Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to the strangers scattered throughout Asia Minor, addressed the urgent appeal that as strangers—strangers and pilgrims—they should abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul.
Consider what you are, he seems to say, as his words are paraphrased by the greatest of all commentators on his first epistle: “If you were citizens of this world, then you might drive the same trade” with the men of this world, “and follow the same lusts; but seeing you are chosen and called out of this world, and invested into a new society, made free of another city, and are therefore here but travellers passing through to your own country, it is very reasonable that there be this difference betwixt you and the world, that while they live at home your carriage be such as fits strangers, not glutting yourselves with their pleasures, nor surfeiting upon their delicious fruits, as some unwary travellers do abroad; but as wise strangers living warily and soberly, and still minding most of all your journey homewards, suspecting dangers and snares in your way, and so walking with a holy fear, as the Hebrew word for a stranger imports.”
The topic is one upon which Archbishop Leighton ever writes feelingly. As again in his comment on the psalmist’s profession of being a stranger with God, and a sojourner as all his fathers were, the same devout expositor observes that he who looks on himself as a stranger, and is sensible of the darkness round about him in this wilderness, will often put up that request with David, “I am a stranger in the earth: hide not Thy commandments from me.” What, Leighton asks, is the joy of our life, but the thoughts of that other life, our home before us? “And certainly he that lives much in these thoughts, set him where you will here, he is not much pleased nor displeased; but if His Father call him home, that word gives him his heart’s desire.”
Once again, in the sixth of his lectures on the immortality of the soul, Leighton expatiates on the fact that this is not our rest, that we have no place of residence here below: “it is the region of fleas and gnats; and while we search for happiness among these mean and perishing things, we are not only sure to be disappointed, but also not to escape those miseries which, in great numbers, continually beset us; so that we may apply to ourselves the saying of the famous artist confined in the island of Crete, and truly say,—
(“The earth and the sea are shut up against us, and neither of them can favour our escape; the way to heaven is alone open, and this way we will strive to go.”)
Incidentally, it adds to the interest of every such passage in Leighton’s writings to remember a noteworthy circumstance respecting his death. He had been used to say that if he were to choose a place to die in it should be an inn—for that would look so like a pilgrim’s going home, to whom this world was all as an inn. It was his opinion, also, as we read in the memoir of him by Aikman, that “the officious tenderness and care of friends was an entanglement to a dying man, and that the unconcerned attendance of those who could be procured in such a place would give less disturbance.” He had his wish. At the Bell Inn, Warwick Lane, Robert Leighton, in his seventy-fourth year, stranger and pilgrim, drew his last breath.
Of him who walks by faith and not by sight, who places eternity by the side of time, and so regards the one as a mere path or stepping-stone to the other, it is well said by Dr. Chalmers that he actually moves through life in the spirit of a traveller, feels his home to be heaven, and all his dearest hopes and interests to be laid up there; “walking therefore over the world with a more light and unencumbered step than other men, just because all its adversities to him are but the crosses of a rapid journey, and all its joys but the shifting scenery of the land through which he is travelling, and visions of passing loveliness.”
As in the pilgrim’s song of a contemporary clerical poet:
The second of Bishop Beveridge’s Resolutions comprises this utterance,—after the expression of a longing that he could be ever on the mount, taking a view of the land of Canaan, for then what dreams and shadows would all things here below appear to be,—“Well! by the grace of God, I am resolved no longer to tie myself to sense and sight, the sordid and trifling affairs of this life, but always to walk as one of the other world; to behave myself in all places, and at all times, as one already possessed of my inheritance and an inhabitant of the New Jerusalem;—by faith assuring myself I have but a few more days to live below, a little more work to do, and be admitted to a nearer vision and fruition of God, and see Him face to face.” And thus, although at present here in the flesh, the believer’s resolve is to look upon himself as more really an inhabitant of heaven than abiding (for here we have no continuing city) upon earth.
In the words of l’exilé of Lamennais, “La patrie n’est point ici-bas; l’homme vainement l’y cherche; ce qu’il prend pour elle n’est qu’un gite d’une nuit.” Happy they, exclaims Pascal in his Pensées, whose tears are shed, not at the evanescence of all things earthly and perishable, but when they remember Sion—dans le souvenir de leur chère patrie—the heavenly Jerusalem, after which they sigh continually in the weariness of their exile. But as Schiller’s Thekla replies to Neubrunn’s comment on “the journey’s weary length,”—
John Foster describes the Israelite indeed, who is a pilgrim indeed, as resembling a person whose eye, while he is conversing with you about an object or a succession of objects, should glance every moment towards some great obstacle appearing on the distant horizon. “He seems to talk to his friends in somewhat of the manner of expression with which you can imagine that Elijah spoke, if he remarked to his companion any circumstance in the journey from Bethel to Jericho, and from Jericho to the Jordan; a manner betraying the sublime anticipation which was pressing on his thoughts.” To other pilgrims the vision of the land that is very far off may be, as Professor Maurice puts it, not so clear as they wish; but it is more clear than their vision of anything which lies about them; and without it all would be shadow and darkness. “There, in that state, must lie all that they dream of and hope for.” “There only they must live, or have no life.” “When they pray ‘Thy kingdom come,’ they ask that the Great Shepherd will lead them and their brethren out of a land of pits, a thirsty wilderness, a valley of the shadow of death, to a peaceable habitation and a sure dwelling-place.” There is a bleak desert, in the words of one who wrote sacred songs, though himself no sacred poet,—
In that essay of John Foster’s, from which a citation has already been made, the essayist protests against the care so many popular writers seem to take to guard against the inroad of ideas pertaining to another life—as much care as the inhabitants of Holland take against the irruption of the sea; and their writings, he adds, do really form a kind of moral dyke against the invasion from the other world. “They do not instruct a man to act, to enjoy, and to suffer, as a being that may by to-morrow have finally abandoned this orb; everything is done to beguile the feeling of his being ‘a stranger and a pilgrim on the earth.’” They fail to recognise the c’est vrai of the Christian lyrist’s avowal, the—
The object of such a pilgrim is progress—or, rather, progress is the means to an end; and the end is not yet, is not here, but will surely come, and come quickly, and will not tarry. There is a wicket gate towards which they are making progress, and it is the portal of a city that hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God. They who professedly sojourn here as in a strange country, who obey the call to go out into a place which they shall after receive for an inheritance; who confess, and act on the confession, that they are strangers and pilgrims on the earth; they that say and do such things declare plainly that they seek a country, a better country—that is, a heavenly.
Chaucer’s “old style” conveys a meaning the world can never be too old to learn:
We are strangers and sojourners before God, as were all our fathers. By faith it was that Abraham sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise; in tabernacles, that bespeak the stranger and pilgrim upon earth; not in houses built to endure. For he confessed, and denied not, but confessed that here he had no continuing city. True, a citizen he was of no mean city. But it was not of the earth, earthy. For he looked for a city which hath foundations, more everlasting than the hills. Meanwhile, God’s statutes were his songs in the house of his pilgrimage.
The Bird of God is Wordsworth’s epithet for that “resplendent wanderer” called by Eastern islanders the Bird of Heaven, and by us of the West, Bird of Paradise; and, as usual with the serenely meditative bard of Rydal, there is moral, nay, religious teaching in the symbolism of his strain:—
An appalling pestilence raged in Carthage, and so gave deadly emphasis to the exhortations of St. Cyprian, when he, a good shepherd, sought to lead the sheep of his flock to green pastures and still waters of comfort; reminding them, as he stood between the living and the dead, while as yet the plague was stayed not, that they had renounced the world, and were abiding here as strangers and pilgrims only. “Let us,” he besought them, “embrace that time which gives to each one his home, which, delivering us from this world, and loosing us from worldly snares, restores us to paradise and the kingdom.” Who, he asks, that is placed in a foreign land, would not hasten to return to his own country? Who that saileth towards his own, would not eagerly desire a prosperous wind to bring him swiftly to the embrace of those he loves? “Our country we believe to be paradise: the patriarchs we esteem our parents. Why, then, do we not speed and run, that we may behold our country and salute our parents?”
Salutary though the sentiment be, however, it admits of one-sided exaggeration. There are good people who, for instance, exalt and expatiate upon the death of godly infants, as though to quit this earth of ours at the very earliest date were the most blessed of privileges. The idea of man being sent into the world for any definite purpose never seems, it has been justly said, to enter the minds of these good people. “With them life is but an irksome omnibus-journey—the shorter the better—and to be got over by each without any regard to the comfort or requirements of his fellow-travellers.” Only in part are these strictures on “the shorter the better” applicable, if at all, to the theme and expression of Mrs. Browning’s sonnet:—
Addison devotes a paragraph in one of his Spectators to the fact of men being in Scripture called strangers and sojourners upon earth, and life a pilgrimage. And he refers to several heathen as well as Christian authors, who under the same kind of metaphor have represented the world as an inn, which was only designed to furnish us with accommodation in this our passage. It is therefore very absurd, urges our moral essayist, to think of setting up our rest before we come to our journey’s end; and not rather to take care of the reception we shall there meet with, than to fix our thoughts on the little conveniences and advantages which we enjoy one above another in the way to it.
“The Illusiveness of Life” is the title of a sermon on the patriarchs as sojourners in a strange country, by the late F. W. Robertson, of Brighton; who with characteristic force and insight explains the deception of life’s promise, and the meaning of that deception. He shows how our natural anticipations deceive us—every human life being a fresh one, bright with hopes that will never be realized. With our affections, he goes on to say, it is still worse, because they promise more. “Men’s affections are but the tabernacles of Canaan—the tents of a night—not permanent habitations, even for this life.” Where, he asks, are the charms of character, the perfection and the purity and the truthfulness which seemed so resplendent in our friend? They were only the shape of our own conceptions—our creative shaping intellect projected its own fantasies on him; and hence we outgrow our early friendships—outgrow the intensity of all: we dwell in tents; we never find a home, even in the land of promise, any more than Abraham did. “Life is an unenjoyable Canaan, with nothing real or substantial in it.” But there is another beside the sentimental way, trite enough, of considering this aspect of life—as a bubble, a dream, a delusion, a phantasm, and that other is the way of faith. “The ancient saints felt as keenly as any moralist could feel the brokenness of life’s promises: they confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims here; they said that they had here no continuing city; but they did not mournfully moralize on this; they said it cheerfully, and rejoiced that it was so.” Strangers—the very term implies a distant home. Pilgrims—the law of whose pilgrimage is to make progress. Forgetting the things behind; rating at their true worth the things around; earnestly pressing forward to the things before. Keble’s devout lyric on the escape to Zoar is pitched in this key:—