THE DIVINE DISCONTENT
I
It was the last Sunday in May, and in another week the annual flight to
the seashore and the mountains would have begun again. The breezes
stealing into the church through the open casements wafted hither and
thither the odours of the chancel flowers, and mingled with those fainter
and subtler perfumes set free by the rustling of summer gowns.
As on this day he surveyed his decorous and fashionable congregation,
Hodder had something of that sense of extremity which the great apostle
to the Gentiles himself must have felt when he stood in the midst of the
Areopagus and made his vain yet sublime appeal to Athenian indifference
and luxury. "And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now
commandeth all men everywhere to repent." . . Some, indeed, stirred
uneasily as the rector paused, lowering their eyes before the intensity
of his glance, vaguely realizing that the man had flung the whole passion
of his being into the appeal.
Heedlessness--that was God's accusation against them, against the age.
Materialism, individualism! So absorbed were they in the pursuit of
wealth, of distraction, so satisfied with the current philosophy, so
intent on surrounding themselves with beautiful things and thus shutting
out the sterner view, that they had grown heedless of the divine message.
How few of them availed themselves of their spiritual birthright to renew
their lives at the altar rail! And they had permitted their own children
to wander away . . . . Repent!
There was a note of desperation in his appeal, like that of the hermit
who stands on a mountain crag and warns the gay and thoughtless of the
valley of the coming avalanche. Had they heard him at last? There were
a few moments of tense silence, during which he stood gazing at them.
Then he raised his arm in benediction, gathered up his surplice,
descended the pulpit steps, and crossed swiftly the chancel . . . .
He had, as it were, turned on all the power in a supreme effort to reach
them. What if he had failed again? Such was the misgiving that beset
him, after the service, as he got out of his surplice, communicated by
some occult telepathy . . . . Mr. Parr was awaiting him, and
summoning his courage, hope battling against intuition, he opened the
door into the now empty church and made his way toward the porch, where
the sound of voices warned him that several persons were lingering. The
nature of their congratulations confirmed his doubts. Mrs. Plimpton,
resplendent and looking less robust than usual in one of her summer Paris
gowns, greeted him effusively.
"Oh, Mr. Hodder, what a wonderful sermon!" she cried. "I can't express
how it made me feel--so delinquent! Of course that is exactly the effect
you wished. And I was just telling Wallis I was so glad I waited until
Tuesday to go East, or I should have missed it. You surely must come on
to Hampton and visit us, and preach it over again in our little stone
church there, by the sea. Good-by and don't forget! I'll write you,
setting the date, only we'd be glad to have you any time."
"One of the finest I ever heard--if not the finest," Mr. Plimpton
declared, with a kind of serious 'empressement', squeezing his hand.
Others stopped him; Everett Constable, for one, and the austere Mrs.
Atterbury. Hodder would have avoided the ever familiar figure of her
son, Gordon, in the invariable black cutaway and checked trousers,
but he was standing beside Mr. Parr.
"Ahem! Why, Mr. Hodder," he exclaimed, squinting off his glasses,
"that was a magnificent effort. I was saying to Mr. Parr that it isn't
often one hears a sermon nowadays as able as that, and as sound. Many
clergymen refrain from preaching them, I sometimes think, because they
are afraid people won't like them."
"I scarcely think it's that," the rector replied, a little shortly.
"We're afraid people won't heed them."
He became aware, as he spoke, of a tall young woman, who had cast an
enigmatic glance first at Gordon Atterbury, and then at himself.
"It was a good sermon," said Mr. Parr. "You're coming to lunch, Hodder?"
The rector nodded. "I'm ready when you are," he answered.
"The motor's waiting," said the banker, leading the way down the steps to
the sidewalk, where he turned. "Alison, let me introduce Mr. Hodder.
This is my daughter," he added simply.
This sudden disclosure of the young woman's identity had upon Hodder a
certain electric effect, and with it came a realization of the extent to
which--from behind the scenes, so to speak--she had gradually aroused him
to a lively speculation. She seemed to have influenced, to a greater or
less degree, so many lives with which he had come into touch! Compelled
persons to make up their minds about her! And while he sympathized
with Eldon Parr in his abandonment, he had never achieved the full
condemnation which he felt--an impartial Christian morality would have
meted out.
As he uttered the conventional phrase and took her hand, he asked himself
whether her personality justified his interest. Her glance at Gordon
Atterbury in the midst of that gentleman's felicitations on the sermon
had been expressive, Hodder thought, of veiled amusement slightly
tinctured with contempt; and he, Hodder, felt himself to have grown warm
over it. He could not be sure that Alison Parr had not included, in her
inner comment, the sermon likewise, on which he had so spent himself.
What was she doing at church? As her eyes met his own, he seemed to
read a challenge. He had never encountered a woman--he decided--who
so successfully concealed her thought, and at the same time so incited
curiosity about it.
The effect of her reappearance on Gordon Atterbury was painfully
apparent, and Mrs. Larrabbee's remark, "that he had never got over it,"
recurred to Hodder. He possessed the virtue of being faithful, at least,
in spite of the lady's apostasy, and he seemed to be galvanized into a
tenfold nervousness as he hustled after them and handed her, with the
elaborate attention little men are apt to bestow upon women, into the
motor.
"Er--how long shall you be here, Alison?" he asked. "I don't know," she
answered, not unkindly, but with a touch of indifference.
"You treat us shamefully," he informed her, "upon my word! But I'm
coming to call."
"Do," said Alison. Hodder caught her eye again, and this time he was
sure that she surprised in him a certain disdain of Mr. Atterbury's zeal.
Her smile was faint, yet unmistakable.
He resented it. Indeed, it was with a well-defined feeling of antagonism
that he took his seat, and this was enhanced as they flew westward, Mr.
Parr wholly absorbed with the speaking trumpet, energetically rebuking at
every bounce. In the back of the rector's mind lay a weight, which he
identified, at intervals, with what he was now convinced was the failure
of his sermon. . . Alison took no part in the casual conversation that
began when they reached the boulevard and Mr. Parr abandoned the trumpet,
but lay back in silence and apparently with entire comfort in a corner of
the limousine.
At the lunch-table Mr. Parr plunged into a discussion of some of the
still undecided details of the new settlement house, in which, as the
plan developed, he had become more and more interested. He had made
himself responsible, from time to time, for additional sums, until the
original estimate had been almost doubled. Most of his suggestions had
come from Hodder, who had mastered the subject with a thoroughness that
appealed to the financier: and he had gradually accepted the rector's
idea of concentrating on the children. Thus he had purchased an
adjoining piece of land that was to be a model playground, in connection
with the gymnasium and swimming-pool. The hygienic department was to be
all that modern science could desire.
"If we are going to do the thing," the banker would, remark, "we may as
well do it thoroughly; we may as well be leaders and not followers."
So, little by little, the scheme had grown to proportions that sometimes
appalled the rector when he realized how largely he had been responsible
for the additions,--in spite of the lukewarmness with which he had begun.
And yet it had occasionally been Mr. Parr who, with a sweep of his hand,
had added thousands to a particular feature: thus the dance-hall had
become, in prospect, a huge sun-parlour at the top of the building, where
the children were to have their kindergartens and games in winter; and
which might be shaded and opened up to the breezes in summer. What had
reconciled Hodder to the enterprise most of all, however, was the chapel
--in the plan a beautiful Gothic church--whereby he hoped to make the
religious progress keep pace with the social. Mr. Parr was decidedly in
sympathy with this intention, and referred to it now.
"I was much impressed by what you said in your sermon to-day as to the
need of insisting upon authority in religious matters," he declared, "and
I quite agree that we should have a chapel of some size at the settlement
house for that reason. Those people need spiritual control. It's what
the age needs. And when I think of some of the sermons printed in the
newspapers to-day, and which are served up as Christianity, there is only
one term to apply to them--they are criminally incendiary."
"But isn't true Christianity incendiary, in your meaning of the word?"
It was Alison who spoke, in a quiet and musical voice that was in
striking contrast to the tone of Mr. Parr, which the rector had thought
unusually emphatic. It was the first time she had shown an inclination
to contribute to the talk. But since Hodder had sat down at the table
her presence had disturbed him, and he had never been wholly free from an
uncomfortable sense that he was being measured and weighed.
Once or twice he had stolen a glance at her as she sat, perfectly at
ease, and asked himself whether she had beauty, and it dawned upon him
little by little that the very proportion she possessed made for physical
unobtrusiveness. She was really very tall for a woman. At first he
would have said her nose was straight, when he perceived that it had a
delicate hidden curve; her eyes were curiously set, her dark hair parted
in the middle, brought down low on each side of the forehead and tied in
a Grecian knot. Thus, in truth, he observed, were seemingly all the
elements of the classic, even to the firm yet slender column of the neck.
How had it eluded him?
Her remark, if it astonished Hodder, had a dynamic effect on Eldon Parr.
And suddenly the rector comprehended that the banker had not so much been
talking to him as through him; had been, as it were, courting opposition.
"What do you mean by Christianity being incendiary?" he demanded.
"Incendiary, from your point of view--I made, the qualification,"
Alison replied, apparently unmoved by his obvious irritation. "I don't
pretend to be a Christian, as you know, but if there is one element
in Christianity that distinguishes it, it is the brotherhood of man.
That's pure nitroglycerin, though it's been mixed with so much sawdust.
Incendiary is a mild epithet. I never read the sermons you refer to;
I dare say they're crude, but they're probably attempts to release an
explosive which would blow your comfortable social system and its
authority into atoms."
Hodder, who had listened in amazement, glanced at the banker. He had
never before heard him opposed, or seen him really angry.
"I've heard that doctrine," cried Mr. Parr. "Those who are dissatisfied
with things as they are because they have been too stupid or too weak
or self-indulgent to rise, find it easy to twist the principles of
Christianity into revolutionary propaganda. It's a case of the devil
quoting Scripture. The brotherhood of man! There has never been an age
when philanthropy and organized charity were on such a scale as to-day."
A certain gallant, indomitable ring crept into Alison's voice; she did
not seem in the least dismayed or overborne.
"But isn't that just where most so-called Christians make their mistake?"
she asked. "Philanthropy and organized charity, as they exist to-day,
have very little to do with the brotherhood of man. Mightn't it be you
who are fooling yourselves instead of the incendiaries fooling themselves
So long as you can make yourselves believe that this kind of charity is
a logical carrying out of the Christian principles, so long are your
consciences satisfied with the social system which your class, very
naturally, finds so comfortable and edifying. The weak and idiotic ought
to be absurdly grateful for what is flung to them, and heaven is gained
in the throwing. In this way the rich inevitably become the elect, both
here and hereafter, and the needle's eye is widened into a gap."
There was on Mr. Parr's lips a smile not wholly pleasant to see. Indeed,
in the last few minutes there had been revealed to Hodder a side of the
banker's character which had escaped him in the two years of their
acquaintance.
"I suppose," said Mr. Parr, slowly, drumming on the table, "you would say
that of the new settlement house of St. John's, whereby we hope to raise
a whole neighbourhood."
"Yes, I should," replied Alison, with spirit. "The social system by
which you thrive, and which politically and financially you strive to
maintain, is diametrically opposed to your creed, which is supposed to be
the brotherhood of man. But if that were really your creed, you would
work for it politically and financially. You would see that your Church
is trying to do infinitesimally what the government, but for your
opposition, might do universally. Your true creed is the survival of the
fittest. You grind these people down into what is really an economic
slavery and dependence, and then you insult and degrade them by inviting
them to exercise and read books and sing hymns in your settlement house,
and give their children crackers and milk and kindergartens and sunlight!
I don't blame them for not becoming Christians on that basis. Why, the
very day I left New York a man over eighty, who had been swindled out
of all he had, rather than go to one of those Christian institutions
deliberately forged a check and demanded to be sent to the penitentiary.
He said he could live and die there with some self-respect."
"I might have anticipated that you would ultimately become a Socialist,
Alison," Mr. Parr remarked--but his voice trembled.
"I don't know whether I'm a Socialist or an Anarchist," she answered.
Hodder thought be detected a note of hopelessness in her voice, and the
spirit in it ebbed a little. Not only did she seem indifferent to her
father's feeling--which incidentally added fuel to it--but her splendid
disregard of him, as a clergyman, had made an oddly powerful appeal.
And her argument! His feelings, as he listened to this tremendous
arraignment of Eldon Parr by his daughter, are not easily to be
described. To say that she had compelled him, the rector of St. John's,
at last to look in the face many conditions which he had refused to
recognize would be too definite a statement. Nevertheless, some such
thing had occurred. Refutations sprang to his lips, and died there,
though he had no notion of uttering them. He saw that to admit her
contentions would be to behold crumble into ruins the structure that
he had spent a life in rearing; and yet something within him responded
to her words--they had the passionate, convincing ring of truth.
By no means the least of their disturbing effects was due to the fact
that they came as a climax to, as a fulfilment of the revelation he had
had at the Fergusons', when something of the true nature of Mr. Plimpton
and others of his congregation had suddenly been laid bare. And now
Hodder looked at Eldon Parr to behold another man from the one he had
known, and in that moment realized that their relationship could never
again be the same. . . Were his sympathies with the daughter?
"I don't know what I believe," said Alison, after a pause. "I've ceased
trying to find out. What's the use!" She appeared now to be addressing
no one in particular.
A servant entered with a card, and the banker's hand shook perceptibly
as he put down his claret and adjusted his glasses.
"Show him into my office upstairs, and tell him I'll see him at once," he
said, and glanced at the rector. But it was Alison whom he addressed.
"I must leave Mr. Hodder to answer your arguments," he added, with an
attempt at lightness; and then to the rector: "Perhaps you can convince
her that the Church is more sinned against than sinning, and that
Christians are not such terrible monsters after all. You'll excuse me?"
"Certainly." Hodder had risen.
II
"Shall we have coffee in the garden?" Alison asked. "It's much nicer
outside this time of year."
For an instant he was at a loss to decide whether to accede, or to make
an excuse and leave the house. Wisdom seemed to point to flight. But
when he glanced at her he saw to his surprise that the mood of
abstraction into which she had fallen still held her; that the discussion
which had aroused Eldon Parr to such dramatic anger had left her serious
and thoughtful. She betrayed no sense of triumph at having audaciously
and successfully combated him, and she appeared now only partially to be
aware of Hodder's presence. His interest, his curiosity mounted suddenly
again, overwhelming once more the antagonism which he had felt come and
go in waves; and once more his attempted classification of her was swept
away. She had relapsed into an enigma.
"I like the open air," he answered, "and I have always wished to see the
garden. I have admired it from the windows."
"It's been on my mind for some years," she replied, as she led the way
down a flight of steps into the vine-covered pergola. "And I intend to
change parts of it while I am out here. It was one of my first attempts,
and I've learned more since."
"You must forgive my ignorant praise," he said, and smiled. "I have
always thought it beautiful: But I can understand that an artist is never
satisfied."
She turned to him, and suddenly their eyes met and held in a momentary,
electric intensity that left him warm and agitated. There was nothing
coquettish in the glance, but it was the first distinct manifestation
that he was of consequence. She returned his smile, without levity.
"Is a clergyman ever satisfied?" she asked.
"He ought not to be," replied Hodder, wondering whether she had read him.
"Although you were so considerate, I suppose you must have thought it
presumptuous of me to criticize your, profession, which is religion."
"Religion, I think, should be everybody's," he answered quietly.
She made no reply. And he entered, as into another world, the circular
arbour in which the pergola ended, so complete in contrast was its
atmosphere to that of the house. The mansion he had long since grown to
recognize as an expression of the personality of its owner, but this
classic bower was as remote from it as though it were in Greece. He was
sensitive to beauty, yet the beauty of the place had a perplexing
quality, which he felt in the perfect curves of the marble bench, in the
marble basin brimming to the tip with clear water,--the surface of which,
flecked with pink petals, mirrored the azure sky through the leafy
network of the roof. In one green recess a slender Mercury hastily
adjusted his sandal.
Was this, her art, the true expression of her baffling personality? As
she had leaned back in the corner of the automobile she had given him the
impression of a languor almost Oriental, but this had been startlingly
dispelled at the lunch-table by the revelation of an animation and a
vitality which had magically transformed her. But now, as under the
spell of a new encompassment of her own weaving, she seemed to revert to
her former self, sinking, relaxed, into a wicker lounge beside the basin,
one long and shapely hand in the water, the other idle in her lap. Her
eyes, he remarked, were the contradiction in her face. Had they been
larger, and almond-shaped, the illusion might have been complete. They
were neither opaque nor smouldering,--but Western eyes, amber-coloured,
with delicately stencilled rays and long lashes. And as they gazed up at
him now they seemed to reflect, without disclosing the flitting thoughts
behind them. He felt antagonism and attraction in almost equal degree
--the situation transcended his experience.
"You don't intend to change this?" he asked, with an expressive sweep of
his hand.
"No," she said, "I've always liked it. Tell me what you feel about it."
He hesitated.
"You resent it," she declared.
"Why do you say that?" he demanded quickly.
"I feel it," she answered calmly, but with a smile.
"'Resent' would scarcely be the proper word," he contended, returning her
smile, yet hesitating again.
"You think it pagan," she told him.
"Perhaps I do," he answered simply, as though impressed by her felicitous
discovery of the adjective.
Alison laughed.
"It's pagan because I'm pagan, I suppose."
"It's very beautiful--you have managed to get an extraordinary
atmosphere," he continued, bent on doing himself an exact justice. But
I should say, if you pressed me, that it represents to me the deification
of beauty to the exclusion of all else. You have made beauty the Alpha
and Omega."
"There is nothing else for me," she said.
The coffee-tray arrived and was deposited on a wicker table beside her.
She raised herself on an elbow, filled his cup and handed it to him.
"And yet," he persisted, "from the manner in which you spoke at the
table--"
"Oh, don't imagine I haven't thought? But thinking isn't--believing."
"No," he admitted, with a touch of sadness, "you are right. There were
certain comments you made on the Christian religion--"
She interrupted him again.
"As to the political side of it, which is Socialism, so far as I can
see. If there is any other side, I have never been able to discover it.
It seems to me that if Christians were logical, they should be
Socialists. The brotherhood of man, cooperation--all that is Socialism,
isn't it? It's opposed to the principle of the survival of the fittest,
which so many of these so-called Christians practise. I used to think,
when I came back from Paris, that I was a Socialist, and I went to a lot
of their meetings in New York, and to lectures. But after a while I saw
there was something in Socialism that didn't appeal to me, something
smothering,--a forced cooperation that did not leave one free. I wanted
to be free, I've been striving all my life to be free," she exclaimed
passionately, and was silent an instant, inspecting him. "Perhaps I owe
you an apology for speaking as I did before a clergyman--especially
before an honest one."
He passed over the qualification with a characteristic smile.
"Oh, if we are going to shut our ears to criticism we'd better give up
being clergymen," he answered. "I'm afraid there is a great deal of
truth in what you said."
"That's generous of you!" she exclaimed, and thrilled him with the
tribute. Nor was the tribute wholly in the words: there had come
spontaneously into her voice an exquisite, modulated note that haunted
him long after it had died away . . . .
"I had to say what I thought," she continued earnestly; "I stood it as
long as I could. Perhaps you didn't realize it, but my father was
striking at me when he referred to your sermon, and spiritual control
--and in other things he said when you were talking about the
settlement-house. He reserves for himself the right to do as he pleases,
but insists that those who surround him shall adopt the subserviency
which he thinks proper for the rest of the world. If he were a Christian
himself, I shouldn't mind it so much."
Hodder was silent. The thought struck him with the force of a great
wind.
"He's a Pharisee," Alison went on, following the train of her thought.
"I remember the first time I discovered that--it was when I was reading
the New Testament carefully, in the hope of finding something in
Christianity I might take hold of. And I was impressed particularly by
the scorn with which Christ treated the Pharisees. My father, too, if he
had lived in those days, would have thought Christ a seditious person, an
impractical, fanatical idealist, and would have tried to trip him up with
literal questions concerning the law. His real and primary interest--is
in a social system that benefits himself and his kind, and because this
is so, he, and men like him, would have it appear that Christianity is
on the side of what they term law and order. I do not say that they are
hypocritical, that they reason this out. They are elemental; and they
feel intuitively that Christianity contains a vital spark which, if
allowed to fly, would start a conflagration beyond their control. The
theologians have helped them to cover the spark with ashes, and naturally
they won't allow the ashes to be touched, if they can help it."
She lay very still.
The rector had listened to her, at first with amazement, then with more
complicated sensations as she thus dispassionately discussed the foremost
member of his congregation and the first layman of the diocese, who was
incidentally her own father. In her masterly analysis of Eldon Parr, she
had brought Hodder face to face with the naked truth, and compelled him
to recognize it. How could he attempt to refute it, with honesty?
He remembered Mr. Parr's criticism of Alison. There had been hardness in
that, though it were the cry of a lacerated paternal affection. In that,
too, a lack of comprehension, an impotent anger at a visitation not
understood, a punishment apparently unmerited. Hodder had pitied him
then--he still pitied him. In the daughter's voice was no trace of
resentment. No one, seemingly, could be farther removed from him (the
rector of St. John's) in her opinions and views of life, than Allison
Parr; and yet he felt in her an undercurrent, deep and strong, which
moved him strangely, strongly, irresistibly; he recognized a passionate
desire for the truth, and the courage to face it at any cost, and a
capacity for tenderness, revealed in flashes.
"I have hurt you," she exclaimed. "I am sorry."
He collected himself.
"It is not you who have hurt me," he replied. "Reflections on the
contradictions and imperfections of life are always painful. And since
I have been here, I have seen a great deal of your father."
"You are fond of him!"
He hesitated. It was not an ordinary conversation they were dealing with
realities, and he had a sense that vital issues were at stake. He had,
in that moment, to make a revaluation of his sentiments for the
financier--to weigh the effect of her indictment.
"Yes," he answered slowly, "I am fond of him. He has shown me a side of
himself, perhaps, that other men have not seen,--and he is very lonely."
"You pity him." He started at her word. "I guessed that from an
expression that crossed your face when we were at the table. But surely
you must have observed the incongruity of his relationship with your
Church! Surely, in preaching as you did this morning against
materialism, individualism, absorption in the pursuit of wealth, you must
have had my father in mind as the supreme example! And yet he listened
to you as serenely as though he had never practised any of these things!
"Clergymen wonder why Christianity doesn't make more progress to-day;
well, what strikes the impartial observer who thinks about the subject at
all, as one reason, is the paralyzing inconsistency of an alliance
between those who preach the brotherhood of man and those who are opposed
to it. I've often wondered what clergymen would say about it, if they
were frank--only I never see any clergymen."
He was strongly agitated. He did not stop--strangely enough--to reflect
how far they had gone, to demand by what right she brought him to the
bar, challenged the consistency of his life. For she had struck, with a
ruthless precision, at the very core of his trouble, revealed it for what
it was.
"Yes," he said, "I can see how we may be accused of inconsistency, and
with much justice."
His refusal to excuse and vindicate himself impressed her as no attempt
at extenuation could have done. Perhaps, in that moment, her quick
instinct divined something of his case, something of the mental suffering
he strove to conceal. Contrition shone in her eyes.
"I ought not to have said that," she exclaimed gently. "It is so easy
for outsiders to criticize those who are sincere--and I am sure you are.
We cannot know all the perplexities. But when we look at the Church, we
are puzzled by that--which I have mentioned--and by other things."
"What other things?" he demanded.
She hesitated in her turn.
"I suppose you think it odd, my having gone to church, feeling as I do,"
she said. "But St. John's is now the only place vividly associated with
my mother. She was never at home here, in this house. I always go at
least once when I am out here. And I listened to your sermon intently."
"Yes."
"I wanted to tell you this: you interested me as I had not been
interested since I was twenty, when I made a desperate attempt to become
a Christian--and failed. Do you know how you struck me? It was as a man
who actually had a great truth which he was desperately trying to impart,
and could not. I have not been in a church more than a dozen times in
the last eight years, but you impressed me as a man who felt something
--whatever it is."
He did not speak.
"But why," she cried, "do you insist on what you cell authority? As a
modern woman who has learned to use her own mind, I simply can't believe,
if the God of the universe is the moral God you assert him to be, that he
has established on earth an agency of the kind you infer, and delegated
to it the power of life and death over human souls. Perhaps you do not
go so far, but if you make the claim at all you must make it in its
entirety. There is an idea of commercialism, of monopoly in that
conception which is utterly repugnant to any one who tries to approach
the subject with a fresh mind, and from an ideal point of view. And
religion must be idealism--mustn't it?
"Your ancient monks and saints weren't satisfied until they had
settled every detail of the invisible world, of the past and future.
They mapped it out as if it were a region they had actually explored,
like geographers. They used their reason, and what science they had, to
make theories about it which the churches still proclaim as the catholic
and final truth. You forbid us to use our reason. You declare, in order
to become Christians, that we have to accept authoritative statements.
Oh, can't you see that an authoritative statement is just what an
ethical person doesn't want? Belief--faith doesn't consist in the mere
acceptance of a statement, but in something much higher--if we can
achieve it. Acceptance of authority is not faith, it is mere credulity,
it is to shirk the real issue. We must believe, if we believe at all,
without authority. If we knew, there would be no virtue in striving.
If I choose a God," she added, after a pause, "I cannot take a consensus
of opinion about him,--he must be my God."
Hodder did not speak immediately. Strange as it may seem, he had
never heard the argument, and the strength of it, reenforced by the
extraordinary vitality and earnestness of the woman who had uttered it,
had a momentary stunning effect. He sat contemplating her as she lay
back among the cushions, and suddenly he seemed to see in her the
rebellious child of which her father had spoken. No wonder Eldon Parr
had misunderstood her, had sought to crush her spirit! She was to be
dealt with in no common way, nor was the consuming yearning he discerned
in her to be lightly satisfied.
"The God of the individualist," he said at length--musingly, not
accusingly.
"I am an individualist," she admitted simply. "But I am at least logical
in that philosophy, and the individualists who attend the churches to-day
are not. The inconsistency of their lives is what makes those of us who
do not go to church doubt the efficacy of their creed, which seems to
have no power to change them. The majority of people in St. John's are
no more Christians than I am. They attend service once a week, and the
rest of the time they are bent upon getting all they can of pleasure
and profit for themselves. Do you wonder that those who consider this
spectacle come inevitably to the conclusion that either Christianity
is at fault, is outworn, or else that it is presented in the wrong way?"
The rector rose abruptly, walked to the entrance of the arbour, and stood
staring out across the garden. Presently he turned and came back and
stood over her.
"Since you ask me," he said slowly, "I do not wonder at it."
She raised her eyes swiftly.
"When you speak like that," she exclaimed with an enthusiasm that
stirred him, despite the trouble of his mind, "I cannot think of you as
a clergyman,--but as a man. Indeed," she added, in the surprise of her
discovery, "I have never thought of you as a clergyman--even when I first
saw you this morning. I could not account then for a sense of duality
about you that puzzled me. Do you always preach as earnestly as that?"
"Why?"
"I felt as if you were throwing your whole soul into the effort-=oh,
I felt it distinctly. You made some of them, temporarily, a little
uncomfortable, but they do not understand you, and you didn't change
them. It seemed to me you realized this when Gordon Atterbury spoke to
you. I tried to analyze the effect on myself--if it had been in the
slightest degree possible for my reason to accept what you said you
might, through sheer personality, have compelled me to reconsider.
As it was, I found myself resisting you."
With his hands clasped behind him, he paced across the arbour and back
again.
"Have you ever definitely and sincerely tried to put what the Church
teaches into practice?" he asked.
"Orthodox Christianity? penance, asceticism, self-abnegation--repression
--falling on my knees and seeking a forgiveness out of all proportion to
the trespass, and filled with a sense of total depravity? If I did that
I should lose myself--the only valuable thing I've got."
Hodder, who had resumed his pacing, glanced at her involuntarily, and
fought an inclination to agree with her.
"I see no one upon whom I can rely but myself," she went on with the
extraordinary energy she was able to summon at will, "and I am
convinced that self-sacrifice--at least, indiscriminate, unreasoning
self-sacrifice--is worse than useless, and to teach it is criminal
ignorance. None of the so-called Christian virtues appeals to me: I hate
humility. You haven't it. The only happiness I can see in the world lies
in self-expression, and I certainly shouldn't find that in sewing
garments for the poor.
"The last thing that I could wish for would be immortality as orthodox
Christianity depicts it! And suppose I had followed the advice of my
Christian friends and remained here, where they insisted my duty was,
what would have happened to me? In a senseless self-denial I should
gradually have, withered into a meaningless old maid, with no opinions
of my own, and no more definite purpose in life than to write checks for
charities. Your Christianity commands that women shall stay at home, and
declares that they are not entitled to seek their own salvation, to have
any place in affairs, or to meddle with the realm of the intellect.
Those forbidden gardens are reserved for the lordly sex. St. Paul, you
say, put us in our proper place some twenty centuries ago, and we are to
remain there for all time."
He felt sweeping through him the reverse current of hostility.
"And what I preach," he asked, "has tended to confirm you in such a mean
conception of Christianity?"
Her eye travelled over the six feet of him--the kindling, reflecting eye
of the artist; it rested for a moment on the protesting locks of his
hair, which apparently could not be cut short enough to conform; on the
hands, which were strong and sinewy; on the wide, tolerant mouth, with
its rugged furrows, on the breadth and height of the forehead. She lay
for a moment, inert, considering.
"What you preach--yes," she answered, bravely meeting his look. "What
you are--no. You and your religion are as far apart as the poles. Oh,
this old argument, the belief that has been handed down to the man, the
authority with which he is clothed, and not the man himself! How can one
be a factor in life unless one represents something which is the fruit of
actual, personal experience? Your authority is for the weak, the timid,
the credulous,--for those who do not care to trust themselves, who run
for shelter from the storms of life to a 'papier-mache' fortress, made to
look like rock. In order to preach that logically you should be a white
ascetic, with a well-oiled manner, a downcast look lest you stumble in
your pride; lest by chance you might do something original that sprang
out of your own soul instead of being an imitation of the saints. And if
your congregation took your doctrine literally, I can see a whole army of
white, meek Christians. But you are not like that. Can't you see it for
yourself?" she exclaimed.
"Can't you feel that you are an individual, a personality, a force that
might be put to great uses? That will be because you are open-minded,
because there is room in you for growth and change?"
He strove with all his might to quell the inner conflagration which she
had fanned into leaping flames. Though he had listened before to doubt
and criticism, this woman, with her strange shifting moods of calm and
passion, with her bewildering faculty of changing from passive to active
resistance, her beauty (once manifest, never to be forgotten), her unique
individuality that now attracted, now repelled, seemed for the moment the
very incarnation of the forces opposed to him and his religion. Holder,
as he looked at her, had a flash of fierce resentment that now, of all
times, she should suddenly have flung herself across his path. For she
was to be reckoned with. Why did he not tell her she was an egoist? Why
didn't he speak out, defend his faith, denounce her views as prejudiced
and false?
"Have I made you angry?" he heard her say. "I am sorry."
It was the hint of reproach in her tone to which the man in him instantly
responded. And what he saw now was his portrait she had painted. The
thought came to him: was he indeed greater, more vital than the religion
he professed? God forbid! Did he ring true, and it false?
She returned his gaze. And gradually, under her clear olive skin, he saw
the crimson colour mounting higher . . . . She put forth her hand,
simply, naturally, and pressed his own, as though they had been friends
for a lifetime . . . .