George MacDonald - Thomas Wingfold, Curate

Polwarth laughed, but with a certain seriousness in his merriment, which however took nothing from its genuineness, indeed seemed rather to add thereto.

“It would hardly be needful to enter so fully into particulars,” he said. “It would be enough to let them know that you wished it understood between them and you, that you did not profess to teach them anything of yourself, but merely to bring to bear upon them the teaching of others. It would raise complaints and objections, doubtless; but for that you must be prepared if you would do anything right.”

Wingfold was silent, thoughtful, saying to himself—“How straight an honest bow can shoot!—But this involves something awful. To stand up in that pulpit and speak about myself! I who, even if I had any opinions, could never see reason for presenting them to other people! It’s my office, is it—not me? Then I wish my Office would write his own sermons. He can read the prayers well enough!”

All his life, a little heave of pent-up humour would now and then shake his burden into a more comfortable position upon his bending shoulders. He gave a forlorn laugh.

“But,” resumed the small man, “have you never preached a sermon of your own thinking—I don’t mean of your own making—one that came out of the commentaries, which are, I am told, the mines whither some of our most noted preachers go to dig for their first inspirations—but one that came out of your own heart—your delight in something you had found out, or something you felt much?”

“No,” answered Wingfold; “I have nothing, never had anything worth giving to another; and it would seem to me very unreasonable to subject a helpless congregation to the blundering attempts of such a fellow to put into the forms of reasonable speech things he really knows nothing about.”

“You must know about some things which it might do them good to be reminded of—even if they know them already,” said Polwarth. “I cannot imagine that a man who looks things in the face as you do, the moment they confront you, has not lived at all, has never met with anything in his history which has taught him something other people need to be taught. I profess myself a believer in preaching, and consider that in so far as the church of England has ceased to be a preaching church—and I don’t call nine-tenths of what goes by the name of it PREACHING—she has forgotten a mighty part of her high calling. Of course a man to whom no message has been personally given, has no right to take the place of a prophet—and cannot, save by more or less of simulation—but there is room for teachers as well as prophets, and the more need of teachers that the prophets are so few; and a man may right honestly be a clergyman who teaches the people, though he may possess none of the gifts of prophecy.”

“I do not now see well how you are leading me,” said Wingfold, considerably astonished at both the aptness and fluency with which a man in his host’s position was able to express himself. “Pray, what do you mean by PROPHECY?”

“I mean what I take to be the sense in which St. Paul uses the word—I mean the highest kind of preaching. But I will come to the point practically: a man, I say, who does not feel in his soul that he has something to tell his people, should straightway turn his energy to the providing of such food for them as he finds feed himself. In other words, if he has nothing new in his own treasure, let him bring something old out of another man’s. If his own soul is unfed, he can hardly be expected to find food for other people, and has no business in any pulpit, but ought to betake himself to some other employment—whatever he may have been predestined to—I mean, made fit for.”

“Then do you intend that a man SHOULD make up his sermons from the books he reads?”

“Yes, if he cannot do better. But then I would have him read—not with his sermon in his eye, but with his people in his heart. Men in business and professions have so little time for reading or thinking—and idle people have still less—that their means of grace, as the theologians say, are confined to discipline without nourishment, whence their religion, if they have any, is often from mere atrophy but a skeleton; and the office of preaching is, after all, to wake them up lest their sleep turn to death; next, to make them hungry, and lastly, to supply that hunger; and for all these things, the pastor has to take thought. If he feed not the flock of God, then is he an hireling and no shepherd.”

At this moment, Rachel entered with a small tea-tray: she could carry only little things, and a few at a time. She cast a glance of almost loving solicitude at the young man who now sat before her uncle with head bowed, and self-abasement on his honest countenance, then a look almost of expostulation at her uncle, as if interceding for a culprit, and begging the master not to be too hard upon him. But the little man smiled—such a sweet smile of re-assurance, that her face returned at once to its prevailing expression of content. She cleared a place on the table, set down her tray, and went to bring cups and saucers.

“I think I understand you now,” said Wingfold, after the little pause occasioned by the young woman’s entrance. “You would have a man who cannot be original, deal honestly in second-hand goods. Or perhaps rather, he should say to the congregation—‘This is not home-made bread I offer you, but something better. I got it from this or that baker’s shop. I have eaten of it myself, and it has agreed well with me and done me good. If you chew it well, I don’t doubt you also will find it good.’—Is that something like what you would have, Mr. Polwarth?”

“Precisely,” answered the gate-keeper. “But,” he added, after a moment’s delay, “I should be sorry if you stopped there.”

“Stopped there!” echoed Wingfold. “The question is whether I can begin there. You have no idea how ignorant I am—how little I have read!”

“I have some idea of both, I fancy. I must have known considerably less than you at your age, for I was never at a university.”

“But perhaps even then you had more of the knowledge which, they say, life only can give.”

“I have it now at all events. But of that everyone has enough who lives his life. Those who gain no experience are those who shirk the king’s highway, for fear of encountering the Duty seated by the roadside.”

“You ought to be a clergyman yourself, sir,” said Wingfold, humbly. “How is it that such as I–”

Here he checked himself, knowing something of how it was.

“I hope I ought to be just what I am, neither more nor less,” replied Polwarth. “As to being a clergyman, Moses had a better idea about such things, at least so far as concerns outsides, than you seem to have, Mr. Wingfold. He would never have let a man who in size and shape is a mere mockery of the human, stand up to minister to the congregation. But if you will let me help you, I shall be most grateful; for of late I have been oppressed with the thought that I serve no one but myself and my niece. I am in mortal fear of growing selfish under the weight of my privileges.”

A fit of asthmatic coughing seized him, and grew in severity until he seemed struggling for his life. It was at the worst when his niece entered, but she showed no alarm, only concern, and did nothing but go up to him and lay her hand on his back between his shoulders till the fit was over. The instant the convulsion ceased, its pain dissolved in a smile.

Wingfold uttered some lame expressions of regret that he should suffer so much.

“It is really nothing to distress you, or me either, Mr. Wingfold,” said the little man. “Shall we have a cup of tea, and then resume our talk?”