The trivial round, the common task, Would furnish all we ought to ask — Eoom to deny ourselves; a road To bring us daily nearer God.
^ " Ask me," she wrote, " to do something for your sake, something difficult, and you will see that I shall do it regularly, which is for me the most difficult thing of all." Let those who reproach themselves for a desultoriness, seemingly incurable, take heart again from the example of Florence Nightingale ! No self- reproach recurs more often in her private outpourings at this time than that of irregularity and even sloth. She found it difficult to rise early in the morning; she prayed and wrestled to be delivered from desultory thoughts, from idle dreaming, from scrappiness in unselfish work. She wrestled and she won. When her capacities had found full scope in congenial work, nothing was more fixed and noteworthy in her life and work than regularity, precision, and persistence.^
^ No author of modern times has striven more earnestly or impressively than George Eliot to inculcate a law of duty which
1 E. Meynell, The Life of Francis Thompson (1913), 32. * Sir Edward Cook, The Life of Florence Niglitingale, i. 40.
326 THE DAY'S WORK
rests simply upon our human and social relations, and is inde- pendent of the great spiritual sanctions of the Christian faith. The late Mr. F. W. H. Myers, in one of his essays, tells how at Cambridge he walked with her once in the Fellows' Garden of Trinity, and how she, " taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet-calls of man — the words God, Immortality, Duty — pronounced, with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third. Never, perhaps, had sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty of im- personal and unrecompensing law. I listened, and night fell ; her grave majestic countenance turned towards me like a Sibyl's in the gloom ; it was as though she withdrew from my grasp, one by one, the two scrolls of promise, and left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable fate. And when we stood at length and parted, amid that columnar circuit of the forest trees, beneath the last twilight of starless skies, I seemed to be gazing, like Titus at Jerusalem, on vacant seats and empty halls — on a sanctuary with no Presence to hallow it, and heaven left lonely of a God." ^
^ Carlyle preached the gospel of work as the panacea for human ills. But he did so with the air of a parent who is mixing a disagreeable medicine for a child, and is insisting on its whole- some effects in order to take away attention from its nauseousness. To Morris work was a sheer joy. It has been said that he picked out only those forms of work that were attractive. It would be truer to say that whatever work he undertook he made attractive. It was a joy to him, because he imported beauty into it. When his spirits flagged, it meant, not that he was tired, but that his insatiable energies cried out for even more.*
2. Work and labour have changed indeed since the Psalmist pictured man in the fields, on the hillside, rising with the sun, to go out to his work on the soil until the fading twilight sent him peacefully home again. Now labour stays not with the dying day. No evening sets in its quiet limit. On and on through the night its vast mechanism clangs and roars. On and on through the night the loaded trains groan and shriek ; the furnaces blaze on in the deep holds of the liners tha,t press on untiringly through the black waters. Labour means no longer the slow pacing of ploughing oxen, the long watch of the creeping sheep along the folds. It means now the storm and stress of tumultuous cities,
^ J. C. Lambert. • A. G. Rickett, William Morris, 24.
PSALM CIV. 23 327
the haste of quivering looms, the heat of rushing wheels, the shout of hurrying multitudes, and the rush of crowded streets. Yes ! But all this is still humanity at work. It is man achieving his purpose. It is man fulfilling his Divine prerogative. It is man building himself a city. By his labour, tremendous in its volume and energy and force, he comes to himself. He discloses his powers. He reveals his elemental character. He creates a new world. He proclaims himself a man, he discharges his obligations to God. He fulfils his high calling.
^ Woe to us if we let our work lose the inspiration that comes from knowing that we do it for our Heavenly Father and not for ourselves ! We stand in danger of letting that knowledge go, because work so absorbs us and enchains us by its own sheer power ; but yet we know that that slavery to work which we are aware is growing in ourselves is not the highest or most noble type of life as we behold it in other men. We know that the man to whom work is really sanctifying and helpful is the man who has God behind his work ; who is able to retire out of the fret and hurry of his work into the calmness and peace of Deity, and come out again into his labour full of the exalted certainties of the redemption of Christ and the love of God : to make work sweet and fresh and interesting and spiritual by doing it not for himself, not for itself, but for the Saviour in whom he lives.^