A MODERN "MR. FEARING."
T is extraordinary to what an extent a fashion in dress
will appear to alter types of face. A little boy dressed for a fancy ball after the fashion of his great-grandfather as a child shows his kinship ten times more than in his twentieth- century clothing. We have often longed to paint out the clothes of some Roundhead portrait, and paint in a. coat, collar, and waistcoat such as we see every day. We believe the awakening of historical sympathy which would be the result of this vandalism would be well worth the detriment to the picture. In-word-portraits, as in paint-portraits, changes in fashion hide the uniformity of nature, and we may have a personality presented to us by a literary artist who resembles exactly many personalities of to-day, but a change in the manner of the presentment—in the draperies of the figure as it were—prevents our being immediately struck by the likeness. Take such a picture as that of Mr. Fearing drawn for us by Btmyan in the second part of " The Pilgrim's Progress." With some slight change in the setting the portrait might stand for many men in the present day.
Mr. Fearing, his spiritual biographer tells us, was "a good man," though, from a religious point of view, "much down in spirit." He was always " afraid he should come short of whither he had a desire to go,"' and he spent nearly all his days " in the dark," for he was troubled about his latter end, and " doubted his interest in the Celestial Country." His fears, however, Bunyan assures us, arose from "the weakness of his mind thereabout, not from any weakness of spirit as to the practical part of a pilgrim's life," for he was scrupulous " above many," stuck to his first ideal of conduct, and even in his worst fits of religious depression " he never went back" from it. Weakness of mind in the mouth of the author of the "Pilgrim's Progress" apparently meant uncertainty, not stupidity, for Mr. Fearing was evidently an intellectual man. He loved " to see ancient things and ponder about them," and he loved good talk, though he was shy, and pre- ferred to listen to it " behind a screen." He took great delight in the Scriptures, and spent his happiest days in the house of Mr. Interpreter, who "carried himself wonderful lovingly " towards this ill-assured pilgrim. In matters unconnected with the supernatural Mr. Fear- ing could show fortitude, pluck, and even rashness. In Vanity Fair he wanted to fight every man that he saw, and "I feared," says his guide, "that we should both have been knocked on the head so hot was he against their fooleries." He "went down into the Valley of Humiliation," he goes on, " as well as I ever saw a man in my life." In " that empty and solitary place, free from noise and from the hurryings of this life," he was quite happy, tracing up and down " and picking the flowers. At the Hill Difficulty also "he made no stick," and was not afraid of the lions, but " could have bit a firebrand had it stood in his way." Only in the Valley of the Shadow of Death his terrors returned, and when he came to "the river that hath no bridge" he was sure he should be drowned for ever, and never see the face of Him he had come so far to behold. Here, however, a remark- able thing happened ; the river sank very low, and Mr. Fearing went over "not much above wet-shod." Just before he vanished from sight his guide took leave of him, and hoped he might have a good reception in the world unseen, By this time the pilgrim had ceased to tremble and bewail himself, and replied in a strong voice, " I shall, I shall."
Nobody now paints portraits quite after this method, but the picture produced is still true to a certain type of humanity, a type far commoner to-day than it was in the time of Bunyan. The Mr. Fearing of 1902 is wonderfully like the portrait of his ancestor. Like him he is a man of learned tastes, and is sub- ject to religious, or as some people would say irreligious, de: pression. When we see him to-day we generally see him in Vanity Fair,—fighting. He is a professional man, or possibly a- politician, over-eager, over-cultivated, over-scrupulous, having perhaps weakened the natural springs of hope in his nature by hard work. In spite of his name, we probably think him a very independent and perhaps too uncompromis- ing a man. He is fastidious, and will have nothing to do with the seamy side of professional ambition or of party politics. Probably we should be a little afraid of him as a colleague lest he should biing on us some of the " knocks " levelled at himself, and drag down on his party the severities of public opinion. Such a man as he has seldom the qualities which make for early success. Sooner or later he is bound to visit the Valley of Humiliation. Thither he goes to save his moral dignity, about which he is perhaps too sensitive. He does not lose it on the way down, consequently he does not bemoan himself at the bottom. Once there, indeed, he seems to be " a little cheery " ; his tendency to stick out about trifles frets him less in a position of no responsibility, and he is at peace, —able to see the humorous side of his own discomfiture, and full of gratitude to those few friends who press closer to a man in misfortune. The lions in the uphill path of poverty do not frighten him, and he is content with simple pleasures. But whether he succeeds or fails, he is always liable to terrible depressions. He never forgets the precipice which yawns along one side of the path of life, and when with his depart- ing friends Sympathy takes him into the Valley of the Shadow of Death he seems to abandon all hope. Religious people seldom count him among their company, for he will not abide conventional consolation, and though he has a restless anxiety to know the reason for the hope that is in those who have it, he maintains a strictly ambiguous religious attitude behind a screen of silence or speculation. Towards the end of life the prospect of parting with his work, his friends, his reading, strikes him as more and more fearful. Like the men of Samuel's time, he " kicks at the sacrifice" sooner or later demanded of us all, but at the very last he may lose, like his prototype, all fear of drowning. How is it, asks his biographer of the seventeenth century, and how is it, echoes his biographer of the twentieth, that "such a good man should be all his days so much in the dark " ? There are two reasons, according to Bunyan. The first is " that the wise God will have it so.; some must pipe and some must weep. Now Mr. Fearing played upon this bass. He and his fellows sound the sackbut, whose notes are more doleful than the notes of other music are ; though indeed some say the bass is the ground of music. For my part," he adds, "I care not for that profession which begins not in heaviness of mind. The first string which the musician touches is the bass, when he intends to put all in tune ; God also plays upon this string first when He sets the soul in tune for Himself."
It is impossible to better John Bunyan's explanation; indeed, we believe it to be susceptible of a wider inter- pretation than it was originally intended to bear. Does any good to the Church as a whole spring from the pain and weariness of these unwilling doubters ? We believe that it certainly does. Is it not possible that they may be, as it were, the instrument by which God from time to time puts Christendom in tune ? There are two ways by which faith degenerates. One is by assuming to be right, and the other is by becoming indifferent. The evils of indifference are evident; the evils of a hard-and-fast certainty—an appropria- tion by religion of the methods of argument proper to arithmetic—are likewise provable. A Church which believes itself the sole repository of saving truth will persecute if it has the chance, and persecution is more subversive of Christ's teaching than any amount o: mistakes in dogma. Again, a Church which presents to its children a cut-and-dried plan of salvation, a bargain with which they must close or perish, will end by killing the spirit of true religion in its adherents. At such crises as these, if Christianity is to be preserved in its spiritual purity the Church must again be "put in tune." The certainty which has corrupted faith is shaken for a time, and men are again required " to serve God for nought?' The fact that there are to be found in every age those who will do so, those who, while doubting their " interest in the Celestial Country," yet keep in the narrow way of righteousness, and pursue the ideals of the Great Interpreter, is simply an instance of the power of the divine attraction, and a refuta- tion of the common, if tacit, theory that the dogmatic assurance of man is required to maintain the all-pervading power of God.
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