Letters to the Editor
JORDANS
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
• Sue,—They are threatening to drive a main road past Jordans.
Why sliould that trouble anyone ? Men must go their ways through the world on their lawful errands, and roads are needed to carry them with swiftness and smoothness from here to there. Why not, if need be, past Jordans ?
You do not know Jordans if you can ask that question. If you do know it the thing is beyond imagination. To violate the peace of Jordans is to destroy something that puts quiet into men's lives. And mankind needs quiet to-day. It needs resolve ; it needs courage ; it needs liberal charity. But as foundation for all things it needs a deep-seated peace.
And Jordans is a well where men come to draw the waters of peace. London, with its toil and its turmoil, its striving and its strain, is no more than twenty miles away, but that twenty miles divides one world from another. Jordans with its swaying beech-boughs, Jordans with its smooth turf, no formalism robbing it of its quiet grace, Jordans with its plain grave-mounds and its plainer head-stones—" William Penn, born 1644, died 1718 "—is a place of the spiritual as London is. a .place of the material. Here the world is too much with us. There the world and its insistence falls away. We can turn aside into a quiet place and rest awhile.
Not into a desert place. For Jordans means far more than the peace of solitude. It has laid its peace even on humanity. Men of' all creeds and no creeds can gather in that austere room where generation on geneiation of Quakers have gathered before them through the centuries, and take peace into their souls as they sit together there with the sunlight playing on the grass through the open doorway and the beech boughs sighing as they sway before the breeze. Unlikely men and women—men and women known through two hemispheres have come and worshipped there from time to time Their names would draw surprised and respectful recognition. But their names will not be mentioned here, for though they may be great in Church or State, their presence has given nothing to Jordans. It is Jordans that has given something to them, and they themselves pay reverent tribute to the genius of the place.
Do not try overmuch to analyse that genius. Take it for what it is and give due thanks for it. Call it the spirit of Quakerism if you will, though that is to narrow down some- thing infinitely broad. Call it the sense of the Divine. That perhaps is nearer the essential truth, though divinity must • be something that no unit of humanity finds out of reach, for no man need be shut out from what Jordans gives. You may be Quaker, you may be Catholic, you may be Baptist, you may be pantheist, the peace of Jordans, if once you capture it, will reach you over any seas and still your unquiet spirit by its memory.
That is why a road past Jordans matters. Some despite the place has suffered and must suffer. It cannot be at once in the world and-out of it. It stands, as it is, at a place where three ways meet, and the spaces of silence are broken for the gathered company on Sunday mornings by the grating of gears as the motors mount the hill beyond the graveyard. But, within due limits, noise without serves only to emphasize the peace within. And the Jordans roads are still by- roads where no unbroken stream of traffic- comes. So may they, so must they, always be, unless all the imponderables— the things that bear no label of price because you cannot estimate their worth—are to be cast aside that in our rush through life we may rush a little faster still and save five meagre minutes on some often purposeless journey.
There lies the conflict between the Jordans of to-day and the Jordans as the road-builders would leave it. For the road builders five minutes saved—five minutes more for pleasure, five minutes more for labour, five minutes more for .making money—is all-important. Theirs to snatch at the • minutes. For Jordans the silent witness to eternity. They • stand for the surface things that seem to matter to a few of the little men who once or twice in their fleeting lives pass by that way. Jordan stands to all men for the things that to all men matter...life and death and God and some solace to- the unsatisfied searchings of their souls. For these, Jordans itself, the mellowed brick of its meeting-house, the graves outside, the foaming springtide white of the cherry orchard running up to the old farmhouse where Quakers worshipped round the open hearth while Cromwell ruled and, at greater peril, in the later years under Charles and James—for them Jordans and all around it is road building in itself. For paths must be opened and rough places made smooth for the spirit as well as for the wandering feet. And to-day in far lands and strange places, in China and India, across the Atlantic, in the furthest Pacific, the memory of a little four- square settled building, plain brick without, plain benches within, plain burial mounds hedged in by a plain board fence, means for men and women caught in the perplexities of life a pathway pointed, a road mapped out, that carries them somehow through the jungle and the fen.
More than for Quakerism or any creed, more than for England or any parcel of earth's soil, Jordans stands for the spiritual in the midst of the material, for the eternal in the midst of the transient. Is that so slight a heritage that we can violate a shrine set thus at our very threshold ? Do men need peace so little in their lives to-day ? Must the outward mechanism of life be always dominant ? To the roadmakers themselves the challenge may be offered. Let him among them who has never known a stirring of his spirit towards something larger and more lasting than the life about him lift the first pick, and be the first to rob the generations of the future of what Jordans has meant to the generations of the
Previous page
