The Broad and Narrow Way--chap. 3

Turns out this thing, oh my, has been around. I could have guessed. 

A Brit street preacher named Rev. Gawin Kirkham had it reproduced as a large painting which, somewhere around 1870 or so, he used for reaching the lost. We're talking large large--massive enough for him to require an assistant with a pool cue to point out the mini-sermons Kirkham would deliver when interpreting the thing. So it turns out the Broad and Narrow is not ancient at all, the first one created, in Germany, about the time of the American Civil War. 

But there's more history here, and it's grand. 

Rev. Gawin Kirkham was Secretary of the Open-Air Mission, which was--and is (google it sometime) a society of street preachers who held and hold forth on street corners in Britain's cities. The Broad and Narrow was Kirkham's own flannel graph. Up it would go on a street near you. 

There's more. Contemporary accounts are amazing.

During the season just closed, it has been expounded fifty-three times-- frequently to the poor without payment; but of the sum of £ 200 collected by the Secretary on his year's journeys, covering nearly 9,000 miles. . .. It has thus been carried to the North in Lancashire, Westmoreland, and Yorkshire; to the West in Worcestershire; and to the South in Hants and Dorset; and the testimonies to its usefulness from mayors, magistrates, and ministers are very encouraging'. During the winter of 1882 the Secretary expounded on it more than fifty times. From October to May 1883 he preached about it seventy-two times. In 1886 the number of expositions was one hundred and twenty-four, and in all seven hundred and eighty-nine over seventeen years. In 1892, Kirkham had expounded on its meaning one thousand one hundred and eighteen times, the last time only six days before his death. 

Been around is right. The very first Broad and Narrow was the dream of a well-heeled woman from Stuttgart, a devotee of the German Pietist movement, another group (there's always one) convinced the church had departed damnably from the paths of righteousness, a movement who determined that freedom from the tyranny of the liberals was a platform of their own restrictions--no beer, no cards, no dance, and a heap of Sabbitarianism that rivaled Deuteronomy itself--all of which was required to clean up rampant faithlessness.

That woman's name was Charlotte Reihlen. Ms. Reihlen knew she wasn't blessed with the artistic talent to create The Broad and Narrow on paper or parchment or canvas, so she sought and found yet another committed pietist, an artist named Herr Schacker, to bring it to life, which means the language of the very first B and N was German.

Ms. Reihlen contributed a booklet of explanation with the formidable title Erklärung des Bildes f Der breite und der schmale Weg' , mit Anführung der auf dem Bilde meist nur angedeuteten Schrift, which I won't try to translate because it's just too much fun to try to read it in the original. Besides, if you've seen B and N, you know what the Deutsch means anyway.

Eventually, someone noticed, published a few hundred, and the Broad and Narrow caught on, the first legitimate German pietist meme. A pastor from Stuttgart gave one to a judge from Utrecht, who passed it along to Amsterdam's leading religious publisher, H. deHoog, who published it in 1867, in Dutch. That's the version on our wall.

Pastor Kirkham of the Open-Air Mission spotted it in deHoog's front window, and soon enough The Broad and the Narrow Way was off and running to England too. Listen to this: it was Kirkham who brought it back to Stuttgart, as reported by his friend: 

The lecture had been well advertised and on two successive nights a crowd of a thousand people crowded every corner of the Concert Hall, the finest building in Stuttgart. Mr. Albert Reihlen [Charlotte's husband] presided. At the close the people crowded round Mr Kirkham, and at least five-and-twenty kissed him on both cheeks! 

All of that history in that curious print. Yet, I swear I never saw it until the auction on the far corner of our block forty years ago. I'm sure my parents didn't have one, nor did I see it on some friend's bedroom wall. 

But I knew it immediately on the auction table forty years ago because I was in it. I was part of it, and just as importantly, The Broad and Narrow Way was part of me.

Tomorrow--yet another blessed reiteration.

On the narrow way