire, had con-
When the panther had slaked his thirst for blood, he raised
his head and stood with his fore-paws resting on the dead ox's
side, and gazed all about him.
To one watching from the lake shore, had there been any one
to watch in that solitude, the wild beast and his prey would have
seemed but a speck of black on the gleaming waste. At the
same hour, league upon league back in the depth of the ancient
forest, a lonely ox was lowing in his stanchions, restless, refusing
to eat, grieving for the absence of his yoke-fellow.
THE UNSLEEPING
From 'Book of the Native. ' Copyright 1896, by Lamson, Wolffe & Co.
SOOTHE to unimagined sleep
The sunless bases of the deep;
And then I stir the aching tide
That gropes in its reluctant side.
I heave aloft the smoking hill;
To silent peace its throes I still.
But ever at its heart of fire
I lurk, an unassuaged desire.
I wrap me in the sightless germ
An instant or an endless term;
And still its atoms are my care,
Dispersed in ashes or in air.
I hush the comets one by one
To sleep for ages in the sun;
The sun resumes before my face
His circuit of the shores of space.
The mount, the star, the germ, the deep,
They all shall wake, they all shall sleep.
Time, like a flurry of wild rain,
Shall drip across the darkened pane.
Space in the dim predestined hour
Shall crumble like a ruined tower.
I only, with unfaltering eye,
Shall watch the dreams of God go by.
## p. 12301 (#347) ##########################################
CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS
12301
AN EPITAPH FOR A HUSBANDMAN
From Book of the Native. Copyright 1896, by Lamson, Wolffe & Co.
E WHO Would start and rise
Before the crowing cocks,—
No more he lifts his eyes,
Whoever knocks.
HⓇ
He who before the stars
Would call the cattle home,-
They wait about the bars
For him to come.
Him at whose hearty calls
The farmstead woke again,—
The horses in their stalls
Expect in vain.
Busy and blithe and bold,
He labored for the morrow;
The plow his hands would hold
Rests in the furrow.
His fields he had to leave,
His orchards cool and dim;
The clods he used to cleave
Now cover him.
But the green, growing things
Lean kindly to his sleep; -
White roots and wandering strings,
Closer they creep.
Because he loved them long,
And with them bore his part,
Tenderly now they throng
About his heart.
Β΄
THE LITTLE FIELD OF PEACE
From Book of the Native. ' Copyright 1896, by Lamson, Wolffe & Co.
Y THE long wash of his ancestral sea
He sleeps how quietly!
How quiet the unlifting eyelids lie
Under this tranquil sky!
## p. 12302 (#348) ##########################################
12302
CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS
The little busy hands and restless feet
Here find that rest is sweet; -
-
For, sweetly from the hands grown tired of play
The child-world slips away,
With its confusion of forgotten toys
And kind, familiar noise.
Not lonely does he lie in his last bed,
For love o'erbroods his head.
Kindly to him the comrade grasses lean
Their fellowship of green.
The wilding meadow companies give heed:
Brave tansy, and the weed
That on the dike-top lifts its dauntless stalk,—
Around his couch they talk.
The shadows of the oak-tree flit and play
Above his dreams all day.
The wind that was his playmate on the hills
His sleep with music fills.
Here in this tender acre by the tide
His vanished kin abide.
Ah! what compassionate care for him they keep,
Too soon returned to sleep!
They watch him in this little field of peace
Where they have found release.
Not as a stranger or alone he went
Unto his long content;
But kissed to sleep and comforted lies he
By his ancestral sea.
MARSYAS
From 'Songs of the Common Day. By permission of Mr. Roberts and his
publishers
LITTLE gray hill-glade, close-turfed, withdrawn
Beyond resort or heed of trafficking feet,
Ringed round with slim trunks of the mountain-ash.
Through the slim trunks and scarlet bunches flash
Beneath the clear, chill glitterings of the dawn —
Far off, the crests where down the rosy shore
-
The Pontic surges beat.
The plains lie dim below. The thin airs wash
The circuit of the autumn-colored hills,
A
## p. 12303 (#349) ##########################################
CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS
12303
And this high glade whereon
The satyr pipes, who soon shall pipe no more.
He sits against the beech-tree's mighty bole;
He leans, and with persuasive breathing fills
The happy shadows of the slant-set lawn.
The goat-feet fold beneath a gnarlèd root,
And sweet and sweet the note that steals and thrills
From slender stops of that shy flute.
Then to the goat-feet comes the wide-eyed fawn
Hearkening: the rabbits fringe the glade, and lay
Their long ears to the sound;
In the pale boughs the partridge gather round,
And quaint hern from the sea-green river reeds;
The wild ram halts upon a rocky horn
O'erhanging; and unmindful of his prey,
The leopard steals with narrow lids to lay
His spotted length along the ground.
The thin airs wash, the thin clouds wander by,
And those hushed listeners move not.
He pipes, soft swaying, and with half-shut eye
In rapt content of utterance,—
All the morn
Nor heeds
The young god standing in his branchy place;
The languor on his lips; and in his face
Divinely inaccessible, the scorn.
THE FLIGHT OF THE GEESE
From Songs of the Common Day. By permission of Mr. Roberts and his
publishers
HEAR the long wind wash the softening snow,
I
The low tide loiter down the shore. The night,
Full filled with April forecast, hath no light;
The salt wave on the sedge-flat pulses slow.
Through the hid furrows lisp in murmurous flow
The thaw's shy ministers; and hark! the height
Of heaven grows weird and loud with unseen flight
Of strong hosts prophesying as they go!
High through the drenched and hollow night their wings
Beat northward hard on winter's trail. The sound
Of their confused and solemn voices, borne
Athwart the dark to their long arctic morn,
Comes with a sanction and an awe profound,
A boding of unknown, foreshadowed things.
## p. 12304 (#350) ##########################################
CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS
12304
BESIDE THE WINTER SEA
From Book of the Native. ' Copyright 1896, by Lamson, Wolffe & Co.
S ONE who sleeps and hears across his dream
The cry of battles ended long ago,
Inland I hear the calling of the sea.
I hear its hollow voices, though between
AⓇ
My wind-worn dwelling and thy wave-worn strand
How many miles, how many mountains are!
And thou beside the winter sea alone
Art walking with thy cloak about thy face.
Bleak, bleak the tide, and evening coming on;
And gray the pale, pale light that wans thy face.
Solemnly breaks the long wave at thy feet;
And sullenly in patches clings the snow
Upon the low, red rocks worn round with years.
I see thine eyes, I see their grave desire,
Unsatisfied and lonely as the sea's,-
Yet how unlike the wintry sea's despair!
For could my feet but follow thine, my hands
But reach for thy warm hands beneath thy cloak,
What summer joy would lighten in thy face,
What sunshine warm thy eyes, and thy sad mouth
Break to a dewy rose and laugh on mine!
THE DESERTED CITY
From 'Songs of the Common Day. By permission of Mr. Roberts and his
publishers
HERE lies a little city leagues away;
Its wharves the green sea washes all day long,
Its busy sun-bright wharves with sailor's song
And clamor of trade ring loud the livelong day.
Into the happy harbor hastening gay
With press of snowy canvas, tall ships throng.
The peopled streets to blithe-eyed Peace belong,
Glad housed beneath these crowding roofs of gray.
THER
'Twas long ago the city prospered so;
For yesterday a woman died therein,
Since when the wharves are idle fallen, I know,
And in the streets is hushed the pleasant din;
The thronging ships have been, the songs have been.
Since yesterday it is so long ago.
## p. 12305 (#351) ##########################################
12305
FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON
(1816-1853)
MONG the souls which refused the haven where Newman had
found peace, because they dreamed of longer voyages and
of undiscovered lands, few so suffered in the lonelier seas
of their choice as did Frederick William Robertson. His short intense
life was spent in a spiritual isolation from his fellows, which was
partly the result of temperament, partly of his ability to see clearer
and farther than most men into the mysteries of existence. He never
found home. It seemed, indeed, as if a divine nostalgia drew him
out of the world. He left it still young,
struggling, the questions upon his lips,
the desire in his heart; faring forth into
the lands of God as one who could not mis-
trust the divine Lover, and would fain learn
of himself the meaning of the confused
earthly existence, which had only deepened
his dejection. He was indeed the embodi-
ment of the religious spirit of the end of
the century. He exhibited its most strik-
ing characteristics: its dependence upon
conduct rather than emotion; its glorifi-
cation of morality; its humanism, its hun-
ger for God, hidden under a pantheistic
composure; its adoration of Jesus, as the
one wholly comforting figure in the bleak perspectives of human
history; finally, he held its conception of Christianity as a life, not a
creed. The man who wrote, "The religion of Christ is not a law
but a spirit, not a creed but a life," had felt within him the forces
of a new realization of religion as yet unperceived by his generation.
He suffered in consequence the pangs of those who travail to bring
forth the new which will supplant the old.
His short life of thirty-seven years was lived in a transitional
period of England's spiritual development, when through the pray-
ers of both ritualist and evangelical might be heard strange voices
speaking of strange things,-of a universe emptied of God, of man
without a soul.
XXI-770
F. W. ROBERTSON
## p. 12306 (#352) ##########################################
12306
FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON
Robertson was born in 1816, in London.
His father was a captain
in the Royal Artillery; the boy grew up therefore in the atmosphere
of the military life, and imbibed not a few of its nobler ideals. Until
he was five years old he was at Leith Fort, where his father was
stationed. In 1821 the latter retired to Beverley; there Robertson
attended the grammar school, going later to Tours for the sake of
learning the French tongue. After a year he returned home, contin-
uing his education at the Edinburgh Academy and then at the Uni-
versity. His elevation of character, his nobility of mind, led to a
proposal from his father that he should enter the church; but he re-
fused on the ground of his unworthiness. At the age of eighteen he
was articled to a solicitor in Bury St. Edmunds; but a year's study
so undermined his health that he was obliged to give up the project
of studying the law. His name was then entered on the list of the
3d Dragoons. He spent two years in preparation for military service;
but on the eve of receiving his commission, in 1837, he matriculated
at Brasenose College, Oxford. There he read extensively, coming
under the influence of Plato and Aristotle, of Butler and Jonathan
Edwards. With the Tractarian movement he seems to have had
little sympathy, his temper at that stage of his development being
evangelical. He was being drawn gradually into the church: in July
1840, he was ordained by the Bishop of Winchester, and immediately
entered upon ministerial work in that place. His enthusiasm led
him, however, into excesses of self-denial and of religious exercises,
so that his health being undermined, he was obliged to go abroad
within a year.
It was during his sojourn in Switzerland that he met and married
Helen, third daughter of Sir George William Denys. Upon his return
to England in 1842 he accepted the curacy of Cheltenham, where he
remained for four years; a period of great importance in his life, for
his religious views were gradually undergoing a radical change. Of
a temperament characterized by its reasonableness and by its sen-
sitiveness to reality, what he considered the extravagance and the
cant of the extreme evangelical party filled him with repugnance.
Moreover he had come under the influence of Carlyle and Emerson,
and was beginning to think that dogma occupied too large a place
in religion. He himself was too much of a man of the world in the
best sense, to remain long fettered by what he believed to be pro-
vincial in a church party. He cut loose therefore from his moorings,
and ventured out upon that sea which stretches beyond the limits
of the world. At first he was to encounter only night and the terror
of the unknown.
"It is an awful moment," he writes, "when the soul begins to find that the
props on which it has blindly rested so long are many of them rotten, and
## p. 12307 (#353) ##########################################
FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON
12307
begins to suspect them all; when it begins to feel the nothingness of many of
the traditionary opinions which have been received with implicit confidence, and
in that horrible insecurity begins also to doubt whether there be anything to
believe at all. It is an awful hour-let him who has passed through it say
how awful - when this life has lost its meaning, and seems shriveled into a
span; when the grave appears to be the end of all, human goodness nothing
but a name, and the sky above this universe a dead expanse, black with the
void from which God himself has disappeared.
I know of but one
way in which a man may come forth from his agony scathless; it is by hold-
ing fast to those things which are certain still,- the grand, simple landmarks
of morality. If there be no God and no future state, yet even then it is bet-
ter to be generous than selfish, better to be chaste than licentious, better to be
true than false, better to be brave than a coward. »
Like many other noble spirits of the time, he found in right con-
duct, in the keeping of the commandments, that "upon which his soul
might assuredly rest and depend"; despite the suffering incident upon
his growth, he entered through this new hope into a conception of
Christianity as being primarily not a theological system but a life,
not a religion of emotion but one of principle. He believed that
under this aspect of it only could it become a universal religion,
making its appeal not to the changing intellect but to the eternal
conscience of the race.
―――
These new phases in Robertson's development led to his giving up
the curacy of Cheltenham, and after a short residence abroad, and
a few subsequent months at Oxford - to entrance upon his famous min-
istry at Trinity Chapel, Brighton. There he preached sermons which
attracted the attention of all England, and there he endeavored to
realize his new conception of Christianity, which seemed little short
of heretical to his generation. He founded a workingman's institute,
and was called a socialist; he preached the religion of holiness, and
was accused of heresy: yet his sermons seem wholly reasonable and
beautiful to this generation. They exhibit a remarkable clearness of
spiritual insight, profound knowledge of human nature, and a sweet-
ness, born of strength, most winning in its warm humanity. Never-
theless his teachings were misunderstood; in obscure ways he was
persecuted. His sensitive spirit, which could expand only in the at-
mosphere of sympathy, drew into itself in pain. He suffered likewise
from religious doubt and terror. He had chosen the eternal rather
than the finite; but its vastness struck a chill to a nature made for
the uses of love, for the intimacy and definiteness of affection.
He died on the 15th of August, 1853, knowing that his unfinished
life could be completed only in the lives of his spiritual children,
breathing the air of a time more friendly to a wider interpretation
of the gospel.
## p. 12308 (#354) ##########################################
12308
FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON
THE EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF CHRIST
From Sermons Preached in Trinity Chapel'
IN
N THE case of all rare excellence that is merely human, it is the
first object of the biographer of a marvelous man to seek for
surprising stories of his early life. The appetite for the mar-
velous in this matter is almost instinctive and invariable. All
men, almost, love to discover the early wonders which were pro-
phetic of after greatness. Apparently the reason is that we
are unwilling to believe that wondrous excellence was attained by
slow, patient labor. We get an excuse for our own slowness and
stunted growth, by settling it, once for all, that the original dif-
ferences between such men and us were immeasurable. There-
fore it is, I conceive, that we seek so eagerly for anecdotes of
early precocity.
In this spirit the fathers of the primitive Church collected
legends of the early life of Christ, stories of superhuman infancy,
what the Infant and the Child said and did. Many of these
legends are absurd; all, as resting on no authority, are rejected.
Very different from this is the spirit of the Bible narra-
tive. It records no marvelous stories of infantine sagacity or
miraculous power, to feed a prurient curiosity. Both in what
it tells and in what it does not tell, one thing is plain, that the
human life of the Son of God was natural. There was first the
blade, then the ear, then the full corn. In what it does not
say; because, had there been anything preternatural to record,
no doubt it would have been recorded. In what it does say; be-
cause that little is all unaffectedly simple. One anecdote, and two
verses of general description,- that is all which is told us of the
Redeemer's childhood.
-
The child, it is written, grew. Two pregnant facts: He was
a child, and a child that grew in heart, in intellect, in size, in
grace, in favor with God. Not a man in child's years. No hot-
bed precocity marked the holiest of infancies. The Son of Man
grew up in the quiet valley of existence,-in shadow, not in sun-
shine,—not forced. No unnatural, stimulating culture had devel-
oped the mind or feelings; no public flattery, no sunning of
infantine perfections in the glare of the world's show, had brought
the Temptation of the Wilderness, with which his manhood grap-
pled, too early on his soul. We know that he was childlike, as
## p. 12309 (#355) ##########################################
FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON
12309
other children; for in after years his brethren thought his fame
strange, and his townsmen rejected him. They could not be-
lieve that that one who had gone in and out, ate and drank and
worked, was He whose Name is Wonderful. The proverb, true
of others, was true of him: "A prophet is not without honor
but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own
house. " You know him in a picture at once, by the halo round
his brow: there was no glory in his real life to mark him. He
was in the world, and the world knew him not. Gradually and
gently he woke to consciousness of life and its manifold mean-
ing; found himself in possession of a self; by degrees opened his
eyes upon this outer world, and drank in its beauty. Early he
felt the lily of the field discourse to him of the Invisible Love-
liness, and the ravens tell of God his Father. Gradually, and not
at once, he embraced the sphere of human duties, and woke to
his earthly relationships one by one,-the Son, the Brother, the
Citizen, the Master.
It is a very deep and beautiful and precious truth that the
Eternal Son had a human and progressive childhood. Happy the
Ichild who is suffered to be and content to be what God meant
it to be, a child while childhood lasts. Happy the parent who
does not force artificial manners, precocious feeling, premature
religion. Our age is one of stimulus and high pressure. We live,
as it were, our lives out fast. Effect is everything,— results
produced at once; something to show and something that may
tell. The folio of patient years is replaced by the pamphlet
that stirs men's curiosity to-day, and to-morrow is forgotten.
"Plain living and high thinking" are no more. The town with
its fever and its excitements, and its collision of mind with mind,
has spread over the country; and there is no country-scarcely
home. To men who traverse England in a few hours, and spend
only a portion of the year in one place, "home" is becoming a
vocable of past ages. The result is that heart and brain, which
were given to last for seventy years, wear out before their time.
We have our exhausted men of twenty-five, and our old men of
forty. Heart and brain give way: the heart hardens and the
brain grows soft.
Brethren, the Son of God lived till thirty in an obscure vil-
lage of Judea unknown, then came forth a matured and perfect
Man,—with mind, and heart, and frame, in perfect balance of
humanity. It is a divine lesson! I would I could say as strongly
## p. 12310 (#356) ##########################################
12310
FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON
as I feel deeply. Our stimulating artificial culture destroys depth.
Our competition, our nights turned into days by pleasure, leave
no time for earnestness. We are superficial men. Character in
the world wants root. England has gained much; she has lost
also much. The world wants what has passed away (and which
until we secure, we shall remain the clever, shallow men we are),
a childhood and a youth spent in shade a home.
Now, this growth took place in three particulars.
I. In spiritual strength. "The child waxed strong in spirit. "
Spiritual strength consists of two things,-power of will, and
power of self-restraint. It requires two things, therefore, for its
existence, strong feelings, and strong command over them.
Now it is here we make a great mistake: we mistake strong
feelings for strong character. A man who bears all before him,—
before whose frown domestics tremble, and whose bursts of fury
make the children of the house quake,- because he has his will
obeyed, and his own way in all things, we call him a strong man.
The truth is, that is the weak man: it is his passions that are
strong; he, mastered by them, is weak. You must measure the
strength of a man by the power of the feelings which he subdues,
not by the power of those which subdue him.
And hence composure is very often the highest result of
strength. Did we never see a man receive a flagrant insult, and
only grow a little pale, and then reply quietly? That was a man
spiritually strong. Or did we never see a man in anguish stand
as if carved out of solid rock, mastering himself? or one bear-
ing a hopeless daily trial, remain silent, and never tell the world
what it was that cankered his home peace? That is strength.
He who with strong passions remains chaste,—he who, keenly
sensitive, with manly power of indignation in him, can be pro-
voked and yet refrain himself and forgive,- these are strong
men, spiritual heroes.
-
The child waxed strong: spiritual strength is reached by
successive steps. Fresh strength is got by every mastery of self.
It is the belief of the savage that the spirit of every enemy he
slays enters into him and becomes added to his own, accumu-
lating a warrior's strength for the day of battle; therefore he
slays all he can. It is true in the spiritual warfare. Every sin
you slay, the spirit of that sin passes into you transformed into
strength; every passion, not merely kept in abeyance by asceti-
cism, but subdued by a higher impulse, is so much character
## p. 12311 (#357) ##########################################
FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON
12311
strengthened. The strength of the passion not expended is yours.
still. Understand, then, you are not a man of spiritual power
because your impulses are irresistible. They sweep over your
soul like a tornado,-lay all flat before them,-whereupon you
feel a secret pride of strength. Last week, men saw a vessel
on this coast borne headlong on the breakers, and dashing itself
with terrific force against the shore. It embedded itself, a mis-
erable wreck, deep in sand and shingle. Was that brig, in her
convulsive throes, strong? or was it powerless and helpless?
No, my brethren: God's spirit in the soul,—an inward power
of doing the same thing we will and ought,- that is strength,
nothing else. All other force in us is only our weakness,— the
violence of driving passion. "I can do all things through Christ,
who strengtheneth me," - that is Christian strength. "I cannot
do the things I would," - that is the weakness of an unredeemed
slave.
I instance one single evidence of strength in the early years
of Jesus: I find it in that calm, long waiting of thirty years be-
fore he began his work. And yet all the evils he was to redress
were there, provoking indignation, crying for interference,-the
hollowness of social life, the misinterpretations of Scripture, the
forms of worship and phraseology which had hidden moral truth,
the injustice, the priestcraft, the cowardice, the hypocrisies: he
had long seen them all.
All those years his soul burned within him with a divine
zeal and heavenly indignation. A mere man-a weak, emotional
man of spasmodic feeling, a hot enthusiast would have spoken
out at once, and at once been crushed. The Everlasting Word
incarnate bided his own time,-"Mine hour is not yet come,"
matured his energies, condensed them by repression; and then
went forth to speak, and do, and suffer. His hour was come.
This is strength: the power of a Divine Silence; the strong will
to keep force till it is wanted; the power to wait God's time.
"He that believeth," said the wise prophet, "shall not make
haste. "
――――
-
## p. 12312 (#358) ##########################################
12312
FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON
THE UNIVERSAL NATURE OF CHRIST
From Sermons Preached in Trinity Chapel'
NOT
JOTHING, in the judgment of historians, stands out so sharply
distinct as race, national character; nothing is more
ineffaceable. The Hebrew was marked from all mankind.
The Roman was perfectly distinct from the Grecian character;
as markedly different as the rough English truthfulness is from
Celtic brilliancy of talent. Now, these peculiar nationalities are
seldom combined. You rarely find the stern old Jewish sense of
holiness going together with the Athenian sensitiveness of what
is beautiful. Not often do you find together severe truth and
refined tenderness. Brilliancy seems opposed to perseverance.
Exquisiteness of taste commonly goes along with a certain amount
of untruthfulness. By "humanity" as a whole, we mean the
aggregate of all these separate excellences. Only in two places
are they all found together,-—in the universal human race and in
Jesus Christ. He, having as it were a whole humanity in him-
self, combines them all.
Now, this is the universality of the nature of Jesus Christ.
There was in him no national peculiarity or individual idiosyn-
crasy. He was not the son of the Jew, nor the son of the car-
penter, nor the offspring of the modes of living and thinking
of that particular century. He was the son of Man. Once in
the world's history was born a MAN. Once in the roll of ages,
out of innumerable failures, from the stock of human nature one
bud developed itself into a faultless flower. One perfect speci-
men of humanity has God exhibited on earth.
The best and most catholic of Englishmen has his prejudices.
All the world over, our greatest writer would be recognized
as having the English cast of thought. The pattern Jew would
seem Jewish everywhere but in Judea. Take Abraham, St. John,
St. Paul, place them where you will,-in China or in Peru,-
they are Hebrews: they could not command all sympathies;
their life could not be imitable except in part. They are foreign-
ers in every land, and out of place in every century, but their
own. But Christ is the king of men, and "draws all men,"
because all character is in him, separate from nationalities and
limitations. As if the life-blood of every nation were in his
## p. 12313 (#359) ##########################################
FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON
12313
veins, and that which is best and truest in every man, and that
which is tenderest and gentlest and purest in every woman, in
his character. He is emphatically the son of Man.
Out of this arose two powers of his sacred humanity,— the
universality of his sympathies, and their intense particular per-
sonality.
The universality of his sympathies: for, compare him with
any one of the sacred characters of Scripture. You know how
intensely national they were-priests, prophets, and apostles-
in their sympathies. For example, the apostles "marveled that
he spake with a woman of Samaria"; just before his resurrec-
tion, their largest charity had not reached beyond this,— “Lord,
wilt thou at this time restore the kingdom unto Israel? » Or
to come down to modern times, when his spirit has been mold-
ing men's ways of thought for many ages: now, when we talk
of our philanthropy and catholic liberality, here in Christian Eng-
land, we have scarcely any fellow-feeling, true and genuine, with
other nations, other churches, other parties, than our own: we
care nothing for Italian or Hungarian struggles; we think of
Romanists as the Jew thought of Gentiles; we speak of Ger-
man Protestants in the same proud, wicked, self-sufficient way in
which the Jew spoke of Samaritans.
Unless we bring such matters home, and away from vague
generalities, and consider what we and all men are, or rather are
not, we cannot comprehend with due wonder the mighty sympa-
thies of the heart of Christ. None of the miserable antipathies.
that fence us from all the world bounded the outgoings of that
Love, broad and deep and wide as the heart of God. Wherever
the mysterious pulse of human life was beating, wherever aught
human was in struggle, there to him was a thing not common or
unclean, but cleansed by God and sacred. Compare the daily,
almost indispensable, language of our life with his spirit. —"Com-
mon people"? point us out the passage where he called any
people that God his Father made, common. - "Lower orders"?
tell us when and where he, whose home was the workshop of
the carpenter, authorized you or me to know any man after the
flesh as low or high. - To him who called himself the Son of
Man, the link was manhood. And that he could discern even
when it was marred. Even in outcasts his eye could recognize
the sanctities of a nature human still. Even in the harlot, "one
of Eve's family; " a son of Abraham even in Zaccheus.
-
## p. 12314 (#360) ##########################################
12314
FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON
Once more, out of that universal, catholic nature rose another
power, the power of intense, particular, personal affections. He
was the brother and savior of the human race; but this because
he was the brother and savior of every separate man in it.
Now, it is very easy to feel great affection for a country as a
whole; to have, for instance, great sympathies for Poland, or Ire-
land, or America, and yet not to care a whit for any single man
in Poland, and to have strong antipathies to every single indi-
vidual American. Easy to be a warm lover of England, and
yet not love one living Englishman. Easy to set a great value
on a flock of sheep, and yet have no particular care for any one
sheep or lamb. If it were killed, another of the same species
might replace it. Easy to have fine, large, liberal views about
the working classes, or the emancipation of the negroes, and yet
never have done a loving act to one. Easy to be a great philan-
thropist, and yet have no strong friendships, no deep personal
attachments.
For the idea of a universal Manlike sympathy was not new
when Christ was born. The reality was new. But before this,
in the Roman theatre, deafening applause was called forth by
this sentence:-"I am a man: nothing that can affect man is
indifferent to me. " A fine sentiment that was all. Every pre-
tense of realizing that sentiment, except one, has been a failure.
One, and but one, has succeeded in loving man and that by
loving men. No sublime high-sounding language in his lips
about educating the masses, or elevating the people. The char-
latanry of our modern sentiment had not appeared then; it is
but the parody of his love.
What was his mode of sympathy with men? He did not sit
down to philosophize about the progress of the species, or dream
about a millennium. He gathered round him twelve men.
