Back to: Dickens A Christmas Carol and the Bible
Much they saw, and far they went, and many homes they visited, but always with a happy end. The Spirit stood beside sick beds, and they were cheerful; on foreign lands, and they were close at home; by struggling men, and they were patient in their greater hope; by poverty, and it was rich. In almshouse, hospital, and jail, in misery’s every refuge, where vain man in his little brief authority had not made fast the door and barred the Spirit out, he left his blessing, and taught Scrooge his precepts.
1. Role of the Spirit
Without self-reflection, we easily fall into the role of Scrooge in having a judgmental and cruel attitude toward the poor. But the Spirits do not allow Scrooge to rest his bigotry by showing them what a witness of “the presence the Christ Mass” can provide
The Spirit’s precepts are taught though its’ presence. As they visit these different places of want, the Spirit doesn’t cure or fix the situations, but the Spirit gives the individuals courage to endure the situations by his mere presence and witness. Scrooges is learning these precepts by just being a willing witness these life situations that he had previously kept shielded away from him. This exposure to harshness of life softens Scrooges callous heart. Even though Scrooge is a man of means, his resources can’t solve these problems, nor does the Spirit expect him to solve the world’s problems but the Spirit does expect him to bear patience witness to them and in that witness feel the pain of the injustice of this world. By Scrooge bearing this witness of the strength and courage of these people in the face of this pain, the same people that Scrooge had previously belittled and objectified, Scrooge becomes a changed man.
The only situation that the Spirit can not enter are the places “where vain man in his little brief authority had not made fast the door, and barred the Spirit out”
Here we have the great mystery of human’s “brief authority” that locks the door on God’s influence. Here we understand that humans by their refusal to hear God’s voice can ban God’s influence out of their lives. God gives us the option to turn away from hearing His voice and keeping a callous heart. But if we choose this option God will not spare us from the consequences.
Hear God’s warning in the Scripture:
“See to it, brothers, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called Today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness. We have come to share in Christ if we hold firmly till the end the confidence we had at first. As it has just been said, “Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts as you did in the rebellion.” Hebrews 3:8
Scrooge has ignored his exploitation of the poor by keeping them out of his sight. We can do the same. Poverty is a problem that will never be completely solved in any culture. I have heard many Christians staunchly claim that they will vote down any government program that benefits the poor by quoting John 8, where Jesus said that “you will always have the poor among you but you will not always have me.”
Dickens refers to Shakespeare—no stranger to the Bible with as many as 2,000 scriptural references across thirty-seven plays—alluding to Measure for Measure, Act II, Scene 2, lines 117-122: “Butman, proud man,/ Drest in a little brief authority,/ Most ignorant of what he’s most assured,/ His glassy essence, like an angry ape,/ Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven,/ As make the angels weep.”
It was a long night, if it were only a night; but Scrooge had his doubts of this, because the Christmas Holidays appeared to be condensed into the space of time they passed together. It was strange, too, that while Scrooge remained unaltered in his outward form, the Ghost grew older, clearly older. Scrooge had observed this change, but never spoke of it, until they left a children’s Twelfth Night party, when, looking at the Spirit as they stood together in an open place, he noticed that its hair was grey
2. Twelfth Night
In London at this time, the Holidays stretched from Christmas Day until Epiphany on January 6th, twelve days in all. Dickens greatly enjoyed celebrating the Twelfth Night as part of the festivities for his son’s birthday (“Charley’’) each year. Many children were invited to the Dickenses’ home, and the author was known to delight his young audiences with magic tricks on more than one such occasion
‘Are spirits’ lives so short.’ asked Scrooge.
‘My life upon this globe, is very brief,’ replied the Ghost. ‘It ends to-night.’
‘To-night.’ cried Scrooge.
‘To-night at midnight. Hark. The time is drawing near.’
The chimes were ringing the three quarters past eleven at that moment.
Scene 8. Ignorance and Want. One last vision remains, one that shocks and terrifies Scrooge. It is the two children, the boy representing Ignorance, the girl representing Want—both “wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable”—clinging desperately to the ghost’s robes.
‘Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask,’ said Scrooge, looking intently at the Spirit’s robe,’ but I see something strange, and not belonging to yourself, protruding from your skirts. Is it a foot or a claw.’
‘It might be a claw, for the flesh there is upon it,’ was the Spirit’s sorrowful reply. ‘Look here.’
From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.
‘Oh, Man. look here. Look, look, down here.’ exclaimed the Ghost.
They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.
Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.
‘Spirit. are they yours.’ Scrooge could say no more.
‘They are Man’s,’ said the Spirit, looking down upon them. ‘And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it.’ cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. ‘Slander those who tell it ye. Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And abide the end.’
‘Have they no refuge or resource.’ cried Scrooge.
‘Are there no prisons.’ said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. ‘Are there no workhouses.’ The bell struck twelve.
3. Words of Scrooge are thrown back at him - again
Words of Scrooge are thrown back at him again
Dickens uses “twelve” to recall both the last hour of the day and the last day of Christmastime. Unlike the two previous Spirits who came at one o’clock, the first hour of a new day this Spirit, like death, comes at the last hour of the last day
About such ignorance and want, again in David Copperfield Dickens wrote, “I know that I have lounged about the streets, insufficiently and unsatisfactorily fed. I know that, but for the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a little vagabond.”
Isn’t it interesting that of the two children that hide beneath the Spirit robe, Scrooge is told to beware the boy more than the girl? Remember the girl is Want who is impoverishment, and the boy is Ignorance. Most of our impoverishment is because of our ignorance. And a good deal of the poverty in world goes uncomforted when the people of God choose ignorance over knowledge.
In Proverbs 24:4 the Scripture warns us:
Rescue those being led away to death; hold back those staggering toward
slaughter. If you say, “But we knew nothing about this,” does not he who
weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who guards your life know it?
Will he not repay each person according to what he has done?
Scrooge’s heart was broken at the site of Tiny Tim, because it was not until he gazed at Tiny Tim that he was able to see the wretched creatures of oppression hidden under the Spirit’s robe. These creatures Scrooge had carefully hidden from his sight. Their cries for justice have been muffled under the cloak of celebration, in the same way the cries and the blood of the saints and prophets were hidden under the cloak of the jubilant and overly adorned Babylonian creature in Revelations. (Revelations 18:24) But reveling and false celebrations cannot muffle cries indefinitely. If we will not hear their cries, God demand of us an answer for our negligence. Thus the wealth of the oppressors is allowed to be trampled by the oppressed in Isaiah 26:6 as the vineyard was allowed to be trampled by wild animals in Isaiah 5:5
Our ignorance is no excuse when we turn our back on the suffering of this world
We may not be able to solve the injustices of this world, but we can always pray and allow our hearts to be soften by the injustice so we might not loose our humanity in a type of heartless consumerism and capitalism.
The problems seem so enormous that we don’t want to look at them, but I think God calls us to more. We ought not to bear the world’s suffering on our backs; we would go crazy if we spent every waking moment grieving this world’s sorrows and injustice. We ultimately surrender this world’s oppressed and suffering into the hands of a loving God. Yet we should stand ready to ask God how we might be used as an instrument of healing in this painful world.
Isaiah Twenty Five wastes no words in telling the reader that the consequences of a greedy calloused heart is that God will destroy your own wealth, because God is the protector of the oppressed of the world. But this passage also points us to our need for a savior.
Dickens’s depiction of Ignorance and Want issues from his long involvement with the various groups in England working for reform in the child labor laws and related social problems. In 1838, he visited a factory in Lancashire and emerged declaring, “I mean to strike the heaviest blow in my power for these unfortunate creatures” (Letters I, 483-84). For personal reasons as well, alleviating the deplorable conditions of child labor had always been a concern close to his heart. But Dickens had no personal heroes who had suffered child labor, and it is generally understood, as Rosemary Bodenheim writes, that “the child figures of Ignorance and Want [who appear in the Carol ] are the nightmare fantasies who replaced child workers in Dickens’s imagination” (Knowing Dickens, 63). Another critic, Hugh Cunningham, writes in his essay “Dickens as a Reformer,”
[Dickens landed his] . . . blow on behalf of poor children at work in A Christmas Carol. Two children, Ignorance and Want, symbolize [the dark side of] Christmas Present (Letters 3:461). Both pose dangers, but Ignorance more than Want. Dickens seems to have been more concerned about the lack of education for children than about the work that they had to do. He returned again and again to the dangers of ignorance” (Companion 166).
The two waifs, whom no one would wish to claim, nonetheless belong, according to the ghost, to all of us: “They are Man’s,” it explains. They are our responsibility. Of their faces, Dickens writes: “Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing.” This must stand as a warning to society that attention must be paid. Children neglected, abused, abandoned, uneducated, malnourished, and oppressed will become depraved, and all of society will be threatened.
Scrooge looked about him for the Ghost, and saw it not. As the last stroke ceased to vibrate, he remembered the prediction of old Jacob Marley, and lifting up his eyes, beheld a solemn Phantom, draped and hooded, coming, like a mist along the ground, towards him.
Scrooge confronts real human poverty as the Ghost of Christmas present concludes his visit
Dickens has his Spirit of Christmas portray the spirit of Christianity, as he wrote in The Life of Our Lord, “Remember!—It is Christianity TO DO GOOD, always—even to those who do evil to us. It is Christianity to love our neighbor as ourself, and to do to all men as we would have them do to us. It is Christianity to be gentle, merciful, and forgiving, and to keep those qualities quiet in our own hearts