“Then, Missi,” said the Chief, “it will be our water, and we may all use it as our very own?”
“Yes,” I answered, “whenever you wish it, and as much as you need, both here and at your own houses, as far as it can possibly be made to go.”
The Chief looked at me eagerly, fully convinced at length that the well contained a treasure, and exclaimed, “Missi, what can we do to help you now?”
Oh, how like is human nature all the world over! When one toils and struggles, when help is needed which many around could easily give and be the better, not the worse, for giving it, they look on in silence, or bless you with ungenerous criticism, or ban you with malicious judgment. But let them get some peep of personal advantage by helping you, or even of the empty bubble of praise for offering it, and how they rush to your aid!
I was thankful, however, to accept of the Chief’s assistance, now sorely needed, and I said, “You have seen it fall in once already. If it falls again, it will conceal the rain from below which our God has given us. In order to preserve it for us and for our children in all time, we must build it round and round with great coral blocks from the bottom to the very top. I will now clear it out, and prepare the foundation for this wall of coral. Let every man and woman carry from the shore the largest blocks they can bring. It is well worth all the toil thus to preserve our great Jehovah’s gift!”
Scarcely were my words uttered when they rushed to the shore, with shoutings and songs of gladness; and soon every one was seen struggling under the biggest blocks of coral with which he dared to tackle. They lay like limestone rocks, broken up by the hurricanes, and rolled ashore in the arms of the mighty billows; and in an incredibly short time scores of them were tumbled down for my use at the mouth of the well. Having prepared a foundation, I made ready a sort of bag-basket, into which every block was firmly tied, and then let down to me by the pulley—a native teacher, a faithful fellow, cautiously guiding it. I received and placed each stone in its position, doing my poor best to wedge them one against the other, building circularly, and cutting them to the needed shape with my American axe. The wall is about three feet thick, and the masonry may be guaranteed to stand until the coral itself decays. I wrought incessantly, for fear of any further collapse, till I had it raised about twenty feet; and now, feeling secure, and my hands being dreadfully cut up,
Calvinism.
CALVIN’S name is now associated only with gloom and austerity. It may be true enough that he rarely laughed. He had none of Luther’s genial and sunny humour. Could they have exchanged conditions, Luther’s temper might have been somewhat grimmer, but he would never have been entirely like Calvin. Nevertheless, for hard times are needed hard men, and intellects which can pierce to the roots where truth and lies part company. It fares ill with the soldiers of religion when the accursed thing is in their camp. And this is to be said of Calvin, that so far as the state of knowledge permitted, no eye could have detected more keenly the unsound spots in the received creed of Europe, and no hand could have been found so resolute to excise, tear out, and destroy what was distinctly seen to be false, so resolute to establish what was true in its place, and make truth to the last fibre of it the rule of practical life.
Calvinism, as it existed in Geneva, and as it endeavoured to be wherever it took root for a century and a-half after him, was not a system of opinion, but an attempt to make the will of God as revealed in the Bible an authoritative guide for social as well as personal direction. Men wondered why the Calvinists, being so doctrinal, yet seem to dwell so much and so emphatically on the Old Testament. It was because in the Old Testament they found, or thought they found, a divine example of national government, a distinct indication of the laws which men were ordered to follow, with visible and immediate punishments attached to disobedience. At Geneva, as for a time in Scotland, moral sins were treated, after the example of the Mosaic law, as crimes to be punished by the magistrates. “Elsewhere,” says Knox, speaking of Geneva, “the Word of
God is taught as purely, but never anywhere have I seen God obeyed so faithfully.”
The Calvinists have been called intolerant. Intolerance of an enemy who is trying to kill you seems to me a pardonable state of mind. It is no easy matter to tolerate lies clearly convicted of being lies under any circumstances; specially it is not easy to tolerate lies which strut about in the name of religion; but there is no reason to suppose that the Calvinists at the beginning would have thought of meddling with the Church if they had been themselves let alone. They would have formed communities apart. Like the Israelities, whom they wished to resemble, they would have withdrawn into the wilderness—the Pilgrim Fathers actually did so withdraw into the wilderness of New England—to worship the God of their fathers, and would have left argument and example to work their natural effect. The Catholics chose to add to their already incredible creed a fresh article, that they were entitled to hang and burn those who differed from them; and in this quarrel the Calvinists, Bible in hand, appealed to the God of battles. They grew harsher, fiercer, if you please, more fanatical. It was extremely natural that they should. They dwelt, as pious men are apt to dwell, in suffering and sorrow on the all-disposing power of Providence. Their burden grew lighter as they considered that God had so determined that they must bear it. But they attracted to their ranks almost every man in Western Europe that “hated a lie.” They were crushed down, but they rose again. They were splintered and torn, but no power could bend or melt them. They had many faults: let him that is without sin cast a stone at them. They abhorred, as no body of men ever more abhorred, all conscious mendacity, all impurity, all moral wrong of every kind so far as they could recognise it. Whatever exists at this moment in England and Scotland of conscientious fear of doing evil is the remnant of the convictions which were branded by the Calvinists into the people’s hearts. Though they failed to destroy Romanism, though it survives and may survive long as an opinion, they drew its fangs; they forced it to abandon that detestable principle that it was entitled to murder those who dissented from it. Nay, it may be said that by having shamed Romanism out of its practical corruption, the Calvinists enabled it to revive.
Calvinism was the spirit which rises in revolt against untruth; the spirit which has appeared
and reappeared, and in due time will appear again, unless God be a delusion and man be as the beasts that perish. For it is but the inflashing upon the conscience with overwhelming force of the nature and origin of the laws by which mankind are governed—laws which exist, whether we acknowledge them or whether we deny them, and will have their way, to our weal or woe, according to the attitude in which we please to place ourselves towards them—inherent like electricity, in the nature of things, not made by us, not to be altered by us; but to be discerned and obeyed by us at our everlasting peril.—J. A. Froude.