Fiat justitia ruat coelum. Proverb
Justice, the miracle worker among men. John Bright (July
14, 1868.)
“I thought you were never coming to see me,” said Erica, putting down a
newspaper and looking up with eager welcome at Charles Osmond, who had
just been announced.
“It has not been for want of will,” he replied, sitting down near her
couch, “but I have been overwhelmed with work the last few days. How are
you getting on? I'm glad you don't altogether refuse to see your prophet
of evil.”
“It would have been worse if you hadn't spoken,” she said, in the tone
of one trying hard to make the best of things. “I was rather rash though
to say that I should like my wheels to run down; I didn't know how
terrible it is to be still. One does so grudge all the lost time.”
“But you will not let this be lost time you will read.”
“Oh, yes, happily I can do that. And Mrs. McNaughton is going to give
me physiology lessons, and dear old Professor Gosse has promised to come
and teach me whenever he can. He is so devoted to father, you know, I
think he would do anything for me just because I am his child. It is
a comfort that father has so many real good friends. What I do so hate
though is the thought of having to be a passive verb for so long. You've
no idea how aggravating it is to lie here and listen to all that is
going on, to hear of great meetings and not to be able to go, to hear of
work to be done and not to be able to do it. And I suppose one notices
little things more when one is ill, for just to lie still and watch
our clumsy little servant lay the table for dinner, clattering down the
knives and forks and tossing down the plates, makes me actually cross.
And then they let the room get so untidy; just look at that stack of
books for reviewing, and that chaos of papers in the corner. If I could
but get up for just five minutes I shouldn't mind.”
“Poor child,” said Charles Osmond, “this comes very hard on you.”
“I know I'm grumbling dreadfully, but if you knew how horrid it is to
be cut off from everything! And, of course, it happens that another
controversy is beginning about that Longstaff report. I have been
reading half a dozen of today's newspapers, and each one is worse than
the last. Look here! Just read that, and try to imagine that it's your
father they are slandering! Oh, if I could but get up for one minute and
stamp!”
“And is this untrue?” asked Charles Osmond, when he had finished the
account in question.
“There is just enough truth in it to make it worse than a direct lie,”
said Erica, hotly. “They have quoted his own words, but in a sense in
which he never meant them, or they have quite disregarded the context.
If you will give me those books on the table, I'll just show you how
they have misrepresented him by hacking out single sentences, and
twisting and distorting all he says in public.”
Charles Osmond looked at the passages referred to, and saw that Erica
had not complained without reason.
“Yes, that is very unfair shamefully unfair,” he said. Then, after a
pause, he added, abruptly: “Erica, are you good at languages?”
“I am very fond of them,” she said, surprised at the sudden turn he had
given to the conversation.
“Supposing that Mr. Raeburn's speeches and doings were a good deal
spoken of in Europe, as no doubt they are, and that a long time after
his death one of his successors made some converts to secularism in
Italy, and wrote in Italian all that he could remember of the life and
words of his late teacher. Then suppose that the Italian life of Raeburn
was translated into Chinese, and that hundreds of years after, a
heathen Chinee sat down to read it. His Oriental mind found it hard to
understand Mr. Raeburn's thoroughly Western mind; he didn't see anything
noble in Mr. Raeburn's character, couldn't understand his mode of
thought, read through the life, perhaps studied it after a fashion, or
believed he did; then shut it up, and said there might possibly have
been such a man, but the proofs were very weak, and, even if he had
lived, he didn't think he was any great shakes, though the people did
make such a fuss about him. Would you call that heathen Chinee fair?”
Erica could not help smiling, though she saw what he was driving at.
But Charles Osmond felt much too keenly to continue in such a light
strain. He was no weak-minded, pleasant conversationalist, but a
prophet, who knew how to speak hard truths sometimes.
“Erica,” he said, almost sternly, “you talk much about those who quote
your father's words unfairly; but have you never misquoted the words of
Christ? You deny Him and disbelieve in Him, yet you have never really
studied His life. You have read the New Testament through a veil of
prejudice. Mind, I am not saying one word in defense of those so-called
Christians who treat you unfairly or uncharitably; but I do say that, as
far as I can see, you are quite as unfair to Christ as they are to your
father. Of course, you may reply that Jesus of Nazareth lived nearly
nineteen hundred years ago, and that your father is still living; that
you have many difficulties and doubts to combat, while our bigots can
verify every fact or quotation with regard to Mr. Raeburn with perfect
ease and certainty. That is true enough. But the difficulties, if
honestly faced, might be surmounted. You don't honestly face them; you
say to yourself, 'I have gone into all these matters carefully, and now
I have finally made up my mind; there is an end of the matter!' You
are naturally prejudiced against Christ; every day your prejudices will
deepen unless you strike out resolutely for yourself as a truth-seeker,
as one who insists on always considering all sides of the question.
At present you are absolutely unfair, you will not take the trouble to
study the life of Christ.”
Few people like to be told of their faults. Erica could just endure it
from her father, but from no one else. She was, besides, too young
yet to have learned even the meaning of the word humility. Had Charles
Osmond been a few years younger, she would not even have listened to
him. As it was, he was a gray-haired man, whom she loved and revered; he
was, moreover, a guest. She was very angry with him, but she restrained
her anger.
He had watched her attentively while he spoke. She had at first only
been surprised; then her anger had been kindled, and she gave him one
swift flash from eyes which looked like live coals. Then she turned her
face away from him, so that he could only see one crimson cheek. There
was a pause after he had said his say. Presently, with a great effort,
Erica faced him once more, and in a manner which would have been
dignified had it not been a trifle too frigid, made some casual remark
upon a different subject. He saw that to stay longer was mere waste of
time.
When the door had closed behind him, Erica's anger blazed up once more.
That he should have dared to accuse her of unfairness! That he should
have dared actually to rebuke her! If he had given her a good shaking
she could not have felt more hurt and ruffled. And then to choose this
day of all others, just when life was so hard to her, just when she was
condemned to a long imprisonment. It was simply brutal of him! If
any one had told her that he would do such a thing she would not have
believed them. He had said nothing of the sort to her before, though
they had known each other so long; but, now that she was ill and
helpless and unable to get away from him, he had seen fit to come and
lecture her. Well, he was a parson! She might have known that sooner or
later the horrid, tyrannical, priestly side of him would show! And yet
she had liked him so much, trusted him so much! It was indescribably
bitter to think that he was no longer the hero she had thought him to
be. That, after all, he was not a grand, noble, self-denying man, but a
fault-finding priest!
She spent the rest of the afternoon in alternate wrath and grief. In the
evening Aunt Jean read her a somewhat dry book which required all her
attention, and, consequently, her anger cooled for want of thoughts to
stimulate it. Her father did not come in till late; but, as he carried
her upstairs to bed, she told him of Charles Osmond's interview.
“I told him you like a little opposition,” was his reply.
“I don't know about opposition, but I didn't like him, he showed his
priestly side.”
“I am sorry,” replied Raeburn. “For my part I genuinely like the man;
he seems to me a grand fellow, and I should have said not in the
least spoiled by his Christianity, for he is neither exclusive, nor
narrow-minded, nor opposed to progress. Infatuated on one point, of
course, but a thorough man in spite of it.”
Left once more alone in her little attic room, Erica began to think
over things more quietly. So her father had told him that she liked
opposition, and he had doled out to her a rebuke which was absolutely
unanswerable! But why unanswerable? She had been too angry to reply at
the time. It was one of the few maxims her father had given her, “When
you are angry be very slow to speak.” But she might write an answer, a
nice, cold, cutting answer, respectful, of course, but very frigid. She
would clearly demonstrate to him that she was perfectly fair, and that
he, her accuser, was unfair.
And then quite quietly, she began to turn over the accusations in
her mind. Quoting the words of Christ without regard to the context,
twisting their meaning. Neglecting real study of Christ's character and
life. Seeing all through a veil of prejudice.
She would begin, like her father, with a definition of terms. What
did he mean by study? What did she mean by study? Well such searching
analysis, for instance, as she had applied to the character of
Hamlet, when she had had to get up one of Shakespeare's plays for her
examination. She had worked very hard at that, had really taken every
one of his speeches and soliloquies, and had tried to gather his true
character from them as well as from his actions.
At this point she wandered away from the subject a little and began to
wonder when she should hear the result of the examination, and to hope
that she might get a first. By and by she came to herself with a sudden
and very uncomfortable shock. If the sort of work she had given to
Hamlet was study, HAD she ever studied the character of Christ?
She had all her life heard what her father had to say against Him, and
what a good many well-meaning, but not very convincing, people had to
say for Him. She had heard a few sermons and several lectures on various
subjects connected with Christ's religion. She had read many books both
for and against Him. She had read the New Testament. But could she quite
honestly say that she had STUDIED the character of Christ? Had she not
been predisposed to think her father in the right? He would not at all
approve of that. Had she been a true Freethinker? Had she not taken a
good deal to be truth because he said it? If so, she was not a bit more
fair than the majority of Christians who never took the trouble to go
into things for themselves, and study things from the point of view of
an outsider.
In the silence and darkness of her little room, she began to suspect a
good many unpleasant and hitherto unknown facts about herself.
“After all, I do believe that Mr. Osmond was right,” she confessed at
length. “I am glad to get back my belief in him; but I've come to a
horrid bit of lath and plaster in myself where I thought it was all good
stone.” She fell asleep and dreamed of the heathen Chinee, reading the
translation of the translation of her father's words, and disbelieving
altogether in “that invented demagogue, Luke Raeburn.”
The next day Charles Osmond, sitting at work in his study, and feeling
more depressed and hopeless than he would have cared to own even to
himself, was roused by the arrival of a little three-cornered note. It
was as follow:
“Dear Mr. Osmond, You made me feel very angry yesterday, and sad, too,
for of course it was a case of 'Et tu, Brute.' But last night I came
to the unpleasant conclusion that you were quite right, and that I was
quite wrong. To prove to you that I am no longer angry, I am going to
ask you a great favor. Will you teach me Greek? Your parable of the
heathen Chinee has set me thinking. Yours very sincerely, Erica Raeburn.”
Charles Osmond felt the tears come to his eyes. The straightforward
simplicity of the letter, the candid avowal of having been “quite
wrong,” an avowal not easy for one of Erica's character to make, touched
him inexpressibly. Taking a Greek grammar from his book shelves, he set
off at once for Guilford Terrace.
He found Erica looking very white and fragile, and with lines of
suffering about her mouth; but, though physically weary, her mind seemed
as vigorous as ever. She received him with her usual frankness, and with
more animation in her look than he had seen for some weeks.
“I did think you perfectly horrid yesterday!” she exclaimed. “And was
miserable, besides, at the prospect of losing one of my heroes. You can
be very severe.”
“The infliction of pain is only justified when the inflictor is certain,
or as nearly certain as he can be, that the pain will be productive of
good,” said Charles Osmond.
“I suppose that is the way you account for the origin of evil,” said
Erica, thoughtfully.
“Yes,” replied Charles Osmond, pleased that she should have thought of
the subject, “that to me seems the only possible explanation, otherwise
God would be either not perfectly good or not omnipotent. His all-wisdom
enables Him to overrule that pain which He has willed to be the
necessary outcome of infractions of His order. Pain, you see, is made
into a means of helping us to find out where that order has been broken,
and so teaching us to obey it in the long run.”
“But if there is an all-powerful God, wouldn't it have been much better
if He had made it impossible for us to go wrong?”
“It would have saved much trouble, undoubtedly; but do you think that
which costs us least trouble is generally the most worth having? I
know a noble fellow who has fought his way upward through sins and
temptations you would like him, by the way, for he was once an atheist.
He is, by virtue of all he has passed through, all he has overcome, one
of the fines men I have ever known.”
“That is the friend, I suppose, whom your son mentioned to me. But I
don't see your argument, for if there was an all-powerful God, He could
have caused the man you speak of to be as noble and good without passing
through pain and temptation.”
“But God does not work arbitrarily, but by laws of progression. Nor does
His omnipotence include the working of contradictions. He cannot both
cause a thing to be and not to be at the same time. If it is a law that
that which has grown by struggle and effort shall be most noble, God
will not arbitrarily reverse that law or truth because the creation of
sinless beings would involve less trouble.”
“It all seems to me so unreal!” exclaimed Erica. “It seems like talking
of thin air!”
“I expect it does,” said Charles Osmond, trying to realize to himself
her position.
There was a silence.
“How did this man of whom you speak come to desert our side?” asked
Erica. “I suppose, as you say he was one of the finest men you ever
knew, he must, at least, have had a great intellect. How did he begin to
think all these unlikely, unreal things true?”
“Donovan began by seeing the grandeur of the character of Christ. He
followed his example for many years, calling himself all the time an
atheist; at last he realized that in Christ we see the Father.”
“I am sorry we lost him if he is such a nice man,” was Erica's sole
comment. Then, turning her beautiful eyes on Charles Osmond, she said,
“I hope my note did not convey to you more than I intended. I asked you
if you would teach me Greek, and I mean to try to study the character of
Christ; but, quite to speak the truth, I don't really want to do it. I
only do it because I see I have not been fair.”
“You do it for the sake of being a truth-seeker, the best possible
reason.”
“I thought you would think I was going to do it because I hoped to get
something. I thought one of your strong points was that people must
come in a state of need and expecting to be satisfied. I don't expect
anything. I am only doing it for the sake of honesty and thoroughness. I
don't expect any good at all.”
“Is it likely that you can expect when you know so little what is there?
What can you bring better than an hones mind to the search? Erica, if I
hadn't known that you were absolutely sincere, I should not have dared
to give you the pain I gave you yesterday. It was my trust in your
perfect sincerity which brought you that strong accusation. Even then it
was a sore piece of work.”
“Did you mind it a little,” exclaimed Erica. But directly she had
spoken, she felt that the question was absurd, for she saw a look in
Charles Osmond's eyes that made the word “little” a mockery.
“What makes that man so loving?” she thought to herself. “He reminded me
almost of father, yet I am no child of his. I am opposed to all that he
teaches. I have spoken my mind out to him in a way which must sometimes
have pained him. Yet he cares for me so much that it pained him
exceedingly to give me pain yesterday.”
His character puzzled her. The loving breath, the stern condemnation of
whatever was not absolutely true, the disregard of what the world
said, the hatred of shams, and most puzzling of all, the often apparent
struggle with himself, the unceasing effort to conquer his chief fault.
Yet this noble, honest, intellectual man was laboring under a great
delusion, a delusion which somehow gave him an extraordinary power of
loving! Ah, no! It could not be his Christianity, though, which made him
loving, for were not most Christians hard and bitter and narrow-minded?
“I wish,” she said, abruptly, “you would tell me what makes you willing
to be friends with us. I know well enough that the 'Church Chronicle'
has been punishing you for your defense of my father, and that there
must be a thousand disagreeables to encounter in your own set just
because you visit us. Why do you come?”
“Because I care for you very much.”
“But you care, too, perhaps, for other people who will probably cut you
for flying in the face of society and visiting social outcasts.”
“I don't think I can explain it to you yet,” he replied. “You would only
tell me, as you told me once before, that I was talking riddles to you.
When you have read your Greek Testament and really studied the life of
Christ, I think you will understand. In the meantime, St. Paul, I think,
answers your question better than I could, but you wouldn't understand
even his words, I fancy. There they are in the Greek,” he opened a
Testament and showed her a passage. “I believe you would think the
English almost as great gibberish as this looks to you in its unknown
characters.”
“Do you advise every one to learn Greek?”
“No, many have neither time nor ability, and those who are not apt at
languages would spend their time more usefully over good translations, I
think. But you have time and brains, so I am very glad to teach you.”
“I am afraid I would much rather it were for any other purpose!” said
Erica. “I am somehow weary of the very name of Christianity. I have
heard wrangling over the Bible till I am tired to death of it,
and discussions about the Atonement and the Incarnation, and the
Resurrection, till the very words are hateful to me. I am afraid I shock
you, but just put yourself in my place and imagine how you would feel.
It is not even as if I had to debate the various questions; I have
merely to sit and listen to a never-ending dispute.”
“You sadden me; but it is quite natural that you should be weary of such
debates. I want you to realize, though, that in the stormy atmosphere of
your father's lecture hall, in the din and strife of controversy, it
is impossible that you should gain any true idea of Christ's real
character. Put aside all thought of the dogmas you have been wearied
with, and study the life of the Man.”
Then the lesson began. It proved a treat to both teacher and pupil. When
Charles Osmond had left, Erica still worked on.
“I should like, at any rate, to spell out his riddle,” she thought to
herself, turning back to the passage he had shown her. And letter by
letter, and word by word, she made out “For the love of Christ--”
The verb baffled her, however, and she lay on the sofa, chafing at her
helplessness till, at length, Tom happened to come in, and brought her
the English Testament she needed. Ah! There it was! “For the love of
Christ constraineth us.”
Was THAT what had made him come? Why, that was the alleged reason for
half the persecutions they met with! Did the love of Christ constrain
Charles Osmond to be their friend, and at the same time constrain the
clergy of X______ not many years before to incite the people to stone
her father, and offer him every sort of insult? Was it possible that the
love of Christ constrained Mr. Osmond to endure contempt and censure on
their behalf, and constrained Mr. Randolph to hire a band of roughs to
interrupt her father's speeches?
“He is a grand exception to the general rule,” she said to herself. “If
there were many Christians like him, I should begin to think there must
be something more in Christianity than we thought. Well, if only to
please him I must try to study the New Testament over again, and as
thoroughly as I can. No, not to please him, though, but for the sake of
being quite honest. I would much rather be working at that new book of
Tyndall's.”