The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary

The view I take of the miracles is this, that no one met Jesus or saw Him who was not miraculously affected in some way or other. The deaf began to hear, those who had never spoken in their lives had their lips unsealed, the cripples found out that they had the souls of men, the sick were as if they were well, scales fell from the eyes of the blind, and he who never saw anything in his life was suddenly awake to beauty. The outcast and the vile learned to believe in themselves; even the dead became alive. When John asked, “Art thou He who should come, or do we look for another?” it was sufficient to answer, “The blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, to the poor the gospel is preached.”

And the miracles never cease. As they happened two thousand years ago, so they happen to-day. We have the vision, and our infirmities fall away: we see, we hear, we praise. Christ is ...

There is much of the Gospel written by men who had not the vision, or by politic priests. Many ecclesiastics of the early Church could not understand the mystic story, and misunderstanding it they yet strove to defend by every means in their power the authenticity of their misreadings. Explanations, local colour, even absolute inventions were interpolated in the sacred writings in order to prove that certain dogmas were right, in order to prove that other dogmas were wrong. They actually raised Lazarus materially from death, instead of leaving what was probably the original story, the fact that Jesus convinced Martha and Mary that Lazarus was still alive in the presence of God. Not that the Gospels are the worse, or that we would have them otherwise. There is an added poetry in the marks which time and life make on any living thing. And the Gospels have been crucified as He of whom the Gospels were written was crucified before them.

Most explanations of the miracles are true, but inadequate. They often lead to confusion of thought and the emphasis on the material facts and outward manifestation rather than on the spiritual facts and inner reality. It is true that Christ “went about the world doing good,” and that He is to us “an ensample of godly life,” but the good that He did was spiritual good.

The works of our Marthas get a great deal of their inspiration from the healing of the sick and the ministry to the suffering. Progress itself, the whole modern reform movement as far as it associates itself consciously and verbally with Christianity, identifies its inspiration with that touching of Christ’s soul which did not permit Him to pass one suffering man without healing him.

But it is often forgotten that the good which He did was spiritual good. The true way of Martha is not so much giving money to the penniless, clothes to the ragged, medicine to the sick, homes to the houseless, decent dwellings to those who live in slums, as it is to make the poor know that all these things are nothing and of no account; as it is to touch their hearts and give them a new outlook upon life. Martha has also to make the blind see, make the deaf hear, the mute speak, and to raise the dead. As it is, it frequently happens that the poor, receiving “charity,” are left angry, and so become poorer thereby, and the blind find themselves in a greater darkness, and the deaf in a more deathly silence.

We look on our fellow-creatures with dull eyes, and our personal character and spiritual beauty is not sufficient to lighten up the landscape and the faces of the people around us. There is no light about our heads, and people touching the hem of our garments feel no contact with mystery. So we do not reveal Christ to men. Though all is within our power. Martha’s ordeal is as great a one as Mary’s, her consecration as vital. We cannot go out carelessly and minister to the poor, for if we do, we perform no miracles. And without miracles the poor are not satisfied.

The true Martha has the wishing heart, and her fingers are full of virtue. She is an argument in herself, and her presence without words works true miracles, revealing the mystic meaning of Christ in herself, and causing every one who meets or sees her to be miraculously affected in some way or other.

Obviously the service of Martha is always personal. Therefore nothing anonymous is Christian, and philanthropical societies, parliaments, reform movements, and the like are doomed to failure unless they are served by men and women with Christ-faces.

The West seems to have the tradition of the way of Martha, England especially. Our Victorian era, of which the popular teachers were Kingsley, Carlyle, Ruskin, was essentially an era of work and deeds rather than of faith. As children, we in our prime to-day were brought up on the gospel of work. Thoughts about one’s soul were considered rather ignoble: they were smoke that we had to consume ourselves. We were urged to forget the question of our souls and work. The whole world was working, all the factories of England sang together. Every man in England, from the highest to the lowest, knew when he wakened each morning that he had that day some real and indispensable work to do. The child must learn his lesson in that light. “If I hear of an artist of promise,” says Ruskin, “the first question I ask is, ‘Does he work?’” Ruskin dismissed Whistler, who painted rather in the way of Mary, because he obviously did not work. All great men whatsoever worked.

If you want to be a Knox or a Luther or a Cromwell or a Frederick or a Bismarck you must work.

The spirit of industry seemed to be Christianity itself. In reading Froude’s history one seemed to gain the idea that the Reformation meant getting rid of idleness and monks and abbeys, and substituting noble labour, honest craftsmen, and factories. It is a modern misapprehension. There was a time when we used to sing a hymn extravagantly opposed to the gospel of work—

We have a reputation for work. Most Russians would be incredulous if told that Englishmen had ever sung such words. Yet they have, and we know that we are not like the ants who have always been working and always will work. We have been out of love with work before and will be again.

During the Victorian era every Englishman had his coat off and was working for all he was worth, perspiration on his brow, grime on his body, the clangour of machinery in his ear. Carlyle found his generation working, and gave it his blessing in effective phrase, and was so obsessed by his own message that he gave up his own quest, his own seeking, and lived in the British Museum, pondering, grubbing, scratching, and turning forth volume after volume of dull Frederick, and he forgot his own soul and the man who wrote Sartor Resartus and The Heroes.

And although this work, work for work’s sake, is not a Christian thing, it is associated in the mind with what I call the “way of Martha.” It is an exaggeration of her sweet serviceableness, a supposition that she had gone crazy and had not only become cumbered about with many things, but was so cumbered that she could never in all her life spare a moment to come to the Master. Be that as it may, England had a fairly clear and simple notion of her creed. Work pleased her. Popular opinion was on the side, not of the parson who did nought, but of the old farmer “who stubbed Thornaby Waaste.” Tennyson sang work and the goal of work—“All diseases cured by science,” “the Parliament of the World,” “the rule of the meek upon earth.” We gave our shoulders and our hearts and our lips to the work, though indeed not much of the last, for in those days silence was golden.

Now silence is golden only for those who do not know what to say. A change has come about, is coming about. Work has ceased to be holy.

“To labour is to pray.” “Do the duty which lies nearest to you, that which is doablest.” “Do noble things, not dream them, all day long ...” such was the message of Victorian literature. And yet in that literature there was a note of discord, and that was the voice of Browning, the first of the moderns, and he wrote:

And again:

And again:

The way of Martha had given place to the way of Mary. My elders read Rabbi Ben Ezra to comfort one another:

and they read it because of a secret sense of failure. But the poem, and the message of Browning in general, came to those of my generation with a different force. When I was twenty I lived with the poem, as did those I loved; I carried it with me wherever I went; it burned, it blazed in my mind. It was a triumphant song. All the beauty of the time seemed to radiate from it, and as I recall it to-day and write the old words down, it brings back to me the fields, the hills, the roads, lime blossoms, roses, faces of the summer when its meaning was first absolutely and clearly mine. What was it in the poem? It was the modern movement. It was good b’ye to the old. It was a sight of one’s own immortality and Psyche herself, the ever-lovely one.

But necessarily I cannot write down what it meant. Suffice it that I can remember how a boy of this time reacted to the touch of Browning. Browning was a wonderful turn in English thought.

It was not simply one poem of Browning that broke away from Victorianism. We had held that there was no greater satisfaction than that of the craftsman in the work of his own hands. His was the real Imitatio Christi when he made something with his hands and saw that it was good. Then we read Andrea del Sarto, despising

knowing that the artists who failed reached a heaven denied to him.

From Browning’s day on we have been moving away from Martha and coming to Mary. The note-books of those young ones who loved thoughts began to be filled with verses, sayings, apothegms of a new character, and many of the elder ones to whom we read what we had found were blind and deaf to the new ideas. I remember one old literary man and artist who used always to say, “I take my stand with Jim”—meaning that he held with St. James that faith without works is barren. He belonged to the old.

I admit we were not sober in our judgments. We went to see Ibsen and Bernard Shaw, and it was easy to agree that Nora was right when she fled from her home and her husband to save her soul, and we thought that the immoral and unprincipled Dubedat was sooner to be saved than the hard-working slum doctor. We saw in Solveig, who stayed in the background and prayed, the true type of womanhood, and understood how Peer Gynt through her could be saved. We read Nietzsche, that mad Christian, a sort of Mary who hated her sister Martha, calling out in anger that man had ceased to be man and had become merely neighbour. We entered the domain of Russian literature, and read Dostoieffsky and Chekhof and Gorky, and so fell under the spell of Eastern Christianity, where we remain to-day.

The taste of England has been steadily changing this last ten years, and the current becoming deeper and broader. Russia and the East have been coming steadily nearer, and more and more of us have turned our backs on work and service and that Divine materialism—the raising of the poor. Not that we are on the way to becoming a philosophic and reflective or ascetic nation, or even in the way of singing again “Doing is a deadly thing”; but more and more of our nation is attempting to take to itself and re-express the other aspect of Christianity—the way of Mary.

Even in the North of England, where the land is devoted to work and the towns are little more than barracks of workmen, there is a noticeable and, even from a capitalist’s point of view, an alarming change of spirit. The “workers” are rebellious. It is not that they want more money or lighter hours or better conditions. They simply don’t want to work. The rising generation is disinclined to settle down, and the time is coming when there will be difficulty in getting labouring hands, when it will be difficult to buy them. The gloom of our industrialism is destined to be broken.

As yet, however, those who represent us in politics, literature, and art belong to the old. Mr. Lloyd George with his care for the poor is a Martha. Mr. Bonar Law is a Martha also. H. G. Wells, with his World set Free, and his rooms with rounded instead of squared corners to help the women to sweep, is a Martha. Our poets are not Marys, and it is necessary to go to Francis Thompson or Rossetti to find a mystic poet. Our painters, Peter Graham, Farquharson, Leader, and others whose works deck Academy walls, are occupied with the outward appearances of things rather than the transcendental. And since Watts is dead we have not even a mystical portrait painter, but all admire the gift to show in the face money, importance, style, meat. Our people are worth painting, but there is no one to paint them. We need an English Serof to show the true kindred and spiritual relationship of faces.

On the stage we admire Russian opera and Russian ways. We show The Dynasts in the same way as it would have been shown in Moscow, or nearly so. There first of all the new tendency is showing. Unfortunately we have a long battle against American humour and vulgarity, American materialism and the capital that would exploit our stage. Otherwise our stage would change at a greater speed. Still the difference in the way Shakespeare is produced in England is an index of the change. When we produce Hamlet as it is produced at the Theatre of Art, Moscow, we shall have traversed the whole distance between the way of Martha and the way of Mary as far as the stage is concerned.

Strange that there should be a feud between the Church and the Theatre! They were originally one and the same, and as it is the Church remains a holy theatre where day after day is enacted the same holy mystery. In passing: how much nearer the Theatre is brought to the Church by the constant repetition of the great classical and mystical dramas such as Hamlet. The reason for the religious distrust of the Theatre which exists in all countries,—in England in the Free Churches; in Russia in the Orthodox Church,—lies in the degradation of the Theatre, the making it a show of wild beasts, a stage for indecent dances and comic songs, an arena for combats of athletes. The common townspeople are not and never can be the pupils of Hypatia. They will have their indecencies and vulgarities, wild beasts, acrobats, invitation to sin. The showman has usurped the place of the mystagogue, and money-making has replaced religious service or service to art and culture as a motive of theatrical production. The Theatre to-day, even if it aspire to be serious, has unclean hands, and the Church not unfairly regards it as part of the stock-in-trade of the evil one.

An interesting exemplification of the relation of Church and Stage is furnished by Oscar Wilde’s Salome. To the Christian, to look at the dance of Salome is to glance into the charnel-house where all is decay and worms and death, and to see there the head of one of the saints with celestial aureole. But the dramatist has turned the interest to the dance itself and made you say that it is interesting: he has dwelt on the jewels, the crimsons, the thick lips, the luscious movements. Every effort is made to make you agree with Herod, and the best way to do that is to suggest to your body and soul the same feelings towards the dancer on the stage as Herod felt towards the daughter of his brother’s wife—so that you would give her anything, even the pure body of the saint that is in your keeping. He would give you a place with the worms and the spirit of decay, and let you end as Herod ended, eaten by the worms at the last. No aureole for you!

But the Church suggests the aureole for you, and if Salome were presented as a mystery-play the whole interest of the populace would be directed towards the sainthood of John the Baptist. When Oscar Wilde’s Salome was produced at Petrograd, Russia made short work of it. On the first night, at the first public performance, some one stood up in the middle of a scene and shouted in a bass voice:

“Spustee zanavess!” “Lower the curtain!” and the curtain was lowered; and Salome has not been repeated there from that day to this.

Who it was said this is rather a mystery, but it was doubtless some one who had the voice or the ear of Orthodoxy. Russia probably gained by this prohibition. A pity, however, that many other plays quite as injurious are allowed their way to the perversion of private morals and the corruption of public taste. Indeed it would be a gain to Russia if the Church would cease looking at the Stage from a merely ecclesiastical point of view. The fault of the clergy is their pride in their own order and their institutions. The clergy, ministers of the living Church of Christ, should in nature be the humblest of people, so humble in fact, so meek and unresentful, that it would be necessary occasionally to protect them from the enmity of the secular world. As it is, in their pomp, they are proud. They despise the Stage and often prohibit plays on quite wrong grounds, incidentally depriving not only the theatre and the public, but the Church also, of something helpful to the cause of Eastern Christianity and of all real Russian values. The prohibition of Andreef’s Anathema, performed at the Theatre of Art in Moscow, is an example. Though this prohibition was at the instance of the Archbishop of Moscow the play was in essential teaching profoundly helpful to Eastern Christianity. It was written by a man who belonged to the revolutionary movement, but it was only the more remarkable and the more powerful thereby. It was in substance a refutation of Westernism and the ideals after which secularist Russia was striving. A pious and philanthropic Jew inheriting immense wealth, millions of American dollars, resolved in his simplicity to save the world, feeding the hungry, clothing the ragged, giving money to the needy, medical aid to the suffering. The drama shows the futility of this dream, and at the end the mob of enraged and suffering humanity stone the philanthropist to death. Not by material but by spiritual things could their sufferings be assuaged.

The archbishop who stopped it was probably never in a theatre in his life, and no doubt condemned it on hearsay, and from a complete misapprehension of the significance of the drama.

The Church of the future in England, and probably in Russia, will have to come into alliance with what may be called the right side of the theatre. For occasionally in the theatre people worship as much as others do in the Church. Many young people whose families have lapsed from the Church find their religious life functionised in the book, the drama, the opera, the symphony. They are not communicants in the literal sense, they are outside the church walls and the shut church doors, but they are inside the living Church. They have a common word with people inside church walls. Their chorus of praise swells from the other side of the walls, and in some countries the secular chorus of praise to God has considerably more volume than the official ecclesiastical chorus. Somehow in church one rather resents the choir, especially in the Te Deum, when they are singing it to some “God-forsaken” curious tune that a pedant musician has chosen. It is good when the whole church can lift one great voice. And outside the church the greater congregation rather resents the church-goers. They would sing Te Deum also.

The relation of Church and Stage exhibits the confusion of religious values at present existing. The same confusion exists with regard to the Church and Literature—many of the great classics of Russian literature, like Gogol’s Dead Souls, the monks would regard it a sin to read. The ecclesiastical Church takes no useful stand with regard to what is helpful, what harmful, in past and present literature; it is left for the living Church to find out for itself and do what it can without organisation. Even in the domain of Holy Writ there is a confusion of what the living Church believes, and what mere ecclesiasticism lays down. At least one fundamental idea in Christianity has been overlaid, and, as it were, frustrated by the Church itself—the idea of the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost has been conventionalised and made terrible. It has become the most inscrutable and awe-inspiring aspect of the Trinity, whereas it should be the most familiar and consoling, Christ saying good-bye to his disciples in that last long sweet talk where He calls them friends, tells them that after He is gone away from them there will come a new consolation, the vision of Truth.

“I will pray the Father and he shall give you another Comforter that he may abide with you for ever; even the Spirit of truth whom the world cannot receive, ... the Comforter which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you. Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.... If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you. If ye were of the world the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.... When the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, He shall testify of me: And ye also shall bear witness, because ye have been with me from the beginning.”

And in the cross-examination before Pilate, Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews.... To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth.”

Therein lies the true idea of the Holy Ghost, the Holy Spirit—it is the vision of Heavenly Truth that gives the lie to worldly values, worldly truth. By virtue of this Holy Spirit the blind see, though they have no eyes, the deaf hear, the dumb speak, the dead live, mortality itself is disproved. The mysteries of the Pentecostal mitres, of the gift of tongues, and the conventionalised notion of what is called the “sin against the Holy Ghost,” have stood in the way of the simple and beautiful conception of the comforting vision of Truth. The Church, with its keys of heaven and hell, and its arrogation of the power of anathema and excommunication, has preferred to lay its emphasis on those texts which may seem to imply the dreadfulness of offence against a certain more inscrutable aspect of the Trinity. There is nothing in the Gospels but love of man, forgiveness of man, and nothing is more pitiful than the man who, having a glimpse of the Truth, yet denies it or wilfully confuses it with magic or unclean power.

But the Filioque clause of the Creed is alone sufficient to exemplify the confusion of ecclesiasticism and the living Church. There are many who think that the two Churches of England and Russia are kept apart by this clause alone. England holds that the Holy Ghost, the Holy Spirit, proceeds from the Father and from the Son, Russia that it proceeds from the Father alone. Russia’s basis is St. John, XV. 26, “... the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me.” “What does it matter how it is put?” cries the living Church. But ecclesiastical pedantry is strongly entrenched, and whenever the question of the intercommunion of the two Churches is mentioned there arises that fatal phrase—“Filioque—and from the Son.”

“Does not one of your Thirty-nine Articles lay down that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and from the Son? And is not assent to the Thirty-nine Articles obligatory upon your clergy? Why, then....” To which one can only answer in one’s heart:

The same confusion exists with regard to the Church and Life. That which the living Church of Christ possesses is a spiritual communion, not a set of dogmas or a set of points of ecclesiastical law. If a man is really touched to go to church, if he has the impulse from the heart, it is not in order that he may hear dogma. He goes to blend his voice and his thoughts with the voice and the thoughts of humanity in hymn and prayer. But to-day many misconceptions arise. Carlyle could not go to church because the sermon bored him. Many stay away from churches because they can’t stand so-and-so’s sermon. As if the sermon were part of the service! In old days the sermons were often delivered outside the churches after the service was done. The priest came through the worshippers, went out into the church square, and rising to a platform or “outside pulpit” harangued the everyday crowd. The function of the Church service is not to be a frame to a sermon, even a clever or profound or inspiring sermon. Its function is praise.

A Jew writing for an important Russian newspaper about the state of the Church of England remarks that “dogmas make many leave the Church, and those who stay remain to preach ethics,” and he goes on to praise ethics as the function of the Church, leaving out of account, and evidently having no notion of, the Church as a temple of religion, a place of communion and aspiration. Surely the preaching ethics is a work begun by parents and confirmed by the schoolmaster. Christ did not die on the cross or forgive the thief who recognised Him in order to preach “Thou shalt not steal!” Yet such a confusion of ideas remains in the mind even of the cultured.

Still, the whole world and the universe is an orchestra praising God, and, remembering that, it is impossible to say there is real confusion or final confusion. It is as impossible to classify and show series of like things, for the imagination tells you that every instrument in the orchestra is diverse. Hence I am open to misconception when I write of confusion or when I classify, as for instance when I talk of Marthas and Marys. There is confusion and there is order. Nothing is fixed, all is in motion, the kaleidoscope is ever moving. So it would be wrong to say that all who were in the way of Martha were in towns working for the poor, or that all in the way of Mary were away in the desert saving their souls at the feet of the Master, or that the priests in their orders and vestments with their processions and grandeur were all in the way of Martha, or that the hermits of the desert did not upon occasion come like Paphnutius to Alexandria to save Thaïs, the dancing-girl. The sisters love one another; and though it is not written in the Gospels, there were certainly occasions when Mary might have been seen cumbered about with many things whilst Martha sat with her Lord.

The purely Eastern aspect of the Church is the way of Mary, the spiritual, meditative, introspective, mystical way, and this is ever the strength of the whole Church. It is even the strength of the Protestant churches, though there the spiritual life is more private. In Orthodoxy the voice speaks from the desert right into the ears of the everyday mundane crowd. The people are enjoined against sloth in the name of the fathers of the desert. They sing their hymns in praise of those who have overcome. They are encompassed round about with “the crowd of witnesses,” the ikon faces and frescoed saints of the church walls, the thousands of those who have died in the Lord looking on whilst we run with patience the race that is set before us.

Our work is in the world, our passion is for the realisation of good worldly hopes. We pray for the King, the Emperor; we own a true allegiance to a God-guided Cæsar, and are ready to render to such a Cæsar the things that are his. We pray for the administrative bodies and for Parliament, may they go forward to the raising of the poor, the healing of the sick, the raising to a life of knowledge those who are dead in ignorance. We pray for our fellow-man and for ourselves. We band ourselves in a Christian order, and confirm in ourselves the resolve to fight against sin, ugliness, unhappiness. We promise to give time, to give money, to work for the Cause. This is all in the way of Martha. But these thoughts and prayers are made in a temple where the light is the light of candles placed before shrines of the Unseen. A vision accompanies the Christian man. Though his passion is towards the things of this world he is encompassed and enveloped by the atmosphere of another world. The remembrance remains his that Cæsar is not God, nor Cæsar’s officers the angels of God, nor this world the real world, that the poor we have always with us, that our true citizenship is of another realm.

The work of Martha fails, fails again; the poor multiply, sickness becomes a plague and scourge from God, the ignorant increase, peace becomes war, the progressive work of centuries topples down like Babel, kings or emperors become killed, allegiances of millions are changed, famous Christian workers and organisers who have given their whole life to the Cause go out to death with grey hairs, all their life-work made as nought before their eyes. The passionate soldier-saint goes out in failure. The lukewarm mediocre man and the cheerful happy-go-lucky mortals, the ordinary folk, the witty ones, the dull ones, the run of mankind as we call them, also go out, looking at the failure of ideas to which they have vaguely or earnestly given assent. But Christianity does not fail. Thousands of years hence this young religion of Christianity will be more triumphant, splendid, vital, than it is to-day. And this by virtue of the mystical and transcendental aspect of the word.

The service of the Church is more than a consecration of duty. It is a bearing witness to the Truth, a watching till He come, an expectancy, a getting into position for a great procession, a carrying of banners and emblems, a joining in a universal hymn sung not only by ourselves but by all the dead. The light of the Church is the light of transfiguration, not the light of common day, it is the light of the halo round the saint’s head.

You enter a church, such a temple, for instance, as the Cathedral of the Assumption in Moscow. At a step you are in the precincts of a different world. You have overstepped a frontier line, and the language has changed, just as when in Europe you cross a boundary and the language changes, say from German to Russian. The people are looking a different way, not Westward as to the Emperor but Eastward as to God. You are in a new kingdom; but as your thoughts go back to the street you left you realise that the kingdom is not from thence.

The faces in the ikons are not the faces of men. The figures are twisted and strange. One asks: “Why did not the Byzantine painters paint the truth? There never were men looking as these men. Why these copper-coloured and flame-coloured faces? Why the unearthly expression in eyebrows and eyes? Men never looked like that.” The answer is: the early Christian painters did not wish to paint earthly truth. Their object was to indicate the unearthly nature of man, his citizenship of another world. They wrote into the features of every saint, “Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” This was one of the earliest traditions in the Christian Church, and has been handed down from generation to generation in the books of ikonopis or ikon-painting. There is a way to paint a Christian saint, and that way has to be followed in the Eastern churches. He must be represented as a witness unto the Truth, a face that at least at last owns no allegiance to the monarch in the West, but only to the God in the East, the face of an archangel or of one who sings continuously, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was and is and is to come.” One may belong to a mighty empire, but the citizenship of those within the Church is of a mightier and grander and vaster empire. The thrill of the new national hymn is the greater, the characteristic uniforms and robes have the more reverence in their associations.

The vestments of the priests astonish one. They are gorgeous past belief. Whence comes that gold brocade? It was cut in another world. At least, that is its intention, that is what it would signify. Who are they in white robes? Why do the priests at the altar walk so stately? What is that new tempo to which they have learned to move and to swing the censer?

And the voice of the clergy, that unearthly bass, that profound groaning and seeking of notes that man does not utter, that voice as of Jesus commanding the soul of the dead Lazarus to return to the awful and dreadful corpse? The service in the Slavonic tongue, not in the everyday tongue....

All these things bear witness unto the Truth and are the emblems of our allegiance to the kingdom of Christ, marks of our other citizenship, the visible emblems and symbols of our hope, our love and passion. Hence it is possible to sing with angels and archangels. Failure in the work of Martha loses significance as failure. Failure is even good, it is one more sign, an involuntary ritual, telling of our truer destiny.

So though the way of Mary is consummated in the desert, in the cell, in giving up the world, in pilgrimaging, praying, fasting, and only a few can necessarily take to that way, yet it is that way which speaks triumphantly in the Church. The great majority of human beings must always remain behind “cumbered about with many things,” though loved by the Master they will not be able to sell everything, take up the Cross and follow to the place of the Skull. They will keep the commandments of Christ and enter on set occasions the temples we have set up. They will receive confirmation in their life and in the love of the Lord, they will pray for what they will, and confess themselves. They will praise and be in communion. They will recognise that they belong to another kingdom, and their hearts will swell with the triumphant and passionate affirmation of the Godhead which each finds in his poor conditional existence as man. The way of Martha and the way of Mary.

At Easter I was at my old home, Vladikavkaz, and on the second Tuesday after Easter Sunday went through one of the most characteristic of Russian holidays—Krasnagorka. It is half-Christian, half-pagan—a festival of spring and of new life, but celebrated almost entirely in graveyards and cemeteries. At Krasnagorka almost the whole population of the town goes on an outing or a picnic—to the cemetery.

Early in the morning I received a message from a Russian friend, “Come to our church; you’ll see an interesting sight.” The church was crowded, but I got in, for nobody objects to your pushing. It was an unusual service. The whole centre of the floor of the church, a space of some twenty feet by seven, was covered with napkins in which lay lumps of cake, brightly coloured eggs, basins of rice and strawberry jam, basins of rice and raisins. In each basin, and there were some hundreds of them, a lighted wax candle was stuck in the rice and gave a little flame, and beside each lay the little red book in which the peasant records the names of his relatives as they die.

“What is it all for?” I asked. “It is the food for the dead,” my friend answered.

A priest and a deacon were standing at the near end of the spread of illuminated food, and they read aloud from sheaves of papers the names of dead persons whom members of the church had wished to have remembered. Each person who had brought in food for sanctification brought also a slip of paper with the names of his dead. It took hours to read them all out, and when at last the task was finished, the deacon took a smoking censer, and walking round the feast flung incense over it, the chains of the censer rattling as he made the Sign of the Cross. We sang once more the festal hymn of Easter, Christos voskrese iz mertvikh—“Christ is risen from the dead,”—sung at every service until Ascension, and then, after kissing the cross in the priest’s hand, each person sought out his special basin of rice and pieces of cake and bowl of coloured eggs and moved out of the church.

At the door of the church stood many beggars, six or seven bearded, tattered, and dirty old men, and a score or so of women and children. All the old men had their mouths open, and each worshipper, as he made his exit, helped a beggar liberally to rice and jam, scooping out great spoonfuls with wooden spoons and poking them into the open, waiting mouths. Many beggars had cotton bags hanging from their necks, and into these were promiscuously flung spoonfuls of rice and raisins, eggs, biscuit, cake. The beggars were told to eat what was given them in the name of the dead. My friend fed at least ten beggars before she left the church, and gave eggs and bits of cake, but she did not give all that she had. A great quantity was reserved for a spread in the graveyard.

Many cabs were waiting at the church door, and the worshippers stepped into them with their napkins of sanctified food, and drove to the cemeteries of the town. From ten o’clock in the morning until sunset, the cemeteries were as thronged with people as Hampstead Heath on Whit-Monday.

Nearly every grave in a Russian churchyard has seats round it, and it is possible to go to the family grave and sit down and think a little, or pray a little when you wish. I went to the graveyard where my friend’s sister lies buried, an acre of cypress and pine and gentle mounds, where the dank earth seems like bed-clothes laid over the dead. To-day this wide melancholy collection of green mounds and wooden crosses was alive with the laughter and songs of children. On the heaps of mouldering earth samovars were humming, and little candles gleamed against a background of lilac blossoms and spring flowers.

My friend and I sat down. The mother of the dead one came, deep in crape and laden with gifts. We planted our candles, and on this grave as on all the others round about the wan flames flickered. We took bright-coloured eggs—our Easter eggs dyed purple and crimson and brown,—dug holes in the mould with our fingers, buried the eggs, covered their brightness over with mould again. Then we put down slices of Easter cake on the grave, and emptied there saucers of rice—that the dead one might share in. We sat on the crazy wooden seats around, and looked at the earth and were silent.

The mother went away to find a priest, and presently brought a purple-cloaked greybeard to sing over the grave and burn incense. His red and wrinkled face was all red and fresh from the open air, for he had been in the graveyard all day singing over the graves. He was tired, but he raised his head and his voice and called forth his little memorial prayer in an antique musical bass: “Grant to her who has passed away, O Christ, to obtain Thy unspeakable glory.... Give rest, O Christ, to the soul of Thy servant....” We all stood around, silent and awe-stricken, and listened and crossed ourselves, and kissed the cross in the priest’s hand.

He received a rouble, then went away to another grave; beggars besought us; and as if they had not been satisfied at the church door, but were taking enough to last them a whole year, they received helping after helping of rice and cake and eggs. This, I felt, was the great beggars’ day in the year. They were important people. They were necessary to the feast. Strange that they should appear as proxies for the dead and eat for them. A beautiful reminder that in the living we find all our dead again.

We had stood to meet the priest and to give the beggars the food we had brought, so now that the beggars had eaten all the rice and raisins and rice and jam and had gone farther to eat at other graves, we sat down again in the still presence of the green mound and we talked of the virtues of the dead one, of how old she would have been and how beloved she was, and of how often she had been remembered, and how soon we should join her. Evidently the mother assumed that what she said was heard by her whose body lay in the earth. We were all quietly joyful—not sad. We had the spirit of children making believe; we had also the calm faith and knowledge of elders—that there is no death, that those who have passed out of sight have not ceased but are alive for evermore. I felt the Russians, and indeed mankind altogether, to be very dear at this festival; they were doing things that must touch those invisible ones who know more than we do and look on, bring tears to the eyes of angels, and not as often in man’s history and the spectacle of his civilisation and abomination call down the wrath of higher powers.

We talked ... and then as we became silent again we heard the music of man’s life, and listened with our souls.

At some graves there was boisterous jollity, at others terrible anguish and grief. Near where we sat a woman lay moaning on the grave of her husband, her red tear-washed cheeks and her lips on the earth; and she called to him with sobs, telling him all that had happened during the year, how the children were, how often they had thought of him. It was heart-rending to listen to her. And yet, mingled with her terrible lament, came the sound of mumbling priests, the buzz of conversation, the laughter of children wrestling among the graves and gambling in the eggs that had been given them, the tinkle of the guitar and of light songs, the strains of the concertina.

We walked by winding ways across the graveyard and saw many an old man and woman knocking at the door of the earth they would soon enter, dropping placid tears and thinking what it would be like some years hence when they would be under the earth and this festive crowd of live beings above, candle-lighting, feasting, singing, thinking, praying. And there were young men and women walking arm-in-arm, looking brightly into one another’s eyes, strengthening their bonds of love and of life. There were also little children, boys and girls, thoughtless, indifferent to death and to the dead, waiting for the older people to go away, so that they might forage among the graves and dig up again the red and blue eggs that had been buried there.

“Are they allowed to do that?” I asked in horror.

“Yes,” said the sister. “Every one knows that directly evening comes and we elders go home the poor children will come and dig up the eggs and take them away, and take also the wild flowers we have brought. Let them! It is quite good that they should. You know it is the festival of spring and of life.” I realised that she was right. It is the way to give to the dead—give to the beggars and to the children. The dead get what we send them, surely.

Strange to notice in this acre of God some graves that had not been visited this day—old graves. I reflected on many a country walk in England, culminating in a visit to an old church and graveyard, and the tracing of the names and dates of people long since passed away. It is somewhat strange. When we are in an old graveyard and looking at the graves of people who have died centuries ago we feel, instead of grief, a sort of quiet satisfaction, and that even when those whose burial is recorded are of our own name and family. We dare not even contrast our feeling with the poignancy that is attached to a new grave—with its garish stone, fresh clods, and wilted flowers.

I often wonder where the dead are. Neither in heaven nor hell, I suppose, nor waiting for a last day and dreadful judgment, nor going through the circles of purgatory, nor just simply under the earth....

We know that they exist and are alive, and the knowledge is of that more certain kind that does not spring from our mentality but is felt in our bodies. The grief we have when sons or daughters or fathers or mothers die is a physical anguish, and is akin to the pains of birth. Some one has been cut off, deceased—cut off from us. Even in a dream to lose one of those nearest to us is to suffer a sort of physical mortification, to weep senselessly, lose control of nerves, and be prostrated.

The fact is we are all one. Even the death of some one who is quite remote jars upon the soul.

We were talking one evening of death and some one said to me: