The Works Alexander Brown Bell

A dark, low room, with ceiling cob-web hung,

Floor leather-strewn, the black of age on all--

Woodwork and stone. One window, three feet square;

And by it, on a low seat, all day long

A man works called John Struthers, shoemaker.

The sunlight through the casement falls aslant,

His bald broad head; the salt air gently plays

With one scant wisp of silver hair that sweeps

Atop the ample forehead, like white foam

Upon the breaker's crest beyond the bar

Just sighted from the doorway; while his eyes,

A moment raised from off his work, gleam bright

Upon the world with all their honest blue.

A mellow, thoughtful face, with one sad touch

Of pain that lurks and quivers round the mouth--

As if a time of tears had been and passed--

Ripples with welcome as it sees me stand

Framed in the narrow doorway; and a shout

Of hearty greeting bids me come and sit

Within, beside him, on a vacant stool.

I know the man of old. His shoulders stoop

With bending o'er his last; but his mind stands

Erect and free; and many a time I've talked

With him on matters deep and high, and gleaned

Ripe store of wisdom from his quaint fresh way

Of stating cases; for we student folk

Let our thoughts run in ruts until their way's

Familiar--grows a beaten track, indeed--

See nought of vistas other side the hedge;

And road-dust in our nostrils stifles out

The smell of odorous pinewoods far away.

First, I must tell him all the news from town;

What party's upmost in the State, and how;

What new book's ta'en the public taste by storm;

What men are coming to the front, what fallen.

Next,of my studies; and he makes me quote

A line of Greek to let him hear the sound--

It's like the sea out yonder, so he says--

And Horace--whom he thinks a shallow fool--

And Plato--whom he honours as a man

Who wrestled with the problems of the world,

Like Jacob with the angel, till he wrung

His blessing from their terror.

So the time

Speeds, and I'm free to catechise in turn.

And then he tells me of his neighbour's cat,

And how his Dorking hen has ceased to lay,

And how his farmer-landlord lost a calf,

And how the got match went on Tuesday week,

And how--but here I touched another string,

Asked after an old playmate--a glad girl

With sunny eyes, and laughing lips, and cheeks

Where summer stood eternal, golden hair

Richer than Jason's fleece, and voice so sweet

The very throstles hushed to hear her sing.

"A mere chit of a girl, she was," I cried,

"When last I saw her. Years have passed since then.

Elsie must be a woman. Is she well?”

But he was silent; and I prattled on,

Till by and by the tragedy leaked out:

An old, old story--almost quite as old

As that first story whispered in Eve's ears

In Paradise, and quite, yes, quite as old

As that the serpent's honied tongue out-poured.

She'd loved less wisely than she might; too well

For her just neighbours; and one night, so it seemed,

With chill fear at her heart, devouring shame

Across her path, she'd crept to the pier's end,

And given all her misery to the sea.

“So one girl's lost and one man's damned," I cried,

When John had finished.

“Neither lost nor damned,

As I know yet," he answered with a strange,

Brief, flickering smile about his mouth,

Not of derision, but of tenderest pity,

And of serenest hope.

A blasting scorn

Burned on my tongue's end, ready to flash forth,

And cover round, with words of flaming hate,

The wretch who lived, her blood upon his head,

But that strange look upon the old man's face

Damped out the fire, and left me dumb.

“I doubt,"

He said, "I cannot tell you what I mean,

Being no scholar; but I'll try. You see

This Leather on my lapstone here, I beat

With hammer into hardness? Were it lead

That lay before me, I could beat it out

Into what shape pleased; but, being leather,

Not lead--well, hammer's not the tool for such.

So, when I try to beat my thoughts to shape,

I find them like the leather, not the lead.

Yet, an' I may but hammer for a bit,

And not offend, it's joy for me to do it.

"You parsons--please excuse me; but perhaps

You'll be more wise than most when you're full-fledged--

Aye blame for all the evil in the world

Him you call God, I call The Eternal Power--

The 'Not Ourselves’, to quote the phrase of one

You parson's like not. How with an honest heart

To such a God can man true worship pay?

God is all love,you say; yet when is aught

That's evil found within a city's walls

And not at God's door laid? Is't pestilence,

Or plague, or earthquake shock, or lightning flash

That scorches flesh to cinder in its path,

Or but a dead mouse in a muddy well

Making the waters stink?--“'tis God, all God.

Does God lay open sewers in the streets?

Does God build houses without lightning-rods?

Is't God who makes your drinking water foul,

Or want of scavenging? Judgments and trials,

God-sent, you call such things. Ye fools and blind.

‘Tis man that makes the evil in the world.

‘Tis man that works the sorrow and the sin.

The fewer and the famine in the slums

Where the poor starve that middlemen may dine--

Man's work again, all man’s. Take from the world

All evil can be traced to man as source--

How much remains? Believe me, not enough

To burden a flea's back. What blasphemy

For man to blame the God who made all good

For what he's made all evil.

“Mark the truth.

God sits aloft in heaven, serene and sure--

The Eternal Power that makes for Righteousness--

And views His earth here marred by you and me;

Then steps He into it, like wrestler to a ring,

To wrestle with the evil we have made,

And turn it from its dark and hell-bound course.

What you and I'd find leather, He finds lead;

And on His earth, as lapstone, beats to shape--

Shapes to His end--that's Righteousness and Joy--

All evil and all sorrow, ay, all sin,

Even sins we sin against our very soul."

“A pleasant gospel, truly, for the man

Who ruined her, that man may sin, and sin,

And find each sin turn blessing at the last.

But for the girl--? Was her fall righteousness?

Was her shame joy? Was that last perilous leap

Through air and water to the world to come

A thing the Eternal Power you worship made for?"

I cried, heart-stung by the man's dastard deed.

The old man smiled. "Nay, that I never said,

But that the man was damned, and the girl lost,

I doubted. I believe the All-lowing God

Loves Love too well to think of smiting love

Because for true love's sake it gives more love

Than is love's due. The girl was no light chit

That spread her charms obtrusive in his face

To tempt with wanton curve of breast or lip.

Her sin was that she trusted over-much,

Loved over-much; and where a lesser love--

Enough of this, lest I seem to make light

Of her sad fault, though such a fault it was

As had more virtue in't than many a deed

Of virtue men reward with gold, not mire,

With fame, not shame, with honour, not despite.

Still, at the best, ‘twas fault in her. She sinned,

And she must suffer. Was it such a sin

As doomed her to eternity of flame?

There is a Hell. I've been there: so I know.

But it's a Hell doth straightly hedge us in

In all our ways, gapes ever by our side

With ready mouth to gulp the sinner down

To quenchless fire. Its never-dying worm

Sits here"--striking his breast--“It pierces through

Both flesh and spirit till it sits within

Enthroned, and ever when our life's most fair,

And the heart leaps with triumph, it bestirs

Its damned crest, and fixes poisoned fang

Deep in the vitals of our very soul,

Think you she knew no Hell those weary weeks

After he left? What torture of the damned

E'er dreamt by Calvinist could equal that

She felt through all those slowly ebbing months

As every guilty throb beneath her heart

Told of the shame before her? I have marked

Her altered gait, her cheeks grown pale and thin,

Eyes sunken-bright, each quiver of the lip

A cry for pity, till my heart rose up,

And, had I but encountered with that man,

I could have rent from out his lecherous breast

His living heart with hands compunctionless,

As if I'd merely thrawn a chicken's neck.

And ,think you, if in me who am but mortal,

Finite in love and in perception too,

Her peril raised such pity, that the God

Whose love is infinite, who knows each thought--

The love that led to sin, the pain sin brought,

And penitence that followed after pain--

Shall be less merciful than I, mere man,

With all a man's blunt heart? No, I believe

That through her sin and sorrow God worked out

Some great end that we see not—unachieved,

Perhaps, without the sin and sorrow. She's not lost,

Believe me--neither body, life, nor soul,

Though you ne'er meant the last.

“Now, take the man,

He's damned, you say. Perhaps; I cannot tell.

I know he's sinned, and brought his hell on him

In callousness of heart, in vision dimmed

To the great sight of God here in the world.

What is this earth, that ocean, but a veil

Before God's face lest His too-radiant eyes

Break forth, and blast us with excess of beauty?

The meanest flower we tread on in the fields

Is God incarnate. All men--you and I--

Carry His image in us. Is't no Hell

To have our eyes shut to the sight of Him,

To catch no glimmer of the heavenly vision,

To hear no whisper of the heavenly song,

To view the earth but as a soulless clod?

Is't less Hell that its inmates feel it not?

Thank God! I'd rather bear--yea, ten times o'er--

The Hell I know of, than be so dead to all

The Godhead and the glory in the world

As not to feel the pains of Hell, just live

To eat, and sleep, and stumble to the grave.

We cannot win to Heaven except through Hell.

“Yet even that tempter with his soul's eye shut

Can work no evil in this world of God's

God cannot change to good, save evil done

To his own soul; and even that, if he

But with an honest heart will cease to thwart

Wi' his ill the good God's purposed for the world,

God can work round, and make it bless him yet."

“A cheerful creed." I ventured.

John replied,

"A creed there's reason in, as well as cheer.

For, think you, If God makes for righteousness--

And, if He do not, He's no God at all:

The best in man can't worship less than that--

Will He from is eternal purpose turn

From paltry you or me? Let's do our worst;

Yet good will triumph o'er us in the end,

And all the ill we, foolish, thought to do

Prove blessing in the lives we meant to blast.

Only, for us, each sin seals up a door

Whereby God entered, and the soul grows dark

And dry. Let us cease seek our private aims,

Launch out into the current of God's thought,

With our small might row with it to its goal--

What can withstand us when we work with God?”

But then I told him of a city's poor;

How famished men stood shivering in the streets;

How women killed their babes to buy them bread;

How babes turned from dry breasts to cry to God;

Yet no voice spake from Heaven, and aye more fierce

The grinding seemed of human flesh and blood

In Mammon's mill, and righteousness, I feared,

Was far away. Did there come good from that?

"That. evil's man's, not God's," John said.

"yet even from nation's shame God brings forth good,

Though not a good to joy in. Just as Christ

Was crucified by pride, yet in His death

Brought life to men, the poor, by daily death,

Work out the nation's life. They are the Christs

Whose agony and bloody sweat purchase

Our ease. They, guiltless, expiate our sins,

And, by the squalid horror of their lives,

Bring riches, grace, and art, to deck the homes

Of the undeserving few. How dare men stand

And see such sacrifice, and not cry ‘Hold’

And immolate themselves?

"For these same poor,

(Right being the end of all) I doubt not God

Will recompense them, each in his degree,

With honour and dominion, even as Christ

Sits there at God's right hand. And I am sure

God marks us well who idly let them die,

Nor stir a hair to save them. God marks His Christs,

And will not see the meanest of them scorned,

And scatheless leave the scorner.

"Righteousness

Is all. From that I start, with that I end;

And, knowing that, I know that purposeless

God dare not let a sparrow fall, or worm

Be cloven in vain. Yet sorrow's sorrow still,

And sin is sin, pain's pain, and death is death;

And this quick flesh shrinks quivering from the thought.

And sometimes, as I think on all the wrong

Man works light-hearted under God's blue sky,

My heart brims up with tears, and I would fain

See God unpack His soul with cloud and fire

And shake men with the shadow of His wrath

Fill vied Raid teens to His holy feet.

"O Thou Eternal One in Heaven that sit'st,

Not breathless with the adoration of Thy saints,

But working out with energy divine,

And calm assurance of almighty power,

The good Thou purposedst from endless time,

Building even flaws and frets of petty man

Into the beauty of Thy universe.

Come. Sweep the chaff from off Thy threshing-floor,

Banish all vileness from this world of ours,

Purge all the evil from this heart of mine,

And make it pure and perfect as Thine own."

The old man ceased; and, as he ceased, a ray

Of evening sunshine fell upon his face,

And lit it up as with a smile from Heaven.

I bowed my head.