“Built upon the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, Jesus Christ himself being

the chief corner-stone."

FEBRUARY, 1860.

HOW MEN WRITE THEIR OWN LIVES WITHOUT

INK OR PAPER.*

BY REV. W. T. ROSEVEAR. ..... An event, still fresh in your memories, illustrates what I mean by the unwritten portion of men's lives. A. storm broke upon the British seas. It met a ship called the “Royal Charter,” homeward bound from Australia. It wrapped its black wings around that poor ship, swept her onward like a cork, and dashed her to pieces upon the rocks of Anglesea. What was then passing in the souls of her passengers and crew ? Does the Board of Trade tell us what? Do newspapers tell us what? Great upwritten histories of souls in inconceivable agony then sank like lead through the devouring deep, and now lie like inaccessible libraries upon the floor of the hungry sea. None but God knows what his creatures, in their extremity, thought, felt, and did. None but He knows what memories of home and friends rushed upon them, what the sad farewells and partings between husbands and wives, mothers and children,-what the prayers that rose up through the storm, rent the heavens in twain, and grasped the throne of God with an agony of importunity that cannot belong to written and spoken prayers. He, the All-merciful One, knows it all; He, who hath taught us that “the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.”

Not only in terrible disasters, such as shipwrecks, but in our common discipline, how much of our life is unwritten! Where is the record of all the mingled experiences of hope and of fear, of struggle and of rest, of defeat and of victory, through which our spiritual being has passed or is now passing? The worst and the best of men's lives never, perhaps, come fully out into public view. The best within us shrinks from making itself public through humility-the worst through shame. A large portion of every man's life is hid from the common gaze. “ The heart knoweth its own bitterness, and a stranger intermeddleth not with its joy."

There is in our city a large amount of unwritten good-good felt and done of which there is no pen-and-ink record. There are two ways of looking at society. One is to treat every man as if he were

* This article is extracted from a Sunday Afternoon Address, delivered in the Corn Exchange, Coventry.

VOL. III.NEW SERIES.

a rogue till you have proved him to be an honest man; the other is to believe him to be an honest man till you have proved him to be a rogue. I prefer the latter. Better that your heart should sometimes bleed, through trusting men too much, than that it should be always dark, cold, suspicious, through not trusting them at all. An English city is not an African jungle; nor should citizens arm themselves to the teeth with suspicion against citizens, as if they were wild beasts waiting to pounce upon one another. “Harm watch, harm catch," runs the proverb. To be always prying into the failings of men is to feed upon garbage and to grow blind to our own failings. “Ashes always fly back in the face of him that throws them,” says an Eastern sage. Evil-thinking of others is mean, is un-English, is unmanly. If I shall directly speak of the dark side of society, I shall do it with intense pain- I shall do it with the sole aim of arous. ing transgressors to become better men. What I now wish to do is to lead you to inquire if there may not be a larger amount of good in, our city than you have been accustomed to think. Go into the homes of many belonging to all classes, rich and poor alike. Look upon the private and domestic deeds which never come out into the pub. lic gaze, and I maintain that among them would be richer sympathies, holier principles, and diviner heroisms silently at work than you would find in many of those public deeds which astonish the world. There are nobler records on earth, my friends, than those which are contained in the printed lives of saints, or the sculptured monuments of warriors. There are charities which soothe, and heal, and bless, of which there is no memorial, save in the gratitude of those who received them. There are small kindnesses which fall soft and gentle as morning dews upon hearts from which suffering and disappointment had brushed off the freshness of hope — kind. nesses which disappear in the neir life of courage which they feed, and, like the dews, leave no other proof of their presence but that best of proofs, the new verdure, and bloom, and fruit, which spring up wherever they fall. There are great wrongs borne with uncomplaining fortitude and meekness, the heart quietly staying itself upon the justice of God. There are heavy afflictions met, in the conviction that they shall work out an eternal weight of glory. There are self-denials and sacrifices cheerfully made by one neigh. bour in health to help and comfort another neighbour in sickness. There are families who help families, and fight the great life-battle together with stout hearts and true. There are right brotherly souls here and there, inspiring one another by their mutual courage and prayer. These are a few, and only a few, passages from the great volume of moral and religious good in this city which is written, not with ink, but with imperishable deeds. These deeds cut their own channels through the world as do the little rivulets that take their rise in the bosom of unknown mountains. They fall at length into some great central river of influence. They roll irre. sistibly on to the ocean, and thus break upon every shore, and influcnce everything in earth and in air. Grand things are those quiet acts of love and goodness to be found in some of the homes of our City. They go out upon the eternities. They are durable as the

throne of the heavens. They belong to that great family of deeds which are, in fact, the chosen instruments for revealing character throughout the universe. This law includes God as well as mai). He, the Infinite Father, is love ; but how does he make us feel it? By deeds, and by words which reveal deeds. The Gospel shows God coming nearer and nearer to us in a series of works in creation, in providence, in redemption. These works reached their crowning point in the work of Christ for man. “Herein is love; not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins." By deeds of love we, too, in our measure, must reveal Christianity. Christian. morality must take the place of Christian miracle, and summon the attention of sinners to the teaching of Christ. It is the living action that springs from an orthodox faith, and not that faith itself, which moves and saves the world. Spoken and written words and professions are a very artificial language by the side of living deeds. By these the soul of a good man enters, I had almost said, with all his goodness, into the soul of his brother. At all events he speaks to his brother in the mightiest and most convincing language that is spoken on God's earth. You may have sneered at Christianity as it is sometimes printed in books and preached in pulpits ; you never sneered at it when embodied in the large-hearted and loving deeds of Christian men. And I tell you there are such men. Here and there through the churches of Christ there are at least a few earnest souls weighed down night and day as with the “burden of the Lord,” filled with something of Paul's mighty travail for your salvation. “The kingdom of God is come nigh unto you.” There are good men in this city who think of you, who love you, who pray for you, and who would rather be the means of saving your souls than of winning an empire for themselves. Some may not believe this, because there is no written record of it; but it is true. There is such a thing as disinterested benevolence.

There is in our city, on the other hand, a vast amount of unwritten evil. Newspapers have been telling us for centuries about “the great fair,” * Godiva processions,' “ crowded theatres," and hosts of such things. But we have never read the moral and eternal histories of our fellow-citizens which have been developed in connection with such amusements. Customs that appeal only to the lower part of our nature should be swept into oblivion. Bury them deep in the past. However time-honoured, they are not worthy to live in this age of enlightenment unless they are pure-unless they are in accordance with reason and conscience. Let us put away childish things, and have recreations such as become men and the manhood of modern society.

How would it be if there were an instrument by which we could photograph the social and moral evil of our city P-if we could bring it out in pictorial histories, vivid and life-like as our countenances ?

if we could individualise it so that the name of every man among us could be printed in plain English letters under such a vivid portraiture of his inner self? if we could then hang it up in open day. light in our public thoroughfares, and in the corners of our streets,

the

how would it be? How would it look, think you ? In sooth it would be a strange sight—that picture of the unholy soul in its relation to God and eternity-hung there in the midst of placards an. nouncing sales, lectures, sermons, concerts, theatres, balls, and all the heterogeneous doings of our modern English life. It would be an awful sight. While it hung there, its eye, I weèn, would bave power to awe back passengers from the streets. Not one in a million would have courage to look at it. Many a man would rather be shot through with a cannon-ball than meet its glance.

.... Unless a change comes over society in regard to what has been styled the “ greatest vice of the age,” the heart of this nation will rot. I fear no foreign invasions; but I do fear our national vices. If they prevail-if they make us corrupt-conquering armies will be at our gates. “Wheresoever the carcass is, there will the eagles be gathered together," Set your faces, my fellow-citizens, like a flint against the sins I have indicated. Take heed, lest in professing regard for your city's welfare, you secretly stab it in the dark. If you slay its virtue, you shed the nation's life-blood, and prove yourselves, not patriots, but traitors. “ Be men.” Reverence, shield, and strengthen woman. “Awake to righteousness, and sin not; for some have not the knowledge of God. I speak this to your shame.” Beware! lest your life should throw itself out into another of the unwritten tragedies which are at this moment enacted in our city. The murder of Duncan in “Macbeth" is not half so harrowing as the murder of character in poor men's homes. Oh! there is many a poor creature whom you pass unnoticed in the streets who might "a tale unfold whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood," more than anything which the Ghost of murdered Claudius could tell Hamlet about the “secrets of his prison-house.” Shakespearian tragedies acted in royal theatres are less awfully sublime in their appeals to our pity than certain every-day tragedies acted under cottage roofs.

The unwritten portion of your lives is constantly tending to publicity. This holds true of the good as well as the evil; but for the sake of directness I confine myself only to the latter. The evil which you have done is stamped upon God's world. It is working its way through society. Accidents, or the most trivial circumstances, may remove the screens which now stand between it and the light. Sin resembles goodness in one thing—it cannot be always hid. Sin of every description, no less than “murder, will out." Nothing can keep it back-nothing. It is an imprisoned giant, waiting to leap from its night-cavern into the open day. Its hour must come. “Be sure thy sin will find thee out.” The world itself is so made, it would seem, as to reveal it—to hold it up, sooner or later, in the eyes of all men, What the Great Teacher and Master of the World said in Judea eighteen centuries ago is true here to-day: “There is nothing covered that shall not be revealed, neither hid that shall not be known. Therefore, whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light, and that which ye have spoken in the ear shall be proclaimed upon the housetops.” I beseech you,

think on these words. Realise the fact, that the unwritten portion of your lives is tending to publicity is not only doing its work silently upon the heart of the population, but also forcing its way out upon the ear and eye of the world. The sins of some of you may resemble rivers rolling through underground caverns, and because they are not seen at present you may have no anxiety about them. But know that these rivers are moving; know that they reach a point in their course in which they leap forth into the daylight, and roll their poisonous flood across the open globe. Even if they should never become visible on earth, what then? There is another world, and in that other world there are books kept by an Omoiscient Observer, and in those books all your actions on earth are faithfully recorded :-“ And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God, and the books were opened : and another book was opened, which is the book of life, and the dead were judged out of those things written in the books, according to their works."

And here I cannot refrain, in connection with this principle, that all sin is tending to publicity, from a moment's allusion to an event which has suddenly filled us with terror. That murder committed yesterday morning is written out there upon yonder green field, not in ink, but in red life-blood. To every city on the globe, in which an English newspaper is read, the guilt of the husand who could murder a wife is proclaimed. But why do I thus speak of that which is so revolting even to think about? Why ? Mark youbehind that deed of blood lie great unwritten histories of sins. At first they were what men call emall-little family quarrels, unfaithfulnesses, and hatreds. They multiplied ; they grew into giants. The fire of hell, with which the man had so often played, leaped into the bosom of those sins of his, 80 small once, so vast and terrific now, for they burnt the manhood out of him, and made him a demon. In a moment his hitherto unwritten sins have become public. He was a child once, innocent as the babes which you, mothers, press to your bosoms. He has become what he now is by tampering with sin, by yielding to temptation through a number of years. Beware, oh beware! An awful warning against sin is now ringing through the city. “Let no man say when he is tempted, he is tempted of God; for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man; but every man is tempted when he is drawn away of his own lust and enticed; then, when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin, and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth-DEATH.'

I am thus brought to my last thought, viz.: that for tbe whole of your lives, written and unwritten alike, you are responsible to God. Your life itself, with its wondrous instincts, passions, and faculties, is his gift ; and for the use you make of it you are accountable to Him. In saving man, God neither does violence to the responsibility of the creature nor to the sovereignty of the Creator, but he works in harmony with both. “Faith cometh by hearing, and heariog by the word of God.” You are not to be swung coldly through your life orbits, as moons are wheeled through spacedistant, remote from their central suns ; but “God works in you, to will and to do of his good pleasure.” It is yours, then, through him,