Adam Bede
“But perhaps doubts come into your mind like this: Can God take much
notice of us poor people? Perhaps he only made the world for the great
and the wise and the rich. It doesn’t cost him much to give us our
little handful of victual and bit of clothing; but how do we know he
cares for us any more than we care for the worms and things in the
garden, so as we rear our carrots and onions? Will God take care of us
when we die? And has he any comfort for us when we are lame and sick
and helpless? Perhaps, too, he is angry with us; else why does the
blight come, and the bad harvests, and the fever, and all sorts of pain
and trouble? For our life is full of trouble, and if God sends us good,
he seems to send bad too. How is it? How is it?
“Ah, dear friends, we are in sad want of good news about God; and what
does other good news signify if we haven’t that? For everything else
comes to an end, and when we die we leave it all. But God lasts when
everything else is gone. What shall we do if he is not our friend?”
Then Dinah told how the good news had been brought, and how the mind of
God towards the poor had been made manifest in the life of Jesus,
dwelling on its lowliness and its acts of mercy.
“So you see, dear friends,” she went on, “Jesus spent his time almost
all in doing good to poor people; he preached out of doors to them, and
he made friends of poor workmen, and taught them and took pains with
them. Not but what he did good to the rich too, for he was full of love
to all men, only he saw as the poor were more in want of his help. So
he cured the lame and the sick and the blind, and he worked miracles to
feed the hungry because, he said, he was sorry for them; and he was
very kind to the little children and comforted those who had lost their
friends; and he spoke very tenderly to poor sinners that were sorry for
their sins.
“Ah, wouldn’t you love such a man if you saw him—if he were here in
this village? What a kind heart he must have! What a friend he would be
to go to in trouble! How pleasant it must be to be taught by him.
“Well, dear friends, who _was_ this man? Was he only a good man—a very
good man, and no more—like our dear Mr. Wesley, who has been taken from
us?... He was the Son of God—‘in the image of the Father,’ the Bible
says; that means, just like God, who is the beginning and end of all
things—the God we want to know about. So then, all the love that Jesus
showed to the poor is the same love that God has for us. We can
understand what Jesus felt, because he came in a body like ours and
spoke words such as we speak to each other. We were afraid to think
what God was before—the God who made the world and the sky and the
thunder and lightning. We could never see him; we could only see the
things he had made; and some of these things was very terrible, so as
we might well tremble when we thought of him. But our blessed Saviour
has showed us what God is in a way us poor ignorant people can
understand; he has showed us what God’s heart is, what are his feelings
towards us.
“But let us see a little more about what Jesus came on earth for.
Another time he said, ‘I came to seek and to save that which was lost’;
and another time, ‘I came not to call the righteous but sinners to
repentance.’
“The _lost!... Sinners!_... Ah, dear friends, does that mean you and
me?”
Hitherto the traveller had been chained to the spot against his will by
the charm of Dinah’s mellow treble tones, which had a variety of
modulation like that of a fine instrument touched with the unconscious
skill of musical instinct. The simple things she said seemed like
novelties, as a melody strikes us with a new feeling when we hear it
sung by the pure voice of a boyish chorister; the quiet depth of
conviction with which she spoke seemed in itself an evidence for the
truth of her message. He saw that she had thoroughly arrested her
hearers. The villagers had pressed nearer to her, and there was no
longer anything but grave attention on all faces. She spoke slowly,
though quite fluently, often pausing after a question, or before any
transition of ideas. There was no change of attitude, no gesture; the
effect of her speech was produced entirely by the inflections of her
voice, and when she came to the question, “Will God take care of us
when we die?” she uttered it in such a tone of plaintive appeal that
the tears came into some of the hardest eyes. The stranger had ceased
to doubt, as he had done at the first glance, that she could fix the
attention of her rougher hearers, but still he wondered whether she
could have that power of rousing their more violent emotions, which
must surely be a necessary seal of her vocation as a Methodist
preacher, until she came to the words, “Lost!—Sinners!” when there was
a great change in her voice and manner. She had made a long pause
before the exclamation, and the pause seemed to be filled by agitating
thoughts that showed themselves in her features. Her pale face became
paler; the circles under her eyes deepened, as they did when tears
half-gather without falling; and the mild loving eyes took an
expression of appalled pity, as if she had suddenly discerned a
destroying angel hovering over the heads of the people. Her voice
became deep and muffled, but there was still no gesture. Nothing could
be less like the ordinary type of the Ranter than Dinah. She was not
preaching as she heard others preach, but speaking directly from her
own emotions and under the inspiration of her own simple faith.
But now she had entered into a new current of feeling. Her manner
became less calm, her utterance more rapid and agitated, as she tried
to bring home to the people their guilt, their wilful darkness, their
state of disobedience to God—as she dwelt on the hatefulness of sin,
the Divine holiness, and the sufferings of the Saviour, by which a way
had been opened for their salvation. At last it seemed as if, in her
yearning desire to reclaim the lost sheep, she could not be satisfied
by addressing her hearers as a body. She appealed first to one and then
to another, beseeching them with tears to turn to God while there was
yet time; painting to them the desolation of their souls, lost in sin,
feeding on the husks of this miserable world, far away from God their
Father; and then the love of the Saviour, who was waiting and watching
for their return.
There was many a responsive sigh and groan from her fellow-Methodists,
but the village mind does not easily take fire, and a little
smouldering vague anxiety that might easily die out again was the
utmost effect Dinah’s preaching had wrought in them at present. Yet no
one had retired, except the children and “old Feyther Taft,” who being
too deaf to catch many words, had some time ago gone back to his
inglenook. Wiry Ben was feeling very uncomfortable, and almost wishing
he had not come to hear Dinah; he thought what she said would haunt him
somehow. Yet he couldn’t help liking to look at her and listen to her,
though he dreaded every moment that she would fix her eyes on him and
address him in particular. She had already addressed Sandy Jim, who was
now holding the baby to relieve his wife, and the big soft-hearted man
had rubbed away some tears with his fist, with a confused intention of
being a better fellow, going less to the Holly Bush down by the
Stone-pits, and cleaning himself more regularly of a Sunday.
In front of Sandy Jim stood Chad’s Bess, who had shown an unwonted
quietude and fixity of attention ever since Dinah had begun to speak.
Not that the matter of the discourse had arrested her at once, for she
was lost in a puzzling speculation as to what pleasure and satisfaction
there could be in life to a young woman who wore a cap like Dinah’s.
Giving up this inquiry in despair, she took to studying Dinah’s nose,
eyes, mouth, and hair, and wondering whether it was better to have such
a sort of pale face as that, or fat red cheeks and round black eyes
like her own. But gradually the influence of the general gravity told
upon her, and she became conscious of what Dinah was saying. The gentle
tones, the loving persuasion, did not touch her, but when the more
severe appeals came she began to be frightened. Poor Bessy had always
been considered a naughty girl; she was conscious of it; if it was
necessary to be very good, it was clear she must be in a bad way. She
couldn’t find her places at church as Sally Rann could, she had often
been tittering when she “curcheyed” to Mr. Irwine; and these religious
deficiencies were accompanied by a corresponding slackness in the minor
morals, for Bessy belonged unquestionably to that unsoaped lazy class
of feminine characters with whom you may venture to “eat an egg, an
apple, or a nut.” All this she was generally conscious of, and hitherto
had not been greatly ashamed of it. But now she began to feel very much
as if the constable had come to take her up and carry her before the
justice for some undefined offence. She had a terrified sense that God,
whom she had always thought of as very far off, was very near to her,
and that Jesus was close by looking at her, though she could not see
him. For Dinah had that belief in visible manifestations of Jesus,
which is common among the Methodists, and she communicated it
irresistibly to her hearers: she made them feel that he was among them
bodily, and might at any moment show himself to them in some way that
would strike anguish and penitence into their hearts.
“See!” she exclaimed, turning to the left, with her eyes fixed on a
point above the heads of the people. “See where our blessed Lord stands
and weeps and stretches out his arms towards you. Hear what he says:
‘How often would I have gathered you as a hen gathereth her chickens
under her wings, and ye would not!’... and ye would not,” she repeated,
in a tone of pleading reproach, turning her eyes on the people again.
“See the print of the nails on his dear hands and feet. It is your sins
that made them! Ah! How pale and worn he looks! He has gone through all
that great agony in the garden, when his soul was exceeding sorrowful
even unto death, and the great drops of sweat fell like blood to the
ground. They spat upon him and buffeted him, they scourged him, they
mocked him, they laid the heavy cross on his bruised shoulders. Then
they nailed him up. Ah, what pain! His lips are parched with thirst,
and they mock him still in this great agony; yet with those parched
lips he prays for them, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what
they do.’ Then a horror of great darkness fell upon him, and he felt
what sinners feel when they are for ever shut out from God. That was
the last drop in the cup of bitterness. ‘My God, my God!’ he cries,
‘why hast Thou forsaken me?’
“All this he bore for you! For you—and you never think of him; for
you—and you turn your backs on him; you don’t care what he has gone
through for you. Yet he is not weary of toiling for you: he has risen
from the dead, he is praying for you at the right hand of God—‘Father,
forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ And he is upon this
earth too; he is among us; he is there close to you now; I see his
wounded body and his look of love.”
Here Dinah turned to Bessy Cranage, whose bonny youth and evident
vanity had touched her with pity.
“Poor child! Poor child! He is beseeching you, and you don’t listen to
him. You think of ear-rings and fine gowns and caps, and you never
think of the Saviour who died to save your precious soul. Your cheeks
will be shrivelled one day, your hair will be grey, your poor body will
be thin and tottering! Then you will begin to feel that your soul is
not saved; then you will have to stand before God dressed in your sins,
in your evil tempers and vain thoughts. And Jesus, who stands ready to