IX

It is Good Friday to-day. This morning I wandered through a clean,

rain-washed world; among budding hedges, making for the great Cathedral

towers that loom across the flat. It was noon when I passed through the

little streets. Entering the great western portals, I found the huge

Cathedral all lit by shafts of golden sunshine. There was a little

company of worshippers under the central lantern; and a grave and

dignified priest, with a tender sympathy of mien, solemnly vested, was

leading the little throng through the scenes of the Passion. I sate for

a long time among the congregation; and what can I say of the message

there delivered? It was subtle and serious enough, full of refinement

and sweetness, but it seemed to me to have little or nothing to do with

life. I will not here go into the whole of the teaching that I

heard--but it was for me all vitiated by one thought. The preacher

seemed to desire us to feel that the sad and wasted form of the

Redeemer, hanging in his last agony on the cross among the mocking

crowd, was conscious at once of his humanity and his Divinity. But the

thought is meaningless and inconceivable to me. If he was conscious

then of his august origin and destiny, if he knew that, to use a

material metaphor enough, he would shortly pass through lines of

kneeling angels amid triumphant pealing music to the very Throne and

Heart of God, the sufferings of his Passion can have been as nothing.

There is no touch of example or help for me in the scene. Even the

despairing cry, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" becomes a

piece of unworthy drama; and yet if one presses the words of Jesus, and

remembers that he had said but a few short hours before that he had but

to speak the word, and legions of angels were at hand to succour him,

it is impossible to resist the feeling that he knew who he was and

whither he was bound. I do not say that the thesis is untrue; I only

say that if he knew the truth, then there is no medicine in his

sufferings for human despair.

The preacher seemed to feel the difficulty dimly, for he fell back upon

the thought that the agony was caused by Christ's bearing the load of

the world's sin. But here again I felt that, after all, sin must have

been in a sense permitted by God. If God is omnipotent and

all-embracing, no amount of freewill in man could enable him to choose

what was not there already in the Mind of God.

And then, too, the lesson of science is that man is slowly struggling

upwards out of his bestial inheritance into purity and light; and thus

if a man can inherit evil from evil progenitors by the law of God, he

is not a free agent in the matter; and it thus becomes a piece of sad

impiety, or worse, to say that it was inconceivable agony to God to

bear the sins which his own awful law perpetuated.

And to go deeper, what did the sacrifice effect? It effected no instant

change in the disposition of man; it appears to me to be a dark

profanity to believe that the human death of Christ effected any change

in the purpose and Love of God to the world. That God should come

himself on earth to die, in order that he might thereafter regard the

human race more mercifully, seems to me, if it were true, to be a

helpless piece of metaphysical jugglery. If that were true of God,

there is nothing that I could not believe of him.

And so the words of the preacher, a man, as I knew, of faithful energy

and unbroken prosperity of virtue, brought me no more hint of the truth

than did the voice of a hidden dove which cooed contentedly in the

stillness in some sun-warmed window of the clerestory. Dove and

preacher alike had lived secure and contented lives under the shadow of

the great Church, and equally, no doubt, if unconsciously, approved of

the system which made such tranquil lives possible.

Once, it seemed to me, the human accent broke urgently through, when

the preacher spoke of dark hours of spiritual dryness, when the soul

seemed shut out from God--"When we know," he said in heart-felt tones,

"that the Love of God is all about us, but we cannot enter into it; it

seems to be outside of us." Had he indeed suffered thus, this

courteous, kindly priest? I felt that he had, and that he was one of

the sorrowful fellowship.

One word he said that dwells with me, that "Faith overleaps all visible

horizons." That was a golden thought; so that as I walked back in the

cool of the afternoon, and saw the prodigious plain stretch on all

hands, and thought how strangely my own tiny life was limited and

bound, I felt that the message of Christ was a mysterious trust, an

undefined hope; not a mechanical process of forgiveness and atonement,

but an assurance that there is something in the world which calls

lovingly to the soul, and that while we stretch out yearning hands and

desirous hearts to that, we are indeed very near to the unknown Mind of

God.

X

I have often wondered how it has come about that Job has become

proverbial for patience. I suppose that it has arisen out of the verse

in the Epistle of St. James about the patience of Job; but, like the

passage in the Book of Numbers which attributes an extreme meekness to

Moses, it seems to me to be either a very infelicitous description, or

else a case where both adjectives have shifted their meaning. Moses is

notable for an almost fiery vehemence of character, and the punishment

that was laid upon him was the outcome of a display of intemperate

wrath. Just as we associate meekness with the worm that never turns, so

the typically patient animal is the ass who is too phlegmatic to resent

the most unjust chastisement, and ready to accommodate itself to the

most overtaxing burdens. But Job is the very opposite of this; he

endures, because there is no way out; but he never for a moment

acquiesces in the justice of his affliction, and his complaints are

both specific and protracted. He does not even display any very

conspicuous fortitude under his afflictions. He is not indomitable so

much as persistent. He is rather stubbornly self-righteous. It could

not, of course, be otherwise, for the essence of the situation is that

the sufferer should be aware that his deeds do not deserve punishment,

and that the sufferings he endures should be permitted in order that

his faith in God as well as his faith in his own integrity should be

tested.

The truth is that the word patience is used in English in a double

sense; it is applied to a sort of unreasoning stupidity, which accepts

suffering and pain without adding to it by imaginative comparison; such

patience knows nothing of the pain of which Dante speaks, the pain of

contrasting present unhappiness with past delight; and similarly, it

does not suffer the pangs of anticipation, the terrors of which Lord

Beaconsfield spoke, when he said that the worst calamities in his life

were the calamities which never happened. Nine-tenths of the misery of

suffering lies in the power of forecasting its continuance and its

increase, and the lesser patience of which I have spoken is the

patience which, by no effort of reason, but by pure instinct, hears the

burden of the moment in the spirit of the proverb that "sufficient for

the day is the evil thereof."

But there is a nobler and a purer quality of patience which is perhaps

one of the highest and most hopeful attributes of humanity, because it

is nurtured in so strong a soil, and watered with the dew of tears;

this is a certain tranquil, courageous, and unembittered sweetness in

the presence of an irreparable calamity, which is in its very essence

divine, and preaches more forcibly the far-reaching permanence of the

spiritual clement in mankind than a thousand rhapsodies and panegyrics

extolling human ingenuity and human greatness. Mankind has a deeply

rooted and childlike instinct that apology and repentance ought to be

met with the suspension of pains and penalties, and the hardest lesson

in the world to learn is that guilt may be forgiven, but that the

consequences of guilt may yet have to be endured. When we have really

learnt that, we are indeed perfected. St. Peter in one of his epistles

says that it is less creditable to be patient when one is buffeted for

one's faults than when one suffers for one's virtues. I fear that I

cannot agree with this. One may be convinced of the justice of a

sentence, but the more one is convinced of it, the more does one regret

the course of conduct that made the sentence necessary. The sinner who

suffers for his sin bears not only the pain of the punishment but also

the sense of shame and self-condemnation. The good man who suffers for

his goodness does indeed have to bear the burden of an awful mystery, a

doubt whether God is indeed on the side of the righteous; but he is not

crushed beneath the additional burden of self-contempt, he has not the

humiliating sense of folly and weakness which the transgressor has to

bear; and thus it so often happens that the well-meaning transgressor

is slow to learn the lesson of patience, because he takes refuge in a

vague sort of metaphysics, and attributes to heredity and environment

what is really the outcome of his own wilfulness and perversity.

But the true patience, whatever the cause of its sufferings, brings

with it a blessed sense of the faithful sternness, the fruitful

lovingness of God, who will not let even the feeblest of sinners be

satisfied with less than he can attain, in whose hands the punishment,

like fire, runs swiftly and agonisingly to and fro, consuming the baser

elements of passion and desire.