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Dear Readers: Here I am today, still washed out physically from my latest bout with the sickness that has caught me once a year since I was 15, with the high fever and cellular infection in a bad leg I’ve got, and that has made me think — it always does — about the whole of my life, if it were to end tomorrow. When I was a boy, we weren’t so much pressured with the notion that if you didn’t do something great and glorious, you were worthless. Think about how that can spoil your appreciation of the really beautiful ordinary things around you, and not least among them the ordinary people. I used to tell my students that there is nothing more beautiful in all of creation than the human face, the natural human face, boy or girl, man or woman, old or young. Why are we taught not to be content with the homely and ordinary?
I mention this because I’d like to preface my words on our Hymn of the Week with something that the author of the hymn said about his own poetry, at the beginning of one of his books, The Passing Bell: and other poems:
“The following poems are offered to the public in the humble hope that they may please and profit those who read them. This is surely not too ambitious an expectation to be entertained by one who has been already kindly received in his efforts to do both. And who, though conscious that his verse falls far short of that high order of Divine Poesy after which his heart aspires, still must sing on to the end for the comfort of his own spirit, and would lose half the enjoyment of his song, if he did not feel that it bore its part, though an inferior one, in the great chorus of joyful praise, which daily gladdens earth, and deepens even the happiness of Heaven. Surely the smaller birds of the grove are not to refrain from their warblings because they are not nightingales ; and sweet as is their wondrous melody, is it not rare as well as sweet, and are there not long intervals which would be those of utter silence in our woodlands, if we had not the residue of the year gladdened with less magnificent, though possibly not less truthful song ? Every one, bird or human being, sings simply as his own nature enables him ; the gladness of his heart, the tenderness of his love, the passionate overflowings of his soul, these he cannot restrain; and while their utterance relieves his own heart, other hearts are helped by such relieving.
I love the chipper and bubbly twitter of the brave little wren, and what if he is not the ethereal wood thrush? Let him be what he is, what God made him to be. Do we need gaudy parrots everywhere? How about a thin little dragonfly on a lily pad in a muddy pond, with blue wings that seem to change color if you move your head in the slightest to catch the refracted light from a different angle.
“Yet Christians are called to a heroic life,” you may say. Yes and no. What we are called to is the daily life of walking along the right paths, and lest we be tempted to boast about it, Jesus is near to remind us, firmly and gently: “Without me, you can do nothing.” Saint Paul says the same thing, from the vantage of his own person: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me,” and so that “if any man would boast, let him boast in the Lord.”
So we have what I find a pleasing thing to consider, that the author of “Fight the Good Fight” was not a headline-maker, not anyone you’d look on as an obvious warrior. John Samuel Bewley Monsell (1811-1875) was just — just! — a faithful Anglican priest, serving at several churches, publishing 11 books of poetry he never pretended was going to surpass that of his most renowned contemporary, Alfred Tennyson, much less that of the greatest sacred authors. He died an unfortunate but also a very ordinary kind of death, falling from the roof while he was directing the repair of his last parish church, St. Nicholas, in Guildford. He didn’t die from the fall, but from an infected wound he got from it. Had he had the antibiotics I’m taking today, he probably would have lived a good many years after. A bit of trivia about St. Nicholas’: a few years later, a little baby named Pelham, later to be nicknamed “Plum,” was baptized there — the wonderful humorist P. G. Wodehouse.
Of course, “Fight the good fight” also comes from St. Paul, looking back on his own life and his apostleship, when he wrote to Timothy, “I have fought the good fight, I have run the race to the finish.” But again, that’s not boasting, and the words that Reverend Monsell writes are words of exhortation, to follow Christ and run “the straight race,” enabled to do so by the grace of God. For Christ is always near to give us the strength we need, which is his own strength. If we have that, what else can we need? What does it matter what the world says about our lives, or even whether anyone says anything about them at all? — so long as we hear these words, “Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of thy Master.”
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Fight the good fight with all thy might; Christ is thy strength and Christ thy right. Lay hold on life, and it shall be Thy joy and crown eternally. Run the straight race through God's good grace; Lift up thine eyes and seek his face. Life with its way before us lies; Christ is the Path and Christ the Prize. Cast care aside; upon thy Guide Lean, and his mercy will provide; Lean, and the trusting soul shall prove Christ is its Life and Christ its Love. Faint not nor fear, His arms are near; He changeth not, and thou art dear. Only believe, and thou shalt see That Christ is All in all to thee.
Word & Song is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymn, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. To support this project, please join us as a free or paid subscriber.
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