THE CRISIS OF FAITH
It is a hard thing to write the history of a soul. The human soul is
not a simple study; it is constituted of so many parts, faculties,
emotions, sympathies, antipathies, as to render its diagnosis
imperfect, nay perhaps impossible. We seldom understand one another’s
motives; we do not always understand our own. We are a mystery, each
of us, to his neighbour; I had almost said we are a mystery each to
himself.
Yet this is the task which must be undertaken in this chapter--to
relate the spiritual agonies of a soul. It will be necessary to show
by what process of reason or conviction one who had been trained in
the safe though narrow path of Christian evangelical orthodoxy became,
as it were, a wanderer, homeless and hopeless, how he passed from
certainty to doubt, from doubt to negation, and at length went down
into the valley of darkness from which there is often no return.
In the history of a soul, its own confessions, its own introspections,
are the only guides. All else is conjecture, imagination. Such papers
or letters as Gerald Eversley has left will therefore be used here, for
in them he speaks for himself, and the record, though incomplete, is
not untrue. But the difficulty in using them is that they lack date,
method, consecutiveness; they are like the volcanic upheavings of a
soul’s fiery unrest; the doubts which possessed him, and the reactions
of his faith are welded together. Yet who is there that is at all times
equally religious or equally irreligious? Is not every man a believer
sometimes, a sceptic sometimes? Has not faith its days of sunshine
and of cloud in every life? It is not perhaps faith or unfaith that
discriminates mankind; it is rather the longing for faith, the anguish
of unfaith, or the opposites of these.
Doubts of God break upon the soul as the waves upon the shore, surging,
retreating, engulfing one another with incessant flux and reflux in
measured advance until the flood or in measured ebb-tide, but alas!
defertilising, devastating it always, and leaving it strewn with the
débris of weed, shingle, shifting sand, and the wreckage of men.
How impotent, too, are words as images of thought! They pursue ideas,
beliefs, reflections, with halting steps; for between the thought and
its expression lies an interval, brief or prolonged, and while the mind
is expressing itself, it moves. Men are often doubters before they
confess their unbelief, and when they proclaim it, they are drawing
near to faith again.
He whose spiritual history is here recorded was a youth. He lacked
the moderating, chastening experience of age; he had seen only
two-and-twenty years when this story comes to an end. His view of
religion might have been calmer had his years been more; but it would
not, I think, have been more touching or more tragical. The experienced
Christian, the confirmed Agnostic may both alike smile--it were more
fitting, perchance, that they should weep--at the half-reasonings,
the lights and shadows of belief, the exaggerations and recoils in
the lonely pilgrimage of this young soul. And yet this at least is
sure, that if the fate of a human soul battling in the great waters
within the sight and hail of the shore, and going down alone, does not
profoundly move and thrill the nature of any one of us, it is ill for
him; he is far--very far--from the kingdom of God.
Let it not be deemed that Gerald Eversley ever fell into the sophistry
of treating religious belief as a thing indifferent. That miserable
thought could not be his. Early hallowed associations possessed him.
The beauty of a life ordered by religion was before his eyes. In the
hours when he had drifted farthest from the sanctuary of God he would
still, I think, have owned that life without religion, though it might
be lived, and lived not selfishly nor unprofitably, yet was not, nor
could ever be, the same thing.
And if he asked himself Is religion needed? he could give but one
answer. The world around him, the world within him, were his witnesses.
Human nature is not so constituted that it can afford to dispense
with its strongest motive to morality. ‘Is it said,’ he writes, ‘that
the belief in God does not make men moral? To say so is to deny the
influence of belief upon action altogether. Why do men act in one
way rather than in another? Because of their beliefs. Belief is the
sole curb of passion. A man’s creed determines soon or late his
deeds. Man, so far as he is a rational being, must be guided by his
reasonable expectations of consequences, _i.e._ by his beliefs. What
absurdity, then, to imagine that a belief in man’s responsibility for
his actions--public or obscure--for his words, for his very thoughts,
to an Infallible, Eternal and Almighty Judge, is not an infinitely
potent cause of moral action! The man of belief and the man of unbelief
stand on different platforms. It is the former who provides, the latter
who accepts, the sanctions of morals. Infidelity may appeal to public
opinion as a restraining force; but what created public opinion? Faith.’
Then he seeks to meet the objection that religion does not always
moralise human lives. ‘It is true, but what if it is? Motives do not
always produce their natural results; they may be counteracted by other
motives or by passions stronger for a time than themselves, for man is
not simply rational, he is a creature of emotion, impulse, passionate
desire. The sea, high-swollen by gales, overleaps its walls, dashes
its salt spray for a brief while above the cliff. Are the walls then
useless? were it well to pull them down? Better to strengthen them,
deepen them, heighten them. No; religion may be false, but it has no
substitute.’
It is clear that when he wrote these words--and they were never
cancelled--he longed to believe; he realised the beauty, the
blessedness of belief. Would that beauty and blessedness be always his?
He saw the storm descending upon him from afar, and he cowered before
it. He ‘feared as he entered into the cloud.’ Men talk sometimes of
‘giving up’ religious belief; but no belief that is worth possessing
was ever ‘given up;’ it is torn away by some cruel power irresistible,
and the soul is left lacerated, bleeding from the wound. To Gerald
Eversley (if he had ever known them) would have come home those
wonderful lines which show that Goethe passed through deeper spiritual
waters than he was fain to confess:
Wer nie sein Brod mit Thränen ass,
Wer nie die kummervollen Nächte
Auf seinem Bette weinend sass,
Er kennt Euch nicht, Ihr himmlischen Mächte.
Ihr führt ins Leben uns hinein,
Ihr lasst den Armen schuldig werden,
Dann überlasst Ihr ihn der Pein,
Denn alle Schuld rächt sich auf Erden.
Let us try to follow him in his wanderings.
All unbelief begins in a distrust of the goodness of God. To be able
to say ‘I believe in God’ is to have a religion, nay, if the truth be
told, it is to have all religion. That majestic article of belief is
so high a triumph over the apparent faults, schisms, lapses, miseries,
agonies of Nature, that he whose heart can say ‘I believe that God is
good’ is prepared for other beliefs as developments of that.
Consider how great a belief it is--great in its difficulty, great in
its august beneficence. ‘I believe in the All-Good,’ or, as Christ
put it, ‘I believe in God the Father.’ Marvellous it is that _Theist_
or _Deist_ should have been a term used reproachfully. To believe
in a superintending gracious Providence; to believe that in life’s
sorrowful straits an Everlasting Eye oversees us, an Almighty Voice
still bids us be of cheer; to believe that there is a soul of goodness
in things evil, that life is a riddle of which the key is held in
divine invisible hands, and that we see as yet but a fragment of the
scheme that extends from eternity to eternity--is not this the heart
of religion? is it not a solace, guidance, discipline of the soul? ‘I
marvel,’ says Gerald Eversley in one of his letters, ‘that the mere
faith in God, apart from prophets, priests, mediators, revealers, has
not exercised a more sacred, divine influence among men. But I marvel
yet more at the tenacious strength with which men in all ages and in
all quarters of the world have adhered to that belief, so antithetical
as it is to moral experience. The warrant of it lies not, methinks,
in the phenomena of Nature or Life. It lies in the constitution of
the human heart. _Fecisti nos ad Te_, as St. Augustine says, _et cor
nostrum inquietum est donec requiescat in Te_. We cling to the faith
in God, not because it is open to no objection, but because, when our
vision is clearest, not chequered or distorted by pride, passion,
cupidity, self-deception, no other faith than that is possible. I
believe in God.’
When Gerald Eversley in his lonely meditations found that the
belief in God (which he had always taken as axiomatic) was gravely
questioned, it was as though the earth were quaking under his feet.
The extinguishing of the sun or moon in the heaven would not be a
more terrible shock than is the loss of God to a young soul. It is
altogether desolate if bereft of Him. It is so trustful, so generous,
so positive; it leans so hard upon its faiths, and is so sure of their
ability to endure whatever assault of criticism may be opposed to them,
that to lose aught is to lose all; and, when the faith in God fails,
the man, from a sentiment of having been abused and cheated, plunges
many a time headlong into sin. Oh! the pity that God should fail men in
their bitter need of Him!
I find this passage in one of Gerald Eversley’s papers, written, it
would seem, not long after the date of his leaving St. Anselm’s. It is
like much that men have thought and written since the world was.
‘What is the voice of Nature? Is it love? I see a wild battling
of forces, ruthless, inexplicable, working out good--such good as
exists--by agonies of evil. I see the strong trampling on the weak,
life issuing from suffering and death, pain inflicted every day upon
the innocent and unoffending; everywhere violence, cruelty, pestilence,
cataclysm the laws of the universe. No, the voice of Nature is not
love.
‘What is the voice of History? Is that then love? Has the progress of
man been effected by beneficent agencies? Are the hands of civilisation
stained with no bloodshed? Everywhere the pages of human history
exhibit the red fires of tyranny, injustice, persecution, conscience
sacrificed at the stake, virtue outraged and expelled, vice enthroned
in the palace, nay, in the sanctuary of God, armies of men slaughtered
for a tyrant’s will, butcheries, fusillades, dragonnades, noyades, the
axe, the scaffold, the guillotine. Everywhere, everywhere.
‘Why should the Almighty, if He be All-Merciful, permit this carnage?
There is no answer.’
The revolt of souls against religion is more often moral than
intellectual in its origin. It is when the moral sense is shocked that
the intellect sharpens its sword in the cause of unbelief.
The growing humanity of life--a humanity which is the one clear
compensating gain for many defaults--rises in protest against the
severities of religious history or religious doctrine. The murderous
deeds wrought by the heroes and heroines of the Old Testament did not
offend the Covenanters as they offend their late descendants to-day.
It would not seem that the teaching of Christ, in regard to the future
life and its punishments and rewards, aroused so much as one faint
murmur of indignation among His contemporaries, who were the vigilant
jealous enemies of His Messiahship. Yet that teaching, interpreted with
the literalness which would wring the last latent drop of bitterness
out of metaphor or allegory, has come to be so keenly resented by
sensitive consciences as to imperil the claim of His religion to be the
divinely appointed satisfaction for the spiritual needs of humanity.
Gerald was led on--it is but a step--from doubting the justice of God
in this world to doubting it in the next. His spirit revolted at the
inequalities and disproportions of the present life. But it revolted
still more at the thought of an immutable inequality between the
destinies of men in the unseen life. His father had always assumed
this inequality as an element of revelation. He had spoken of the
‘great gulf fixed,’ of the eternity of bliss, and the eternity of
condemnation. It was as sure to him as the Incarnation itself; nay,
he would argue, if there was an Incarnation of the Eternal, can the
penalty of rejecting Him be less than eternal?
There is no mistake in religion so great as that of being too logical.
In the affairs of man and man logic has its place, for they are
confined within the boundaries of the reason. But in the relation
of the Infinite to the finite, in the problem where one factor is
Infinity, logic is the most dangerous, the most fatal of possible
guides. From Augustine to Calvin and Jonathan Edwards, it has been the
vice of theology. Mr. Eversley did not ask himself, Can one man sin and
the consequences for man be everlasting, and shall a God die and the
consequences of His death end for most men with threescore years and
ten?
Strictly considered, the revelation of the Divine Nature is and must
be not single, but twofold. Every truth of God has two sides, like a
medal, and it is impossible to view them simultaneously. The nearest
human approximation to such truth will be found to lie in a harmony of
conflicting propositions. Logical contradictions are an absurdity in
human things; in divine things they are sometimes the only possible
expressions of truth. The divine severity and the divine forgiveness,
like necessity and free will, run in parallel lines which know no
meeting in this life, but may perchance meet in the eternal Life of
Heaven.
Gerald Eversley seems to have had some inkling or presentiment of this
fact, for I find somewhat later a reference to Isaiah lv. 8, 9, as
a passage affording the solution of religious difficulties. ‘For my
thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith
the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways
higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.’
But it was the last flicker of the dying flame. On the very same page
there is a sentence showing how the bitter herb of unbelief had already
begun to poison the spring of happiness in his life.
For no sooner is the goodness of God denied or doubted than a sense of
dissatisfaction arises in the human mind. Things are well as they are,
if they are the expression of a divine (though inscrutable) will. They
are not well, if judged in and by themselves.
Gerald Eversley found himself impatient (as so many before him) of
the circumstances of his being, nay, of his being itself. Instead of
thanking God for his creation, he censured his father for it. Questions
such as these welled up in his soul: ‘Why was I born, when it were so
much better not to have been than to be? Τὸ μὴ φῦναι ἃπαντα νικᾷ λόγον.
Why has man no option in his birth? why may he have none in his death?
Where is the right of parents to bring children into life, knowing not
if it will be to them a misery, a curse? How can he who believes that
the vast majority of mankind are predestined to an everlasting woe,
augment, with a light and laughing heart, the number of the damned?’
And again:
‘The honour of parents hangs upon the belief in God. The duty of
parents to the children whom they have begotten, perhaps to those
children’s bitter pain, is a law of Nature. But the duty that children
owe to parents needs a revelation of the Divine Will. And what if the
revelation fails?’
Thus Gerald for the first time in life began to look with angry eyes
upon the father who had once been his ideal of human goodness. Mr.
Eversley held that children were ‘an heritage and gift that cometh of
the Lord;’ he had been known to say that, where God sent the mouths, He
would send the bread to feed them. The theory can hardly be said to be
justified by experience. Gerald resented and condemned it. He argued
that the parent was responsible for his children’s welfare here and
hereafter. Unhappy, wretched he was in his view; it made his home (with
its widening circle of open-mouthed little sisters) intolerable to him;
his father ceased to be any more his friend, and became to him as a
stranger, and for many months in the early days of his college life,
Kestercham--the once loved village of his boyhood--saw him not.
His vision being thus disturbed, his soul embittered, he turned a
fierce scrutiny upon the evidences of Christ’s religion. He treated
them fiercely, almost vindictively. He resolved to give them no
quarter. He would be true to his conscience--logically true--be the
cost what it might. He seemed to delight in tearing his old beliefs
to shreds. Human nature is strangely capable of finding pleasure in
self-inflicted pain.
It is not the function of a religious creed to solve all difficulties.
Difficulties, physical, intellectual, spiritual, are the stimulus of
humanity. Do them away, and humanity becomes contented and enervated.
Lessing said, not less forcibly than nobly, that the possession of
truth belongs to God; it is the search for truth that is the dignity of
man. In this light Pilate’s question gets a new meaning, What is truth?
No evil could happen to human nature so great as the loss of its
unsolved and as yet insoluble mysteries.
Religion does not affect to solve religious difficulties. Difficulties
are inherent in the relation of the divine to the human. God may be
apprehended but not comprehended. Were it possible to comprehend Him,
it would be impossible to worship Him. The blessing of religion is not
in solving the mysteries of life or nature; it is in showing that there
is a solution, and that God keeps it in His hands.
But Gerald Eversley’s mind was already decided for negation (though he
knew it not) when he applied himself to the study of Christianity. That
it was so is clear from such words as these in one of his papers:
‘Can it be supposed that God, if He were good and would that all men
should be saved, would leave His revelation in doubt? A revelation
which can be denied is no revelation. Would He have committed it to
fallible men and to yet more fallible records and documents of men?
Would He not have written it in flaming characters across the heaven,
like the sacred sign that made the Emperor Constantine a Christian?
Who will stake his all upon an hypothesis? Who will die for a superior
probability? It cannot be a divine providence that loving souls, eager
to believe, should be tossed to and fro as on a wild sea and be never
at rest. Give me certainty, not an agony of doubt and fear. O God, if
Thou be God, prove Thyself God.’
Oh! Gerald, Gerald, it is not the certainties of life (they
are few enough) for which men die. The theories, hypotheses,
uncertainties--these, and only these, may claim the supreme
self-sacrifice.
It is distrust in the goodness of God, I say again, which is the
beginning of all unbelief. Gerald Eversley thought himself unfairly
used by religion, and his reprisal lay in using religion with more
unfairness.
The truth is that if God be good, if He be, as the _Wisdom_ has it,
a ‘lover of souls,’ then it is a natural presumption that He should
anticipate the need of His children, by establishing an understanding
or sympathy between Himself and them. Granted the goodness of
God, inspiration and revelation, however understood, cease to be
intrinsically difficult; they are natural, almost necessary. The one
eternal paradox would be that God should care for men and should take
no means to assure them of His care.
But a treasure is not the less a treasure because it is in earthen
vessels. The human record of a divine revelation may be looked at
either broadly or in detail. If it be scrutinised microscopically, many
flaws, fissures, faults will come to light. The element of humanity
is in all things the element of error. It is only in the inviolate
works of God in Nature that the microscope reveals ever new wonders of
beneficence and beauty. But religion can never depend upon disputed
points of authorship and chronology. Truth is self-luminous; it matters
not who discovers or describes it. Names, places, dates, are the
accidents of a religion; they are not of its essence. We need no proof
of the sun in heaven. We need no proof of the Divine Life on earth.
He who lived that Life called Himself the Son of Man. That one who is
mere man should call Himself the Son of Man, were arrogance. But that
one who is higher than man, stooping for a time to human estate, should
call Himself the Son of Man, is the perfectness of condescension.
More it is not necessary to define. ‘If you do not ask me,’ says the
philosopher, ‘I know.’
Gerald Eversley fell into the mistake of pressing details. It is
the mistake of one who would contemn a hero for an error in dress.
Revelation is not infallibility. Life is spontaneous, erratic; death
is rigid, immaculate, complete in itself. God speaks by revelation;
revelation is life.
Gerald Eversley argued himself into his own predetermined conviction.
He did not believe in God, therefore he did not believe in revelation.
He mistook his premiss for his conclusion.
He stood then in his thoughts face to face with Christ. We all stand
so one day. The ages of history are as one vast columnar gallery, and
at its head looms the one pathetic Divine Figure, saying to every
individual soul of man, What thinkest _thou_ of Me? It is the one
eternal question, ever ancient, ever new; there is no other question in
the world.
The life of Christ is unlike other lives. Its features are distinct and
pre-eminent. All depends (though Gerald failed to see it) upon the way
of looking at them.
It is possible to argue from miracle to Christ. Or it is possible to
argue from Christ to the miracles. Gerald reasoned that miracles could
not occur; therefore Christ did not work miracles; therefore He is not
the Son of God.
But what means that phrase, _The Son of God_? Is it literal, sufficient
truth? Is it not metaphor? and is not metaphor the sole expression of
divine relations?
Sonship implies two things in the human conception of it--posteriority
and inferiority; but no sooner does the Creed declare Him Son of God
than it declares that He is neither posterior nor inferior to His
Father, and yet it calls Him Son. It denies in one clause what it
asserts in another. It is self-contradictory, but it is not therefore
false.
Why, then, does the Christian Church make use of metaphor? Partly,
perhaps, because it is natural to human language to express the
spiritual in terms of the sensuous; are not conception, apprehension,
religion itself, terms of the senses? But partly, too, because
metaphor appeals to the emotions; its very vagueness is suggestive,
stimulating, inspiring, and it is by the emotions that religion lives.
To say, then, that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, is not to say that
that is intrinsic absolute truth.
Gerald Eversley had surrendered his faith in the divine nature of
Christ. But he still clung to faith in Him as the highest or archetypal
man, understanding so His self-chosen title ‘the Son of Man.’ This is
the confession which, it will be remembered, he tried to make once to
his father. He essayed to speak of Christ as perfect man, though not
divine. He forgot that, if there were a perfect man, he would be more
than man. Imperfection is an attribute of humanity.
Yet how infinitely touching is at times the desire of those who no
longer believe Him divine to acknowledge and reverence Him as the
head of the whole human family! They still speak of Him as ‘the Great
Master,’ ‘the Holy One,’ ‘the Lord,’ nay even as ‘the Saviour.’ It is
the glow that flushes the horizon when the sun has already sunk into
the waves.
Gerald Eversley, in this phase of his belief or unbelief, said to
himself, ‘He is nearer to me than he was, now that I think of him as
man. Time was when his voice came to my ears, as it were, through long
and distant avenues. Now I speak to him face to face. He is my elder
brother, like myself, yet oh! how much higher! I grasp his hand. He
goes before me on the dark and lonesome road. What need to dream of
him as descending from heaven, or emptied of a divine glory? It is
enough that one who walked upon the earth, a man among men, living the
common life of men, tempted as men are, suffering like men, yet lived
so sublime a life as to extort from human souls the vain ascription of
divinity. That is my comfort, greater than if he had been the firstborn
of Creation, and legions of angels had waited upon his word.’
Gerald Eversley did not long deceive himself with the imagination that
the residuary Christ of his speculations was the same Being whom he had
known and adored in childhood. It is the idlest of idle superstitions
that modern reason or sentiment can rewrite the Gospel. Human thought
did not create Christ, as Rousseau’s _Vicaire Savoyard_ knew well.
Neither can it re-create Him. And if the re-creation were possible,
there would be a new Christ. If the angels of God were not obedient
to His summons, His strong forbearance in not calling upon them was a
mockery. If He could not have saved Himself from death, then His death
is no longer meritorious. If he was, like other men, of the earth
earthy, where then is the condescension of His humanity? Such a Christ
may be a Friend, an Exemplar, a spiritual Leader; the world’s Saviour
and Redeemer He is not.
For a while Gerald Eversley flattered himself that this was enough. The
miraculous (he said) does not happen. Then there is no Christ. Gerald
Eversley manufactured his own Christ and sought to worship Him; but the
prayer died away upon his lips.
Yet, after all, this manufactured Christ did not content him. It
is easy to make a selection of His words and teachings that please
the individual, and to leave the rest. It is easy, but it is not
satisfying. And the worst is, that one person is as much entitled to
make his selection as another. Gerald, being honest with himself, could
not but own that there are words, and actions too, of Christ which do
not harmonise with any such selective process. It was a pain to him
that so much must be left out. The divine and the human elements are
the warp and the woof in the sacred biography. The result of selection
is destruction. An accomplished critic, in the exercise of his
selective faculty, has decided that Christ could not have spoken the
parable of the Prodigal Son. Is the result to discredit the parable of
the Prodigal Son, or to discredit the principle of selection? Heaven
help us when the Christ of God is dissolved in the crucible of critical
taste!
I do not say that a human Christ is not worth having; I only say that
he is not the Christ of Christendom. Perhaps Gerald Eversley felt it to
be so too; for he wrote, ‘No man is happy in a God whom he fashions for
himself. The objects of worship are given, not made; they proceed from
God to man, not from man to God. Science can analyse, but it cannot
create. It can explain every hue of the rainbow, but it cannot set the
rainbow in the heaven.’
He had ceased to worship the divine Son of Man; was it likely that he
would worship His shadow? Jesus Christ was to him one whom he could
admire or reverence, like Socrates or Marcus Aurelius; He was no more a
Guide for life and for death.
So Gerald Eversley faced faith on the ocean of life like a
vessel without rudder or compass. The sanctions of his life, its
encouragements, its consolations were lost. He was without faith in the
world.
To the obligation of the moral law he still clung. It was not in his
nature to commit the baseness of discovering in infidelity a pretext
for sin. The supremacy of honour, truth, charity, purity, was still
the law of his life. Whether these high principles of conduct were
self-sufficient, whether they could for ever flourish in a climate that
knew not the golden sunlight, he did not ask, he did not wish to ask.
He was trying to live the Christian life without Christ. He was not
happy.
In the academical society to which he migrated from St. Anselm’s, he
was subjected to a new and penetrating experience. His intellectual
distinction won him, from the first, admission into a cultivated
society. He was struck by the conversation of his associates. It
was brilliant and fascinating. It sparkled with jest and epigram.
It overran in festive good humour. But it lacked seriousness. It
seemed remote from the realities of life. There was in it no sense
of responsibility, of awe, of the sense of sin, of the longing for
righteousness. The froth upon the cup was high and shining; but in the
wine was no strength, no virtue. One of Gerald’s frequent companions at
Balliol was heard to say that he did not see what good religion was;
for he was doing his duty, and he could not do it better if there were
a hundred Gods to punish him. Gerald thought of the Pharisee and the
Publican, and of the reverential solemnity with which his father had
been wont to repeat the words, ‘God be merciful to me a sinner.’
Yet the stream carried him away. How hard it is to live in the stream
and not be borne away by it! And Gerald came to feel the absence of
belief to be as natural as belief had once been to him. He took it for
granted. He said to himself that nobody believed, because he and his
half-score of friends were unbelievers. It began to seem to him a thing
incredible that he had once enjoyed a simple unquestioning faith in God
and Christ.
It may be that, if it were the Divine Will to test the worth of human
souls, no better test were possible than the withdrawal of religious
faith. Better, in God’s eyes it may be, than the soul that believes, is
the soul that acquits itself nobly in the absence of belief. To steer
straight on when the waves of the deep run mountain-high, and neither
sun nor moon appears for many days in heaven--this is the triumph of
a faithless faith. O soul, that deemest thyself forsaken of God, thou
bearest within thee a God whose name is conscience.
And yet the desolation of being faithless--how great it is! Never had
Gerald been so solitary before. He shrank more and more from going
home. The meeting with his father was painful to him, for he had given
up the habit of going to church. And if he knew that his father prayed
for him, that was but one witness more to the vanity of prayer.
At college the men whom he met habitually were either the votaries or
(more often) the enemies of religion, and he was neither. Except at
Helmsbury, and there only on the rare occasions of conversation with
Lady Venniker, he could look for sympathy nowhere. He found it not in
the earth nor yet in the heaven, and he knew not that it could ever be
found.
Unhappy then he was, and daily unhappier. If he asked, ‘Is there a God?
do I stand in relation to Him? Has there been One who spoke on earth
in the accents of heaven? Is man responsible except to man? Is there a
hereafter? Whence came I? Whither am I going?’--the only answer was the
echo of his own voice. Culture could tell him all things, save the one
thing that his soul needed to know. It might be that that knowledge was
for ever hidden. But if so, if the questions that man is compelled to
ask are the questions to which an answer is denied, then is life vain,
nebulous, self-torturing, nay, it is death.
Lonely was Gerald, indescribably lonely. One extract from his papers,
written when he had been at college a year and more, may be given here;
it will not unfitly bring this chapter to a conclusion.
‘I lay wakeful one night until the night was passing into morning.
It was more than I could bear--that aching, terrible void. I could
have chosen death rather than that living pain. At last I rose from my
bed, half dressed myself, and went out. The night had been rainy. The
lamps in the courtyard were just flickering on the verge of extinction;
they seemed to me emblems of my own dying faith. For a time I stood
upon the bridge, gazing downwards into the dark, sluggish water. Many
thoughts, weird and dreadful, coursed through my mind; I can scarcely
recall them. But I know I said, standing there, “Is life then worthy
to be lived, if such be life? What is it that constrains me to suffer
and live? Religion teaches that life is a service, and the living
man a soldier set at his post by Divine Will, and it is treachery
or cowardice to quit it until He gives the command. But I have done
with religion. And if my life is my own, and death is sweeter, or
less bitter, than life, why live?” So I said--but not yet, not yet.
The roseate light began to play on the eastern horizon. I crossed the
courtyard, and returned, not as I had come, but under the shadow of the
old ivy-grown wall. When my servant came in the morning I was asleep.’
To this had Gerald Eversley come.
‘And Job spake, and said, Let the day perish wherein I was born, and
the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived. Let
that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the
light shine upon it.’