The Two Schools

I have thought that every man has formed some opinion, however true or false. concerning himself—that is to say, his personal appearance, his abilities, physical and mental, and his social status. To put it in another form, every man has some idea of his own importance; although it is not at all times that he will communicate this idea to others. As a rule he keeps such matters to himself. And there are, doubtless, sufficient grounds for his conduct. It stands to reason that the man himself knows himself best, and that it is he who is the best fitted to form a correct judgment on the matter. If he is a man of parts, he dare not say so for fear of lowering himself in the estimation of others, and of appearing smaller to their minds than to his own. It is only one in a million who has the assurance, like the Apostle Paul, fearlessly to announce his superiority over others, although the proportion of those who believe in their own superiority is much greater. So brightly doth the beauty of humility shine before men, that even honesty is obliged to veil its eyes in her presence. How great must He have been who could make such revelations, set up such claims for Himself without tarnish either to His meekness or His modesty.

It is commonly supposed that greatness and humility should go together; yet there is room to think that what men call humility is very often but another form of wisdom, or rather strategy. Picture to yourself Dr.——in midst of the Association, addressing his hearers after this style:—“Well, my dear brethren, you know I am greater than you all, that I can write a tract or compose a sermon better than any of you. In a word, you know, that for culture and natural ability, I am as good as a dozen of some of you, and better than any two of your best.” What would the brethren say? Would they not stare at each other, and would their looks not convey a plain hint that the speaker was going off his head? And yet, who knows better than the speaker himself that that which I have just put into his mouth is true in every word, although he would not take the world for saying so. The really great man feels he can leave it to others to form an estimate of him without any guidance of his own, the probability being that they will rate him only too highly, and he prefers that they should err in this direction than in any other. In neither great nor small men is there too much readiness to set others right who evince a tendency to value them at more than their proper worth.

Speaking from personal experience, I can say that the conciousness of inferiority is an uncomfortable one; and this is possibly the reason that the small man, on every occasion, endeavours to show all of himself there is to be seen, and that to the best advantage. This tendency is observable in other animals besides man. The other day I saw two cocks upon a dunghill— a great Cochin China, long-shanked and high-crested, and a pert little bantam. The one looked listless and easy-going; but as for the other, how he thrust out his breast, and standing a-tiptoe, held head and tail so high that they nearly touched each other. In clear note he crowed and crowed again, attempting, it struck me, to pick a quarrel with the Cochin, round whom he circled, saying, after his own fashion: “Don’t you see my breast and tail? You haven’t a tail like this one.” Cochin, for a while, pretended not to notice him, but at last he too crowed, although with note so much like a groan that I fancied he must be commiserating the dandy upon his diminutiveness. I do not know whether it is the Cochin and the Bantam who imitate men, or it is the latter who imitate the former; but there is certainly some resemblance between them. This, however, is what I was going to ask, “Rhys, what measure hast thou taken of thyself? ‘There is no one here to listen, so thou can’st answer honestly and without much danger of being thought either conceited or hypocritical. Thou art a preacher, the pastor of a flock, thou rhymest occasionally, and contributest at times to the periodicals. What station dost thou occupy in thine own eyes?” Well, putting my foot upon the neck of pride, I shall answer honestly, without deceiving myself, there being nobody about to hear.

He who knows everything knows that in those matters I ought and deserve to be great, namely, religion and the proof of things spiritual, I am painfully small. And the more I have to do with things divine and eternal, all the more do I feel the grip of earth upon me, all the heavier do the weights become which hold me down. But that the promises of Holy Writ were so strong and emphatic concerning the power and grace of the Saviour. I would long since have sunk into despair under the load of a depraved heart and a guilty conscience. My prayer, from the depth of that heart, is that He may strengthen me in the faith.

With regard to my personal appearance, I know there is nothing attractive about it, and I have often wondered at the reflection that some one. at some time, had a tender regard for me, as I shall have occasion to refer to later on. I have many times envied that charm of manner possessed by “Glan Alun,” which made everybody forget his person. Dear man! I I prefer thee to a hundred of these comely and smart, but soulless ones. At the same time I try to believe there is nothing repulsive in my appearance. Can it be that I am mistaken? Be it as it may, I should be more than pleased were I Thomas John, and were it possible to possess his remarkable soul. After all, a fine and commanding presence is a great thing in a preacher, and he who climbs the pulpit without one is always at a discount.

In the matter of natural tendencies—well, yes, there is no one here to listen—I think I excel some of my brethren. And they know it or, at any rate, ought to. I would not for the world tell this to anybody, and if anybody were to say it to me, it is certain I should protest; and that, maybe, is reckoned for humility in me.

As to the amount of knowledge I possess, it is neither here nor there. Indeed, there are in the church here mere youngsters, who, in some directions, know a good deal more than I do; and I am sore put to it very often to prevent them from understanding as much. Take geography for instance, I know next to nothing of that valuable science; and when some of these same youngsters happen to question me upon the subject, I am forced to tax my ingenuity to the utmost in order to conceal my ignorance. It would never do to let them know how ignorant I, a church minister, really am, because, the boys, poor things, believe I know everything. 1 have various ways of getting out of difficulties of this kind. When a question is asked me which I do not know how to answer, I invariably direct it to a lad in the class whom I think able to do it for me, and if I fancy he has answered correctly, I bestow upon him a nod of commendation. But if a question be asked which neither I nor any one else in the class can answer, then I endeavour to impress upon the minds of my scholars the importance of everyone’s reading and investigating for himself, the knowledge thereby acquired being of much greater value to them than any they would get by my answering the question off-hand. I add that the question will be borne in mini until the following meeting, when I shall expect every one of them to be able to answer it. Meanwhile I hunt up the information for myself. Of course no one knows all this, and the wise would not blame me even if they did know it, because were I to admit my ignorance before the boys, it would detract greatly from my pastoral usefulness.

What occasioned the writing of so long a preface to the present chapter was my thought of the misfortune it is, for a preacher more particularly, to be deprived of the advantages of education in one’s early youth. He is constantly stumbling against something he ought to have learned in school when a boy, and he can never aspire to the position and the usefulness of those who have received a thorough elementary training in their childhood. When I was a boy there were only two day schools in the town of my birth. One was kept by a gentleman of the name of Smith, whom I remember very well. Mr. Smith was the great oracle of the town. He was looked up to by some people with an admiration bordering almost upon worship. He was believed to be proficient in at least seven languages, and he was said to utter words which no one else could understand. I heard my mother declare that Mr. Smith and Dic Aberdaron were the two greatest scholars the world had ever seen. Whatever my opinion may, by this time, be with reference to the accuracy of my mother’s judgment, I know that I implicitly believed in it then, I would pull up in the street when Mr. Smith passed by, and look after him with an indescribable awe. He was a tall, thin, grey-headed personage, wearing black clothes and spectacles. I think he was the only one in the town at that time who allowed his moustache to grow. Mr. Smith’s was looked upon as a very superior sort of institution, and none ever thought of sending their children there save the gentry and the well-to-do. I remember associating some great mystery with the green bags in which his scholars used to carry their books.

I have reason to believe that mother would never have thought of sending me to school to Mr. Smith, even had her circumstances permitted it, because she considered him irreligious. She had a variety of reasons for forming this opinion of him. For one thing, he went to the Llan on the Sunday instead of “professing religion;” or, in other words, he frequented the Church of England instead of going to chapel. The “English Church” and “Religion” were two words very far removed from each other in my mother’s vocabulary. Then again there was his habit of taking a stroll on Sunday afternoons instead of remaining at home pondering over the Word and the Doctrine. Moreover, she had heard from an old maid-servant of Mr. Smith’s that he had in his house a “Devil-raising Book,” which he was constantly reading “after dark.” There could be no doubt of the correctness of this story, because one night Mr. Smith left the book open upon the table, where the girl saw it next morning. Thoughtlessly she drew near and tried to read it, but not one syllable could she make out beyond the single word “Satan,” and before she had visited the room a second time the book had disappeared. It happened that the girl did not know a word of English. As additional proof, mother recollected very well that Mr. Smith was in Parson Brown’s company when the latter visited Ty’nllidiart to lay the spirit there, and shut it down in his tobacco box. Hereupon my mother came to this conclusion:—that if Mr. Smith, who was not a parson, was able to help Mr. Brown, who was a parson, in the work of laying spirits, he could not be any stranger to the work of raising them either. But mother’s principal reason for believing Mr. Smith to be irreligious was, unquestionably, the fact of his wearing a moustache. Nobody could persuade her, she declared, that the man who had proved the great things of religion could possibly allow the hair to grow upon his upper lip. She had never seen any one deserving the name of Christian who wore a moustache. What would Mr. Elias and Mr. Rees,* have taken for wearing moustachios? A short whisker near the ear was a different thing entirely. As I have said, these considerations, even could my mother have afforded to send me, proved an unsurmountable obstacle to my going to school to Mr. Smith. And besides, my mother did not believe in higher education. I heard her say, more than once, that she never knew good to come of over- educating children, and that too much of this sort of thing had led many a man to the gallows. “As to the children of the poor,” she would remark, “if they are able to read their Bible, and know the way into the Life eternal, that is quite enough for them.”

The other school was kept by one Robert Davies, or, as he was commonly called, “Robin the Soldier,”—a well-set, fleshy man, but somewhat advanced in years, who had spent the prime of life in the British Army, where he distinguished himself as a brave, intrepid warrior. He returned to his native village minus his right leg, which he had left behind him in Belgium, a pledge of his zeal and fidelity in his country’s cause, whilst campaigning against “Bony.” Robert supplied this deficiency by means of a wooden leg, of foreign growth but his own shaping, and tipped with an iron ferrule. Upon his departure from the army the Government then in power deemed it incumbent upon them to endow him with a pension of sixpence a day for the rest of his life, in recognition of his valuable services as a soldier, and as a substantial recompense for the loss of his limb; for which reasons Robert used to address his wooden leg as “Old Sixpenny.” For some weeks after his return from the army, he used to be regularly asked out by old friends to supper for the sake of hearing him give an account of his battles, and all he had seen and heard abroad. Robert, however, speedily got to the end of his tether, and his stories gradually grew to be a good deal staler than his appetite, so that at last the only place they were tolerated was the taproom of the Cross Foxes, to which Robert became a constant visitor.

The income from the wooden leg being barely sufficient to meet the weekly calls of the Cross Foxes, our old Soldier speedily found himself in straightened circumstances. But relief was not long in coming. Providence found him an opening as toll-gate keeper, in which situation, for a season, he fared sumptuously every day. He grew sleek-looking, and self-satisfied, and doubtless would have continued to do so, had not the turnpike authorities happened to discover that it was not Robert who kept the gate, but that it was the gate which kept him. In solemn conclave they came to the conclusion that this was not the original intention of the trust, some of them happening to be self-willed and hard-hearted, going the length even of insisting that the tolls should be restored to their intended use; and Robert was obliged to leave in consequence.

Parson Brown was wondrously kind and charitable towards all his parishioners, especially the orthodox. And inasmuch as the old soldier was one of the “dearly beloved brethren,” and a devout man—that is to say, one who went to church every Sunday morning, to bed every Sunday afternoon, and to the Cross Foxes every Sunday night,—Mr. Brown took an especial interest in his welfare, and was the very first to suggest to him the advisability of setting up school.

“Robbit,” said Parson Brown to him in broken Welsh—so I heard mother tell the story—“Robbit, you scholar, you able to read and write and say catechism—you start school in old empty office there—me help you—many children without learning hereabouts. Robbit; you charge penny week, make lot coin, live comfortable, I do my best to you. You. Robbit, have been fight for the country, me fight for you now.”

Fairplay for Mr. Brown, he had a warm heart, and he never rested until he had set Robert on his feet, or rather on his foot, in this matter of starting a day school.

Soldier Robin’s school was an old established institution before I got of age to be able to go to it. How my mother came to send me there my memory is not sufficiently alert to furnish the details. Sure I am that no burning desire of mine towards education gave the inducement. I am pretty positive, also, that it was not because mother was satisfied of Robert’s religiosity. The likeliest reason I can think of at the moment is that Mr. Brown had used his influence with mother in the matter. Although believing Mr. Brown had never proved “the great things,” she entertained, I know, a very high opinion of him as a philanthropist and neighbour. ‘The only thing which reconciled me to the notion of going to school was the fact that Will Bryan was already a member of that valued institution. I remember very well a consciousness that I was doing a great work by going to school, and that I deserved some sort of tribute for my self denial. Now I have observed, in reading biography, that seldom incommemorate in the life-history of the author is the day upon which he first went to school. That day is fresh in my memory, and I recall it and its occurrences, not as my predecessors have done, for other people’s diversion, but for my own, who am the only one, probably, who can find diversion therein. Perhaps it will be better if I take another chapter in which to relate that day’s doings.