The Way of All Flesh Samuel Butler (book club recommendations .TXT) 📖

if God is the Lord follow Him; only be strong and of a good courage, and He will never leave you nor forsake you. Remember, there is not in the Bible one law for the rich, and one for the poor⁠—one for the educated and one for the ignorant. To all there is but one thing needful. All are to be living to God and their fellow-creatures, and not to themselves. All must seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness⁠—must deny themselves, be pure and chaste and charitable in the fullest and widest sense⁠—all, ‘forgetting those things that are behind,’ must ‘press forward towards the mark, for the prize of the high calling of God.’

“And now I will add but two things more. Be true through life to each other, love as only brothers should do, strengthen, warn, encourage one another, and let who will be against you, let each feel that in his brother he has a firm and faithful friend who will be so to the end; and, oh! be kind and watchful over your dear sister; without mother or sisters she will doubly need her brothers’ love and tenderness and confidence. I am certain she will seek them, and will love you and try to make you happy; be sure then that you do not fail her, and remember, that were she to lose her father and remain unmarried, she would doubly need protectors. To you, then, I especially commend her. Oh! my three darling children, be true to each other, your Father, and your God. May He guide and bless you, and grant that in a better and happier world I and mine may meet again.⁠—Your most affectionate mother,

“Christina Pontifex.”

From enquiries I have made, I have satisfied myself that most mothers write letters like this shortly before their confinements, and that fifty percent keep them afterwards, as Christina did.

XXVI

The foregoing letter shows how much greater was Christina’s anxiety for the eternal than for the temporal welfare of her sons. One would have thought she had sowed enough of such religious wild oats by this time, but she had plenty still to sow. To me it seems that those who are happy in this world are better and more lovable people than those who are not, and that thus in the event of a Resurrection and Day of Judgement, they will be the most likely to be deemed worthy of a heavenly mansion. Perhaps a dim unconscious perception of this was the reason why Christina was so anxious for Theobald’s earthly happiness, or was it merely due to a conviction that his eternal welfare was so much a matter of course, that it only remained to secure his earthly happiness? He was to “find his sons obedient, affectionate, attentive to his wishes, self-denying and diligent,” a goodly string forsooth of all the virtues most convenient to parents; he was never to have to blush for the follies of those “who owed him such a debt of gratitude,” and “whose first duty it was to study his happiness.” How like maternal solicitude is this! Solicitude for the most part lest the offspring should come to have wishes and feelings of its own, which may occasion many difficulties, fancied or real. It is this that is at the bottom of the whole mischief; but whether this last proposition is granted or no, at any rate we observe that Christina had a sufficiently keen appreciation of the duties of children towards their parents, and felt the task of fulfilling them adequately to be so difficult that she was very doubtful how far Ernest and Joey would succeed in mastering it. It is plain in fact that her supposed parting glance upon them was one of suspicion. But there was no suspicion of Theobald; that he should have devoted his life to his children⁠—why this was such a mere platitude, as almost to go without saying.

How, let me ask, was it possible that a child only a little past five years old, trained in such an atmosphere of prayers and hymns and sums and happy Sunday evenings⁠—to say nothing of daily repeated beatings over the said prayers and hymns, etc., about which our authoress is silent⁠—how was it possible that a lad so trained should grow up in any healthy or vigorous development, even though in her own way his mother was undoubtedly very fond of him, and sometimes told him stories? Can the eye of any reader fail to detect the coming wrath of God as about to descend upon the head of him who should be nurtured under the shadow of such a letter as the foregoing?

I have often thought that the Church of Rome does wisely in not allowing her priests to marry. Certainly it is a matter of common observation in England that the sons of clergymen are frequently unsatisfactory. The explanation is very simple, but is so often lost sight of that I may perhaps be pardoned for giving it here.

The clergyman is expected to be a kind of human Sunday. Things must not be done in him which are venial in the weekday classes. He is paid for this business of leading a stricter life than other people. It is his raison d’être. If his parishioners feel that he does this, they approve of him, for they look upon him as their own contribution towards what they deem a holy life. This is why the clergyman is so often called a vicar⁠—he being the person whose vicarious goodness is to stand for that of those entrusted to his charge. But his home is his castle as much as that of any other Englishman, and with him, as with others, unnatural tension in public is followed by exhaustion when tension is no longer necessary. His children are the most defenceless things he can reach, and it is on them in nine cases out of ten that he