Scripture texts illustrated by general literature

“He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” These words cried Jesus, at the close of His parable of the Sower. And He went on to say that to some, to the many, He spake in parables, that seeing they might not see—not having eyes to see; and that hearing they might not understand—not having ears to hear in the Gospel sense. Nor in the Old Testament sense; for these very words are cited from Isaiah; in Deuteronomy too we read of those to whom the Lord hath not given ears to hear; and in both Jeremiah and Ezekiel, of those who have ears to hear, and hear not. One apostle laments the destiny of those to whom God hath given the spirit of slumber, eyes that they should not see, and ears that they should not hear. And to another was entrusted the appeal, “He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches.” For only the ear of the wise seeketh knowledge. The unwise is like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear. The hearing ear, and the seeing eye, the Lord hath made even both of them.

Give but interest in the theme, and the listener’s ear fulfils its natural function, that of hearing. “Mine ears hast Thou opened.” Intensify the interest, and the listener is all ears, all ear. Milton pictures a time—

So again the attendant spirit in his “Comus”:—

Webster’s ill-starred Duchess of Malfi assures her brother, “I will plant my soul in my ears to hear you.” Je t’écoute sans cligner la paupière, exclaims Marillac, in “Gerfaut,” dût ta narration durer sept jours et sept nuits. “Alarmed nature starts up in my heart, and opens a thousand ears to listen,” cries Colonel Talbot in an old play. Perplexed in the extreme, and cut to the heart, by a revelation of household treachery and wrong, an incredulous husband is described in a modern romance, with his hands clasped together, and with his head bent to catch every syllable of the harrowing news,—listening “as if his whole being were resolved into that one sense of hearing.” That reads like a literal translation of Balzac’s description of one whose whole vie se concentra dans le seul sens de l’ouïe. On another page he is not forgetful of certains hommes who se bouchent les oreilles pour ne plus rien entendre. None so deaf as those who will not hear. Next to them may rank those who do not care to. The familiar narrative of “Eyes and No Eyes” might easily have its pendent and parallel, point by point, and paragraph by paragraph, in one to be called Ears and No Ears.

It is with hearing as with seeing. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. Mendelssohn, in one of his letters from abroad, rapturous with gazing on his “favourite Titian,” declares that one “might well wish for a dozen more eyes to look one’s fill at such a picture.” “Had I three ears I’d hear thee!” exclaims Macbeth, when summoned to attend by the apparition of an Armed Head, in the witches’ cave. Just as one of Plato’s epigrams expresses a wish for the thousand eyes of the starry sky, that he might gaze his fill on the star of his life:

Horace uses the expressive phrase, bibit aure, in one of his odes—literally, “drink in with the ear”—a phrase admired by the commentators for its lyric boldness. “I was all fixed to listen,” says Dante, in the tenth gulf of l’Inferno. “O speak your counsel now, for Saturn’s ear is all a-hungered,” entreats the Titan, in Keats’s Hyperion. D’Artagnan, in the ante-chamber of M. de Treville, is described as looking with all his eyes and listening with all his ears, stretching his five senses so as to lose nothing. The same author tells how Mazarin listened, dying as he was, to Anne of Austria, as ten living men could not have listened. “Will you listen?” asks a prince in the same story; and is answered, “Can you ask me? You speak of a matter of life or death to me, and then ask if I will listen.”

When Falstaff asks the prince, “Dost thou hear me, Hal?” “Ay, and mark thee too,” is the reply; and that there is a difference between hearing and marking, between lending one ear and giving both, Falstaff knew as well as most men. And could practise what he knew, if occasion prompted. Witness his wilful deafness when taken to task by the Lord Chief Justice. “Boy, tell him I’m deaf,” he bids his page say. So, “You must speak louder, my master’s deaf,” says the boy. “I am sure he is, to the hearing of anything good,” rejoins the Chief Justice. And when, anon, his lordship taxes the incorrigible knight with being deaf to what he is saying, Sir John assures him, with that consummate assurance of his, that he hears him very well: “Rather, an’t please you, it is the disease of not listening, the malady of not marking, that I am troubled withal.” Quite capable is that witty profligate of entering into the import of each phrase in the collect on the Holy Scriptures, which prays that we may in such wise hear them, as to mark and learn, and inwardly digest them.

A late divine, treating of “animal men” in the “animal” sense of St. Paul, as those who cannot discern spiritual things, but are absorbed in animalism as their being’s end and aim, affirmed that unavailing as it seems to be to talk to them of religion, it avails no more talking of poetry, and art, or speculative science, or the nobler things of the soul: “How can such men discern the things of the Spirit? They understand Tennyson as little as they understand St. Paul.” Having ears they hear not anything so far away as the music of the spheres. Of that, and such as that, the animal man might say, by self-application of a couplet of Cowper’s,