Feeding Swine

“And he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country; and he sent him into his fields to feed swine. And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat: and no man gave unto him.” — Luke xv. 15, 16.

To how much the portion of goods amounted which the younger son took with him we are not told; nor are we told how long it lasted. But once it is in the hands of a spendthrift, wonderful is the speed with which money disappears. As paragons of senseless profusion Dante has handed down the names of Stricca and his companions,’” who sold their estates and bought a princely mansion where they might spend their days in revelry. Their horses’ shoes were silver, and, if one came off, the servants were forbidden to pick it up; and, with like disdain of mean economy throughout, the united fortunes lasted only twenty months, and they finished off in the utmost misery. The Sienese spendthrifts have been often distanced in our living day; and the low taverns along the Thames, where our sailors waste their hard-won earnings — the hotels of Melbourne and San Francisco, where successful diggers fool away in a flash of riot the gold for which they have toiled so long, after a coarse and vulgar fashion could parallel the wildest waste of Heliogabalus or Lucullus.

* Inferno canto 29.

More remarkable than the speed with which the money disappears is the small satisfaction which it yields. Here, in London, you can order a dinner at from ‘v to seven guineas a-head, and if there are ten guests their entertainment will cost you from sixty to eighty pounds. And everything shall be perfectly quiet and orderly — no excess, no noise, no revelry; but out of this large expenditure how much happiness have you created? Of the company perchance one or two, with a palate exquisitely educated, may appreciate the rare viands and rarer wines; and one or two more may tell it to the first acquaintance they meet next morning, subjoining — “But really I would as soon have dined at home;” and of the remainder some may regret the waste, or envy the wealth of the entertainer, or laugh at the vain show. Suppose that, instead of this feast for your rich neighbours, you were laying out the money in a treat to the poor; suppose you took a ragged school or the inmates of a workhouse to the seaside or the country — in the previous chapter we are told, “When thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind: and thou shalt be blessed; for they cannot recompense thee: for thou shalt be recompensed at the resurrection of the just;” — without even waiting till then, you will find in the pleasures of the moment an anticipation of the final reward. Your guests may not make speeches, nor feel all of them exactly as you would have liked; but they have had a holiday and a wholesome meal. Away from mephitic dens, they have inhaled pure oxygen; eyes dull with looking at grey pavements and dusty yards have been refreshed with green fields, or have sparkled at the boundless blue, and when their hearts were filled with food and gladness, words have been spoken, hymns have been sung, which helped to make them love God and their fellow-creatures more. The day will be a bright spot in a hundred memories, and a protracted feast to the giver of the festival.

From wasteful expenditure small satisfaction remains; but if, like the prodigal, your expenditure be on self-indulgence and excess, the more money the greater the misery. If you had stood on the bridge and dropped the sovereign straight down into the river, it would not have come back into your hand any more than the sovereign spent at the play with a jolly supper afterwards; but it would not have left a pain in your head, and a self-loathing in your spirit. If, like George Heriot with the king’s acknowledgment, you had put the bank-notes on the hearth, and sent them flaming up the chimney, they would have left you far richer than those you have spent on reckless companions and riotous living. If, like Cleopatra, you had dissolved a pearl — if you had put together the income of years — all that has been spent on self-indulgence — perhaps in enticing others into sin — could you have put it all together, and, like the queenly jewel, dissipated it in dust and air, we might have been sorry for the idle sacrifice, but the wasted money would not have wasted you. Cleopatra had another pearl, the gift of peerless beauty. That gift was perverted, and it hatched a serpent; it came back into her bosom the asp which stung her. So with the possessions of the prodigal. Talents laid up in a napkin, pearls melted in vinegar, will benefit no one; but rank, fortune, health, high spirits, laid out in the service of sin, are scorpion-eggs, and fostered and fully grown, the forthcoming furies will seize on the conscience, and with stings of fire will torment it evermore.

Whatsoever was the fortune which our spendthrift took into the far country, it was now exhausted. He knew what it was to come to the last shekel, and eat the last dry crust. He knew what it was to saunter along the street, and look wistfully in at doors and windows, and pass on with the painful knowledge that his pocket was empty. And it was astonishing how quickly his old companions found out his altered circumstances. Some who had lately feasted at his cost were seized with sudden blindness, and could not recognise him; and others, who used to have loads of leisure, were now in a perpetual hurry, and could only wave a flying “How do?” as they hastened past. And it might not be all hard-heartedness; for they were beginning to be badly off themselves. There had arisen a mighty famine, and whilst the poor were perishing, those not absolutely destitute were reduced to inferior fare and short allowance. Already — the last coin vanished — the prodigal had converted everything into bread: rings, chains, orna-FEEDING SWINE. y

ments of every kind; and as, owing to the hard times, the market was glutted with such trinkets, it was little he obtained: and now, with a best robe or dress-coat in a bundle, or some such relic of his recent finery, he might be seen stealing up back alleys, or bashfully entering some dingy shop and asking a small advance from the hawk-faced owner; till money, ornaments, apparel, everything, was eaten up, and still the wolf kept howling — still he felt as if he must perish with hunger. In desperation he threw himself on a wealthy citizen. Oh, how unlike his own kind father, this proud and surly pagan! and how unlike his own dainty fastidious self, this willingness to dig — this eagerness for drudgery! But anything to keep soul and body together: bid me do anything so as I may earn a morsel of food. “• There, Moses, there are the hogs: go, feed the swine.” Oh, yes; he will: his spirit is broken; there is no pride now. Utterly abject, unable to resent the bitter mockery which assigned such employment to a Jew, and amidst the unclean creatures feeling the isolation of the outcast, the self-contempt of the apostate and renegade, he drives forth to the field his loathsome charge.’’’’ But though

* Remembering what Herodotus says as to the Egyptian detestation of swine and swineherds (ii. 47), the reader may think that there is an incongruity in making Egypt the scene of the prodigal’s sojourn; but these animals figure on the remaining monuments of old Egypt, and the herdsman or driver as well, with his whip and his noose, as reproduced in the picture of Mr. Selous (see Wilkinson’s Manners a?td Customs of Ancient Egypt vol. iii. p. 34); and Herodotus himself there Is food for the swine, there is none for him. The day is far spent, and his fast is not broken. No meal is brought out; no menial comes near him. It is plain he is forgotten; most likely on purpose. But these crooked pods, which the pigs are so greedily crunching, do not look so bad, and he has seen them in the hands of the children and beggars. He tries them, but alas! so husky and hollow, they only mock his hunger. Faint and weary, for an instant he closes his eyes, and in his dream, behold, he eateth! but he awaketh, and his soul hath appetite. The landscape is a skeleton. Vegetation droops; the earth is iron; and, sickly and swooning, nature seems as if about to give up the ghost. It is the Far Country, and the Far Country in Famine.

Whether it be a natural nobleness, or an acquired refinement — the one, the direct gift of God; the other, an indirect creation of the gospel — it is seldomi forfeited all at once. Step by step the downward path is trodden. The heart dies away from God. The prodigal goes forth from His presence; and, love being lost, fear soon folassigns a use for them: if not permissible as food, they still were serviceable to the husbandman by treading the seed-corn into the soil left soft by the refluent river. The “husks” on which they were fed are the crooked, horn-like pods of the carob-tree, Ceratonia siliqua. It still grows abundantly in Egypt and the Holy Land. See “Husk” in Fairbairn’s Imperial Bible Dictionary. The lover of Shakspere will remember Orlando, “Shall I keep your hogs and eat husks with them? What prodigal portion have I spent that I should come to such penury?” As You Like It, act i. scene i.

lows. He does that which is good in his own eyes — works the will of the flesh and of the mind, and seeks his happiness in riotous living — in those forms of self-gratification which suit his temperament, whether that be animal or intellectual, coarse or aesthetic. Then comes a period of exhaustion and depression. The substance is wasted. Money and credit are gone, and the power of enjoyment is gone. Nerves are shattered, life is vapid, the old sensations pall. There is a famine in that land; and, in despair, he tries the husks which the swine do eat. He flies to fierce excitement and strong stimulants — betting, gambling, speculating, drinking; or, utterly demoralised, he becomes a bold beggar, fastening himself on any acquaintance or stranger who does not forcibly shake him off, glorying in his shame, amongst villanous associates boasting his good connections or his former respectability, and, snatching tit-bits from the swine-trough, shows how thorough is the transformation since he fell from his first estate.

In the, days of the Regency there was a man much envied, and in the ranks of fashion his influence was paramount. It was not that he was a statesman or a hero, a thinker or a speaker; but, as far as an outside can make it, he was the gentleman. His bow, his gait, his dress, were perfection: the Regent took lessons at his toilette; when peeresses brought out their daughters, they awaited with anxiety his verdict, and no party was distinguished from which he withheld his presence. Very poor padding within, heartless and soulless, the usual sawdust which does for a dandy, by infinite painstaking and equal impudence he scrambled into his much-envied ascendancy, the arbiter of taste, the dictator of the drawing-room, the leader of the great army of beaux and butterflies. Then came a cloud. The prince withdrew his favour, and, of course, the prince’s friends. His mysterious wealth suddenly took wing, and means which he took to recover it sent him into life-long exile at Calais and Caen. He had no God.”’’ His god was the sunshine — court-favour, the smiles of the great and the gay. The instant these were withdrawn, the poor Apollo

* A more godless existence than poor Beau Brummell’s it is impossible to conceive. The ideas of accountabihty and worship do not occur, as far as we remember, in all the conversations and letters preserved in the two volumes of his biography. Even as consul at Caen he never so much as paid the mark of respect to the religion of his country implied in a visit to the English place of worship, and the chaplain, who often visited him in his last days, writes: — “He appeared quite incapable of conversing on religious subjects. ... I never, in the course of my attendance upon the sick, aged, and dying, came in contact with so painful an exhibition of human vanity and apparent ignorance and thoughtlessness of and respecting a future state; for I have before visited persons whose mental powers were equally shattered, but still it was possible to touch some chord connected with religion, to which they responded, though perhaps weakly and imperfectly: with him there was some response when sounded on worldly subjects, none on religious, until a few hours before he died, when, in reply to my repeated entreaties, that he would try and pray, he said, ‘I do try,’ but he added something which made me doubt whether he understood me.” — Jesse’s Life of George Brum?nell, vol. ii. p. 350.

butterfly came fluttering down, down into the dust, and never soared again. It was all in vain that old acquaintances tried to keep him out of debt and discredit. With no gratitude, and with little conscience, and with only that amount of pride which makes the misanthrope, he begged and borrowed on all sides, at the table d’hote glad to get a bottle. of wine from some casual tourist by telling stories of old times, and unable to cross the threshold when his only suit of clothes was in process of repair. The broken-down exquisite began to be in want, and, when borrowing a biscuit from a grocer, or a cup of coflee from a kindly hostess, he may have remembered the days when he lavished thousands on folly, the days when he was the favourite guest at the palace. Truly, it was a mighty famine, but it did not bring him to himself It only alienated from mankind a heart which had all along been estranged from the living God, and gave frightful force to his cynicism. “Madame de St. Ursain,” as he said to his landlady, ‘’ were I to see a man and a dog drowning together in the same pond, and no one was looking on, I would prefer saving the dog.”

Just to take one instance more where the portion of goods was vilely cast away. More than fifty years ago, in the pleasant town of Tiverton, there was a clergyman, popular and clever, but by far too fond of field-sports. One day, however, a friend, a mighty hunter like himself, suddenly expired whilst uttering most impious language. The awe-struck minister abjured dogs and guns, and begging his people’s prayers, vowed to live henceforward for his sacred calling. For months his preaching was earnest and impressive, but at the end of that time he resumed the sporting life with fresh devotion, and over and above betrayed a passion from which few are delivered. He had acquired a love for gaming. A presentation to Kew-cum- Petersham brought him to the neighbourhood of London, and gave him opportunity to frequent the gambling saloons of St. James’s; and whilst numbers were reading with delight his Many Things 17i Few Woi’ds, poor “Lacon” himself was sitting far into the night among swindlers and pigeons, and then slinking home to a suburban hovel to sleep as best he could till far into the day. The upshot was, that he was forced to abscond, his living was declared void, and after leading a vagabond life between New York and Paris, the clergyman, the author, and the late fellow of King’s, perished by his own hand at Fontainebleau.*

And whether it be Richard Savage, whose riotous living at last imbrued his hands in another’s blood, and then landing him in the debtor’s prison, left him to be burled at the cost of the kind-hearted gaoler; or Emma, Lady Hamilton, passing like a meteor through foreign courts, and making wise men mad with brilliancy and beauty, then cast off by society, and from a sordid lodging

In 1832. There is a brief notice of Caleb Colton in Rose’s Biographical Dictionary, and some interesting details are given by a fellow-townsman in the Leisure Hour for 1855, P- 42.

carried in a deal box to a nameless grave; or men like Beckford, who, spending prodigious wealth in self-idolatry, have lived to find that the idol was not worth the worship; — by cases which it would weary you to quote, we might show how invariably, if there be but time to work out the legitimate sequel, separation from God ends in desolation and sorrow. We might show how often the wayward child, who would not sit contented at the Father’s board and eat the children’s bread, has ended at the stye and been fain to clutch at husks which the swine do eat. And from the nature of the case, as well as the Word of God, we might show how inevitably the far country becomes a waste and howling wilderness, and how, soon or late, the soul which there abides must die of hunger.

But we weary you. You would rather hear something on the other side, and to that other side we gladly turn. And if self-seeking can never be successful — if separation from God is the death of the soul — if carelessness about others’ welfare, not to say misanthropy, is misery, there can be little difficulty in deciding what is life and joy and peace.

Love to Christ is happiness. Our late friend David Sandeman was naturally of a sombre temperament; but when it pleased God to reveal to him the Saviour, it was a total transformation. It almost lifted him off the earth, and made him hold so lightly house and lands, and even dear kindred, that he was saved, what is to some of us a sore distraction, a divided heart. The night when he was dying of cholera at Amoy a friend asked him.

“Have you any pain?” and he answered, “The only pain I have known since I knew Jesus Christ is sinr” Have you any message to your friends?”” Tell them, it was only last night that the love of Jesus came rushing into my soul like the waves of the sea; so that I had to cry. Stop, Lord, it is enough. O the height, and depth, and length, and breadth, of the love of Jesus! and I was constrained to cry out —

‘All too long have we been parted;
Let my spirit speed to his.’”

Christ did not disappoint him. For His name’s sake he had sought that far country, and very pleasant did he find the Master’s service there. But the task was soon ended, and death was swallowed up in victory.

Harmony with God is happiness. You may feel, “I am not capable of such concentration. Mine is not a fervid or rapturous nature. It must be very blessed to feel like Sandeman, or rather to feel like Paul — For me to live is Christ. But with dispersive tastes and a desultory turn — fond of books, fond of friends, fond of travel — I despair of being ever drawn up to that height of devotion where One Object is the only spectacle, and love to Him the only feeling.” But if love to Christ is the mainspring of Christianity, Christianity itself is the completion or renovation of our manhood — the emancipation from sin’s dominion of the human nature — the “new” but original “creature “set free for the service of God and for the enjoyment of all God-given happiness. Hear the testimony of one who for the best part of fourscore years had lived this life:” I have heard some say that ’ worlds should not tempt them back to tread again life’s dreary waste, Such language is not for me. I should not shrink from the proposal of repetition. ‘Goodness and mercy have followed me all the days of my life.’ My duties have not been burdening and irksome. My trials have been few compared with my comforts. My pleasures have been cheap and simple, and therefore very numerous. I have enjoyed without satiety the seasons and the sceneries of nature. I have relished the bounties of providence, using them with moderation and thankfulness. I have delighted in the means of grace; unutterable have been my delights in studying and perusing the Scriptures. How have I verified the words of Young —

‘Retire and read thy Bible to be gay!’

I have seldom been without hearing of some instance of usefulness from the pulpit or the press ... I have a better opinion of mankind than I had when I began my public life.“‘” Compare the dissenting minister with Beau Brummell — the one taking God’s way of it, the other always taking his own: — the fop always scrambling after costly enjoyments, and finding them apples of Sodom in his grasp; the contented Christian avowing, “My pleasures have been very numerous, for they were cheap and simple;” the self-centred exquisite leading a life of perpetual * Autobiography of the Rev. W. fay, ip. 158.

envy and vindictiveness and spleen, — the unambitious and cheerful man of God radiating on others his own bright, devout, and hopeful feelings, and so ending with an improved opinion of mankind, whilst the disappointed worldling finished off by saying that rather than save a man he would rescue a drowning- doe.

To dwell on high is happiness. You may think Mr. Jay might well be cheerful, for he was healthy and active and free from all ailment. Hear then what Dr. Arnold says of his sister, long” the victim of hopeless disease: “I never saw a more perfect instance of the spirit of power and of love, and of a sound mind; intense love, almost to the annihilation of selfishness — a daily martyrdom for twenty years, during which she adhered to her earlv-formed resolution of never talking about herself: thoughtful about the very pins and ribands of my wife’s dress, about the making of a doll’s cap for a child, — but of herself, save only as regarded her ripening in all goodness, wholly thoughtless; enjoying everything lovely, graceful, beautiful, high-minded, whether in God’s works or man’s, with the keenest relish; inheriting the earth to the very fulness of the promise, though never leaving her crib, nor changing her posture; and preserved through the very valley of the shadow of death from all fear or impatience, or from every cloud of impaired reason, which might mar the beauty of Christ’s Spirit’s glorious work.”^’’

* Life of Dr. Arnold, letter 52, vol. i. p. 332.