ST. PAUL A WORKING MAN AND IN WANT. to take his place among gentlemen, until he has made a fortune; and then he is good enough for any society or any position. If we ourselves have attained any social standing, or made a little money, we shrink from apprenticing our sons to any handicraft. We would rather send them to starve in an overcrowded profession, or to earn a scanty pittance as clerks, than let them "sink" into working men, although as carpenters or coopers, builders or engine-makers, they might soon earn three times as much as a clerk, and hope, by industry and economy, to become masters and employers. They may work as hard as they like at their sports-at cricket, at boating, at gymnastics-but directly hard muscular work earns bread or wages, it is voted low, ungenteel, degrading. This absurd prejudice has never yet found a congenial soil in the East. To this day, for instance, among the Turks, a handicraftsman often rises to offices of state, and now and then to the very highest offices. And even in the Sultan's seraglio, I believe, all the young princes are taught some handicraft, in order that, if misfortunes should befall them, they may have the means of earning their own bread. Among the ancient Eastern races this sensible manly custom was more prevalent than it is in modern times; and in no nation was it more strictly observed, or more honoured in the observance, than among the Jews. It was their rule that every young man, whatever his rank or wealth, and though bred for any of the learned professions, should also be taught some handicraft. To teach their sons a craft of this kind was held to be a religious duty. Their rabbis observed and enforced it; and, so far as we can learn, it was the common and more laborious crafts which they chose. Thus, Rabbi Jose was a tanner; Rabbi Judas, a baker; Rabbi Johanan, a shoemaker; and Maimonides assures us that some of their wisest and greatest rabbis, the leading statesmen as well as the leading teachers of their time, were "hewers of wood and drawers of water." The Talmud is full of injunctions on this point. It affirms that one of the first duties of a father to his son is "to teach him a trade" -it even ranks it on a level with "teaching him the law." Rabbi Juda, too, is very bold, and says: "He that teaches not his son a trade, does as though he taught him to be a thief." And the wise Gamaliel used to say-probably St. Paul heard him say: "He that has a craft in his hands, to what is he like?-He is like to a vineyard that is fenced:" by which he meant, I suppose, that the man's life was defended against the incursions of indolence, sickness, want. What is commanded of a father towards his son?-To 66 519 And Rabbi Saul had his trade. Mechanical and yet not base, he wrought with his hands at the 'art and craft" of tent-making. No doubt, as some of the commentators, jealous with a Western jealousy for Paul's honour, have pointed out, there were branches of this craft which implied no mean artistic skill. As war was then the main business of life, as the wealthiest and most distinguished men passed their lives in "the tented field"tents were often palaces. Julius Cæsar, for instance, travelled with a chest of mosaics, which were laid down to form the pavement of his tent whenever he halted. Many such tesselated pavements are dug up on the sites of ancient Roman camps; and we may be sure that, when the pavements were so costly, the canopies were of a corresponding magnificence. We may be sure, too, from the character of the man, that whatever Paul did, he did well; that, if the chance came in his way, he was quite capable of weaving a sumptuous beautiful tent, fit for the most superb of emperors or the daintiest of princesses. But such chances were not very likely to come to any man who worked for Aquila, a fugitive Jew, now at Rome, now at Corinth, now at Ephesus. And still less were they likely to come to a workman like St. Paul, always on the move, always giving even more time and energy to his labours as rabbi and apostle than to the tasks and niceties of his craft. The probability is that, though he could never be quite a common working man, and though he would always do his work well, he wrought at the most common branches of his trade-made the small rude tents which were sold to ordinary travellers-to merchants, pedlars, freebooters, and pilgrims. The hills of Cilicia, his native country, were famous for a breed of goats, which yielded a long tenacious hair very fit for weaving into a stout impervious cloth. This cloth, called "cilicium" from Cilicia, the province in which it was produced, was on sale in all the markets of Asia, and Greece, and Rome. Wherever they went, tentmakers would find a supply of it; and it was this cloth which Paul had to cut and sew into tents, or the outside covering of tents. Hard, disagreeable work it was, I make no doubt, and badly paid; for, as we shall see, even so good a workman as Paul, working for so good and friendly a master as Aquila, could not always earn enough to live on. But why did Paul, now that he was an apostle and had a right to live by the Gospel, waste on mechanical toils time which he was capable of employing to so much better purpose? Well, he did not think the time was wasted; he held his very work to be a preaching and a commendation of the Gospel. Then as now, the Greeks, and espe circumcise him, to teach him the law, to teach him a trade. cially the Greeks of the seaboard, were the keenest Talmud. traders of the time-the most set on gain by all the Lord and Cephas." He is a soldier: and no soldier is expected to go to a warfare at his own charges. He is a vine-planter: and no man plants a vineyard without eating of the fruit thereof. He is a shepherd: and no man feeds a flock, who does not live on the sale of its milk. He treads out the corn of heaven: is his mouth to be muzzled? He is a ploughman, a sower, a thresher: is he not to "partake" of the grain? He is a minister of the altar: is he not to live by the altar? He is a preacher of the Gospel: and the Lord himself has ordained that they who preach the Gospel should live by the Gospel. This was his "right," this his "power." Nevertheless, he had foregone this right; he had not used this power. Rather than use it, he had borne all kinds of toil and privation, lest the Gospel should be "hindered" by any suspicion of his disinterestedness and integrity. What was the reward at which he aimed? Nothing but this: that "when he preached the Gospel, he might make it without charge" to any; that he might be "free from all men, in order to become," of his own will, “the slave of all.” means and at all hazards. And St. Paul feared that if he "lived by the Gospel," they might suspect him of selfish motives in preaching the Gospel. With what heart could he teach them to love God and their neighbour, while they suspected that he loved himself more than his neighbours or his God, that he was trading on his office,-that instead of seeking their good he was making gain of them? He would give these keen unscrupulous traders no ground for such a suspicion as that. He would earn his bread with his own hands, and so prove his disinterested love for them, and preach with his hands the very Gospel he spoke with his lips. Hence, no sooner does he leave inland Philippi, and come to Thessalonica, on the sea-coast, than he takes up his old craft, and goes to work as a tent-maker. In after months, in his Epistles to the Thessalonians, he reminds them of his toils, and states the motive of them. In his First Epistle* he says: "We were willing to have imparted unto you, not the Gospel of God only, but also our own souls, because ye were dear unto us. For ye remember, brethren, our labour and travail: for labouring night and day, because we would not be chargeable unto any of you, we preached unto you the Gospel of God." In his Second Epistlet he recurs to the theme, and says: "When we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat ;" and puts them in remembrance of the example by which he had illustrated the precept: "Neither did we eat any man's bread for nought; but wrought with labour and travail night and day, that we might not be chargeable to any of you." From Thessalonica Paul came down to Corinth, "the city of the two seas." Here he abode one year and six months. But the very first thing recorded of him§ is, that he "found a certain Jew named Aquila, lately come from Italy, with his wife Priscilla (because that Claudius had commanded all Jews to departing to them the Gospel of God freely; for robbing from Rome), and came unto them. And because he was of the same craft, he abode with them, and wrought for by their occupation they were tent-makers." In the Epistles he afterwards wrote to the Church at Corinth, he makes perpetual allusion to his labours as a handicraftsman. Un. less we have read these Epistles with this feature of St. Paul's life in our minds, we cannot fail to be surprised as we find how large a space it occupies. I need not refer to passing or indirect allusions. It will be enough to take the three passages in which he elaborates the point. In the First Epistle he devotes as much as a whole chapter to it (the ninth chapter). He argues that as an apostle he has as grcat a right to a maintenance as the other apostles, even the brethren of : This was the reward he sought. The reward he gained was, that his very disinterestedness became a ground of suspicion. Because he did not use that right to live by the Gospel which the other apostles did use, there were some at Corinth who denied his claim to be an apostle; who did not scruple to affirm that he himself doubted his claim, or he would never have foregone his right to a maintenance. It is this argument which he meets in two agitated and pathetic passages of his Second Epistle. He affirms that he is no whit behind those "overmuch apostles" who were seeking to supplant him. With some touch of humorous scorn he apologises for his sin in abasing† himself to the labours of his craft, that he might exalt his hearers and disciples by preach other churches, that he might serve them without wage. He reminds them that when he was with them, he was at times in want; and that even then he was not chargeable to them. He affirms that, at least in the regions of Achaia, of which province Corinth was the capital, no man shall ever rob him of the boast, that in everything he has kept and will keep himself from being bur densome to them. Wherefore," he cries; "because I love you not? God knows it is not that. But because I will never give an occasion to those who boast that they are apostles because they let you support them,-about the only proof of apostleship they can produce. My boast shall be that, though I am an apostle, I have taken nothing from you. O foolish Corinthians, if a 2 Cor. xi. 5-15. + Compare 2 Cor. xi. 7, with Phil. iv. 12. man bring you into bondage, if he devour you, if he take from you, if he exalt himself over you, ye honour these false apostles as the very servants of Christ. Will ye not honour one who has abased himself for you, who has given to you, who has wanted rather than take from you, who has been free of you only that he might the better serve you?" THE THRUSH. THRUSH! that pourest, far and near, For when of late, in search of food, Until at last my critic eye Discerned a tangled beechen bough; I heaved the sturdy steel on high, And with three blows I struck it through. It rocked, then down to earth it fell, Whilst wildly wheeling o'er their fall, The parent thrush with piteous call In their own nest, that scarce was cold, And still a voice within me said, "Thus by the strokes of selfish power, At random dealt, we mourn you dead, Sweet half-fledged hopes, from hour to hour." And this is why, in accents clear, THE HYMNS OF ENGLAND.-VI. QUAINT AND FANTASTIC HYMNS. N many of our compilations of hymns for home use we meet with selections from Spenser, Withers, Quarles, Crashaw, Gascoigne, Raleigh, Herbert Vaughan, Wotton and Herrick; but in the collections for use in places of worship, these names rarely occur. What is the reason? The writers lived in an age when devotional poetry was not the necessity which it has become since the days of Watts and Wesley and Whitefield. They wrote at a time most brilliant in the annals of literature, but most unfavourable to the development of religious life; when it was the fashion to treat the Bible as a text-book for curious riddles and enigmas. Some, unfortunately, wrote because it was the fashion to write, and not because the writers were men who had experienced the aspirations and hopes which formed the burden of their songs. The hymn-writers of the Elizabethan age, and the period succeeding, appear to have been wholly given over to strange conceits, fanciful allusions, quaint sentences, and ingenious symbolism. The expositions of Scripture truth were hard and cold, their praises petrified and unnatural, their appeals quaint, sometimes ludicrous, and ofttimes coarse. It seems surprising to us who have heard the hymns of Watts and Wesley sung with religious. enthusiasm, how such hymns could ever have found acceptance with the people; but singing was not in vogue as a devotional exercise then as now, and we know that when times change we change with them. Nothing would "go down" then but emblematic teaching, the unrestrained use of types, and the fanciful interpretations in the pulpit and in prose literature: and we find that the hymns written during this period, and designed either for devotional use, or for the exhibition of the powers of the writers, were tainted with similar conceits. In subsequent times we may trace a lingering love for the quaint and fantastic in hymnology, which had its rise and full development in the Elizabethan era, and it will be our purpose in the following pages to glance at some of these hymns and their writers. A strange life in strange times was that of Sir Walter Raleigh. In the romance of history there THE HYMNS OF ENGLAND. are few whose career was more brilliant, whose talents were more versatile, and whose end was more sad. He is pleasant to contemplate as the "soldier, courtier, sailor, scholar, orator, poet, philosopher, and hero." His poems were much esteemed in his own day, and are still read with pleasure. There is one, entitled "My Pilgrimage," which is held in just repute, and besides being biographical, gives us a fair specimen of the style which was then so strangely popular. It was written after he had fallen into the net which had been spread for him by malicious foes, and when he was condemned to death for high treason. On the night when he was taken from Westminster to his cell in the Tower; when the scene of the trial was fresh in his mind, and the sense of injustice and treachery was strong within him, his thoughts turned from earth to heaven, from the king's attorney here, to the Saviour, whom he called "the King's Attorney" there, and he wrote by lamplight this poem : : "Give me my scallop-shell of quiet, My staff of faith to walk upon, My scrip of joy (immortal diet), My bottle of salvation, My gown of glory, hope's true gage, No cause deferred, no vain spent journey, To Him who made heaven, earth, and sea. Blood must be my body's balmer, On the last night of his life, when again a prisoner in the Tower, fifteen years after the "Pilgrimage" was written, he wrote on the fly-leaf of his Bible the lines commencing : "Even such is Time, who takes in trust Our youth, our joys, and all we have," recently quoted in full among our Stray Notes. The next day he said, "I have a long journey to go, therefore must take leave." His quaintness was seen to the last. Taking up the axe as he stood on the scaffold, he said with a smile, "It is a sharp medicine, but a sound cure for all diseases;" and then when his head was laid on the block, he spoke those well-known words which have become a proverb: "So the heart be right, it is no matter which way the head lies." So passed a true Christian knight from the perplexities and trials of a wondrously eventful 523 life, into the haven of rest, and he died, as he had lived, in the spirit of his own hymn: "To Thee, O Jesus, I direct my eyes, To Thee my hands, to Thee my humble knees, To Thee my heart shall offer sacrifice, To Thee my thoughts, who my thoughts only sees, One or two of the hymns of Sir Henry Wotton, the friend of dear old Izaak Walton, who has im mortalised him in a biography, are familiar to us. He wrote many quaint and pithy things, and he spoke many-perhaps his popularity is due as much in one respect as the other. the definition of an ambassador as "an who gave He it was honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country." And when his advice was once asked in a matter of diplomatic tactics, he said, "Ever be believed, and will put your adversaries (who speak the truth; for if you do so, you shall never will still hunt counter) to a loss in all their disquisitions and undertakings." After representing the English Court for twenty years in Venice, he returned to England, and settled down as provost of Eton, near to the river, where he could fish with his good friend Izaak Walton, who was a constant visitor. Here he led a quiet and probably a useful life, with "peace and patience cohabiting in his heart," as Walton says; and here he wrote many of his hymns. The following "Meditation of his style : is a good specimen "Oh, Thou great Power! in whom we move, No new-born drams of purging fire; "And said by Him that said no more, But sealed it with His sacred breath. Thou, then, that hast dispurged our score, And dying wert the death of death, Be now, while on Thy name we call, Our life, our strength, our joy, our all." Another of Izaak Walton's friends, and a quaint and fantastic writer of hymns, was Dr. Donne. Walton was one of the Doctor's hearers, and became a convert under his preaching. He wrote his elegy, collected and published his sermons, and prefixed a biography. Donne in the pulpit, as in his writings, indulged in the strangest and subtlest fancies. Common objects were transformed into wondrous things of unknown magnificence. His delight was in grappling with some great metaphysical difficulty, and not unfrequently leaving his hold of the |