9 August: Boreham on Half-Promises

Half Promises
At this season of the year, we in Australia are captivated by the first gilding of the wattle and all the other scarcely-perceptible hints of a new day dawning. It is not so much a promise as half a promise! All through life we are lured to our goal by vague intimations, shadowy premonitions, and crepuscular anticipations. We all remember vividly the drawn-out agony of those dreadful days, and still more dreadful nights, through which Columbus groped his way across the unknown western seas. All on board regarded the land of their search as a chimera, a fantasy, a wild freak of their commander's disordered fancy. Believing that they had sailed beyond the reach of man and beyond the care of God, they made Columbus promise that, unless, in three more days, they sighted land, he would turn his prow once more to the east. And then, on that third day, they saw, circling round the masts, a landbird, and, tossing on the waves, a branch with berries on it. Nothing definite; nothing conclusive; but something that sufficed to excite hope and inflame expectancy.

Who can forget the pathos of that scene, in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," when Eliza was escaping with her child from slavery? The bloodhounds were on her track. She must make all the pace she can; yet the toddling feet of her babe are terribly tired and she herself is too spent to carry him. But with womanly foresight she has provided herself with a store of cakes and apples which she used as expedients for quickening the speed of the child, rolling the apples some yards before him, when the boy would run with all his might after it; and this ruse, often repeated, carried them over many a long mile. The cakes and apples were like the landbird and the berries; they coaxed the traveller on.

When One Swallow Does Make A Summer.
Life is full of such things as the cakes and apples in the slave's basket. It is full, that is to say, of half promises; full of things that egg us on; full of landbirds and of branches with berries on them. Such heartening symbols are not actual promises; they commit nobody to anything; but they suffice to minister new courage and new expectancy: they make us feel that life is worthwhile, and that its goal is sure. One can easily imagine how the passionate enthusiasm of Columbus, which had led him to tramp from one European court to another begging for ships, and which, like a fire burning itself out, had died down during those long and fruitless months at sea, blazed grandly up again when the landbird lighted on the rigging and the bright red berries tossed tantalisingly on the waves.

Something of the same kind confronts us every year with the return of Spring. The thing that most impresses us when the first welcome harbingers of the season appear is Nature's heroic scorn of death. In Winter, life seems to have petered out: it has come to an end: the glory has departed; the curtain has been rung down: everything is finished. But, in Spring, it is death itself that dies. Who, reared in the Old Country, can ever forget the thrill that shot through all his frame when, after months of bare boughs, bleak winds, and icy cold, he suddenly came upon the first crocus peeping through the snow? A logician would maintain that the solitary blossom proved nothing: one swallow does not make a Summer: it does not necessarily follow that, because one tiny flower has peeped shyly through the mantle of white, the whole world will soon be a pageant of movement and splendour. Paley points out that the man who watches the sun set has no evidence to show that it will ever rise again. The fact that a sunrise has followed a sunset millions upon millions of times does not furnish conclusive proof that the same phenomenon will be repeated on the present occasion.

Life's Sublimities Are Based On Half Promises
But there are greater laws than the laws of logic. With no indubitable evidence to support him, the man who watches the sun sink in the west is justified in expecting that, in a few hours time, it will reappear in the east. And certainly the Englishman who, muffled in his Winter furs, pause to admire the first crocus or the first snowdrop, feels that, unlike the sunworshipper, he has, in the flower at his feet, at least a half promise; and a half promise is sometimes the best promise of all.

Pascal, the brilliant French philosopher and mystic, applied the principle of the half promise to the most exalted themes. When those who were searching for truth sought his advice, he comforted them with the assurance that their very desire for truth represented a kind of half promise that their quest would be successful. "Thou wouldst not be seeking God," he would say, "if, in some sense, thou hadst not already found Him." Macaulay applies the same idea to the instinct of immortality. We have, he points out, no proof. Yet, with no proof, millions cherish unshakable convictions. What of the heiroglyphics and fantastic inscriptions on the monuments of antiquity? Why does the Arab bury the horse with his master? Why does the African bury the slaves with their chief ? Why does the South Sea islander bury a bevy of wives with their king? Why does the Maori bury the weapons with the warrior? Nothing can be more impressive than the unanimity with which earnest men in all ages have sensed a life beyond the grave. Plato stressed the significance of all this more than 20 centuries ago, and Addison, across the ages, answered him—

It must be so! Plato thou reasonest well;
Else whence this pleasing hope,
this fond desire,
This longing after immortality?
'Tis the divinity that
stirs within us;
'Tis heaven itself that points out an hereafter
And
intimates eternity to man.

It is this half promise—the half promise that, like the crocus, is better than a promise—that makes us feel that, however wealthy life may be, there is more, immensely more, to follow.

F W Boreham

Image: Spring flowers