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Of late I have been trying to catch up on the great works of literature that I have never read by listening to them as audiobooks – while I am driving, and while I am at the gym.

I am fairly confident that I am the only man in history to have lifted weights while listening to Charlotte Bronte’s classic Jane Eyre.

And Jane Eyre is an absolute classic. I discover that my female friends have read it multiple times, and that they really resonate with Jane. And, I discover, so do I: she’s young, but she’s intelligent, and strong.

For the blokes, then, Jane Eyre tells the story of an orphaned girl who becomes the governess in the house of a mysterious man called Mr Rochester, with whom she falls in love… only to discover that Mr Rochester has a dark secret hidden in his attic: his first wife. She only discovers this on their wedding day.

Oops.

Escaping from Rochester’s grasp, Jane flees the scene and winds up in the house of St. John Rivers, a clergyman. He’s a serious fellow, and has ambitions to be a missionary in India.

And before too long, St. John Rivers proposes to Jane as well. But this proposal is some proposal. What Rev St. John Rivers wants from Jane is a helpmeet for his missionary endeavours, and practicality and purity say that Jane must come as his wife, not simply as his assistant. He tries to persuade, no rather, command her:

God and nature intended you for a missionary’s wife. It is not personal, but mental endowments they have given you: you are formed for labour, not love. A missionary’s wife you must – shall be. You shall be mine: I claim you – not for my pleasure, but for my Sovereign’s service.

It is the high ideal of the Gospel that he serves; and Jane, it seems to him, is to serve him as he serves Christ in a foreign land. His manipulative and high-minded language is intended to force her to his will, not charm her. He uses his special sense of closeness to God as a way to force her to yield to him.

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But our Jane of course is not so easily twisted to a man’s will – which is one of the charming things about her. She has a sense of her own self, and inner world that is convincing and sensible. She rebuffs his offer plainly, suggesting instead that she could travel as a fellow-worker but not a wife.

St. John says:

Do you think God will be satisfied with half an oblation? Will he accept a mutilated sacrifice? It is the cause of God I advocate: it is under His standard I enlist you. I cannot accept on his behalf a divided allegiance: it must be entire.

To which Jane replies:

Oh! I will give my heart to God… You do not want it.

She is smart enough to see through his spiritual bullying, since that is what it is. He wishes to possess her, not work with her. She exposes him as, frankly, a spiritual abuser. Only, he doesn’t like being denied of course:

It is what I want… it is just what I want. And there are obstacles in the way: they must be hewn down. Jane, you would not repent of marrying me; be certain of that; we must be married… Refuse to be my wife, and you limit yourself for ever to a track of selfish ease and barren obscurity…

The violence of his language here is alarming. He won’t be denied, he imagines. His sheer force of ambition will overwhelm her in the end, and she will submit.

In the context of the novel, we are able to see St. John for what he is. He is motivated by the service of God, but he operates with no sense of the human. He speaks often of God’s sovereignty, but he is determined to share in some of that sovereignty. He is incapable of love – of any sort. In fact, we are reminded in him of the words of Paul when he says ‘if I submit my body to the flames, and have not love… I am nothing.’

It is simply not right for Jane to conjoin herself with such a force. Although her true love, Rochester, is at this stage not right for her either – he is still bound to his wife, and has much to atone for in his past before he can belong to Jane – it is clear that she cannot choose St. John Rivers.

Sadly though, the logic of St. John Rivers is not absent from among us. A young man, full of zeal for the Lord, will be told to choose a wife who will double his ministry, and not halve it. Young wives are told this too. There are husbands who will sacrifice the mental health and well-being of their partners on the altar of their ministry ambitions. There are those of us who will cling to the ministry long past the stage when it is obvious that we should choose a calling that puts less stress on a particular family. There are children who report being shunted aside by parents in favour of the higher needs of the ministry, for ‘the sake of the gospel’.

A woman known to me said that her first, violently abusive husband used the very same rhetoric on her.

St. John Rivers’ idealism is not unfamiliar. And the wreckage he leaves around him isn’t unfamiliar either.  

What is spiritually wrong with St. John Rivers is that he doesn’t understand the very Gospel he claims to preach. He doesn’t understand that that Gospel is not a project, or a cause, to which all, including people, must be sacrificed. It is rather, a message which is essentially about love. You cannot demand Jane Eyre marry you and submit herself to your holy work, because it isn’t loving. You can’t act like a jerk at home, and justify it because you have an important part to play in God’s plan for the world.

There might be deities you can serve in that way, but Jesus of Nazareth is not one of them.

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