_Which has to do with the Awakening of Youth_
The boy and girl sprang up apace; their brains developing added
perception and quickness under Lovegood’s tuition--wits are whetted by
congenial wit.
The stripling’s voice broke, lost its treble, and for awhile was
awkward to the ear, as his lank limbs to the eye; and a-top of the
change the down came upon his lip, adding the last touch of whimsy
to youth’s ungainliness. Betty came through the awkward age less
awkwardly, showing a lithe gracefulness in her very lankness of limb.
The girl it was who began to show shy reservations.
The lad was becoming restless with--he knew not what. Coming
adolescence was setting his youngster blood a-jigging. Boyhood was
gone--youth not fully come. Romance was singing in his ears--adventure
thrumming impatient fingers on the windows of his fancy--hot instincts
leading his feet--wilfulness challenging his daring.
In all this dangerous period of his cubhood, the girl’s sweet
companionship steadied the lad--kept him from many tomfool
waywardnesses. Her fragrant hair, loose-flowing to the winds, brushed
his cheek and veiled him in from much unwholesomeness. The girl’s
slender gloved hands held the key to his nobility--opened to him only
the view of the best that was in him; whilst his protection of her, and
his frank confidence in her, filled the lad’s body with early manhood
that had otherwise been filled with indecision and with many and
uncouth vulgarities.
And just as, his voice breaking, a hoarser accent came into his speech,
so, too, a more robust accent came into his thinking. He began to
question, first of all here and there, then from roof to base, what he
had accepted with a boy’s frank acceptance.
The Why and the Whence and the Whither had begun to trouble.
He and Betty had taken to going to church of a Sunday evening. At last,
puzzled by many things, the lad went boldly and called on the vicar.
Encouraged by the well-bred courtesy of the gentle-hearted man and by
the noble simplicity and selflessness of his life, and full of eager
questionings, he had gone again a time or so; but he found his blunt
queries evaded--the deep inmost and basic meaning of life and death,
when he pressed for an answer, was at once thrust behind a screen of
God and angels, seen dimly across a gulf of heavens and hells, in the
human form and habit, and with those earthly functions of which the
disembodied spirit had no further need, and through a veil of vague
talk of the inspired word.
The inspired word!
Inspiration that could allow discrepancies in the simplest details of
the most important things--one gospel giving the Annunciation to Mary,
another to Joseph--one giving the Anointing by a woman to the beginning
of the ministry, the others to the eve of the Crucifixion--all
differing in the statement of the great and solemn act of the very
Crucifixion--one stating that the Christ bore His cross, the others
that Simon bore it--disagreeing even as to the bitter drink that
was given and when given--disagreeing as to the hour of the great
tragedy--every one of them all contradicting each other as to the
sayings on the cross--the statement by Christ in one gospel to the
repentant thief that they would that day be in Paradise denying that
the Christ really descended into Hell and rose again the third day--one
gospel contradicting the others as to the acts and sayings of these
thieves--all at variance even about the last dying words--all writing
different inscriptions over the suffering head--one stating that the
body was embalmed, another denying its embalming.
There were larger discrepancies: How could the devil tempt God? And
even so, what virtue were in so easy a triumph? Why had God, out of His
creation of all things, created the devil? How could He punish for sin
who had created sin? Why did God create a world so faultily that He
Himself condemned it? Why punish His own bungling upon His miserable
creatures? How could He set up as eternal reward the prospect of the
good being with Him in the heavens and listening to the agony of the
victims of His poor maimed handiwork in hell? What had man done more
loathsome than to create a Hell? Was this gruesome heaven of gloating
over the agony of the damned to be our Immortality? If these things had
been written to-day instead of coming out of the dim glamour of the
centuries, would they be believed?
The vicar was genuinely shocked.
He stammered of Conduct--he did not guess the extent of the boy’s
reading.
The good man had always looked upon any who questioned Christianity
as atheists and agnostics--upon atheists and agnostics as criminal
and brutish persons. He had never realized that some of the noblest,
greatest, purest and sweetest lives had been lived by these--nor that
some of the foulest, most damnable, and criminal lives had been spent
in vileness by princes of the Church.
The boy bent his brows on the old gentleman’s embarrassment....
Already bored by the vicar’s dusty sermons, and now baffled to find
that what had baffled him likewise baffled the vicar, he turned
his back on the Church of his people and went with Betty to the
pro-cathedral of Rome.
The beauty of the service, its music and its splendid symbolism,
appealed for awhile to his artistic senses; but the questionings soon
began again to unsettle the lad. For he found that he could not get to
the root of things in this exquisite place even as far as with his old
vicar. He had imagined the Roman Church as united--as agreed. He found
it racked from one end to the other by the warring pronouncements of
the Fathers. The cardinal himself it was who blew up the bridge that
spanned the road to Rome.
It was the day of a great mass at the Oratory. It had been
noised abroad that the church was to be draped red with handsome
draperies--that the cardinal was to speak, robed in his crimson
vestments. All the leaders of society that held to the Papist tradition
were to be there--and, as events turned out, there was, besides, a
large gathering of Society that owned no allegiance to Rome, yet
enjoyed a handsome pageant.
The boy and girl went--anxious to hear what message the illustrious
prince of the Church had for their hearts--what guidance for their
lives--what he had to say upon the great intellectual advancement of
the age--what upon the great questions that loomed before the puzzled
brain of man.
And he, the appointed spokesman of the infallible church, smooth-faced,
aristocratic, magnificent, arose from his seat at his ordered place
in the elaborate service, and his voice broke the musical refrain of
the splendid ceremonial with disturbing accent but to reiterate the
narrow message of his Church that only through absolute subjection of
mind and body to the forms and traditions and quaint superstitions of
that Church could man be saved from everlasting damnation; and, with
triumphant note, he revelled in the fact, and could get to little else,
that the English Church, which had persecuted Rome for generations,
had now begun to place her images upon its altars and in the emptied
niches of its portals--had indeed filched the rubric and the habits
and the symbols of his Church! And, with exultant voice, swelling to
arrogance, he, with the same lips that called his Church catholic,
whilst in the very act of narrowing it to a parochial destiny, twitted
with parochialism the land whose large religious toleration allowed his
Church to live unmolested where that same Church had made a shamble and
a stews when it was in power, debauching its once opportunity by fire
and torture, showing in such strange hellish wise its large Catholicism
to such as had differed from its narrow creed. He spoke passionately of
past persecution--he omitted to say who had taught the lesson.
But of the Why and the How and the Whence and the Whither--nothing. All
the flattest Agnosticism....
That evening the striplings, together with Netherby Gomme, wandered,
with a crowd that pressed, into the large and simple place of worship
of a well-known chapel to hear a great Protestant preacher. This
man, unaided by the gorgeous ritual of the morning that appealed to
every artistic sense, made the simple Protestant claim to individual
responsibility, to acts of life as against the ritual of churches.
He ignored all Christolatry, as a grown man sets aside the toys of
childhood, and his voice thundered that the life of the individual
would be judged solely by the part it played towards the ennobling
of the community. And he showed that just as Christianity had been
born from the Jews and the Greeks, so had Protestantism in turn
been born out of Rome; and so must the future ideals of the great
peoples, purified still more and more by rejecting the false and the
superstitious, be born again out of this same Protestantism.
It was the large, daring, and frank mind of this man that roused the
lad from the lethargic irresponsibility of his boyhood to his duty
towards life. Just as the Romanist communion by its ideal of the
salvation of the individual through and by the community has weakened
the force of the individual, so the innate difference of the Protestant
ideal, the salvation of the community by and through the individual,
strengthened the lad’s nerve and made his will resolute. He flung off
his reliance on others and faced his life and his destiny.
He roused from the drowsy contemplation and the fantastic dreads of
otherworldliness--ridiculous heavens and more ridiculous hells--and
turned to life. For awhile he was not troubled.
The genial optimism of youth came back to him.
It was soon after this stage of awakening intellectual unrest that
the lad found himself embarked on the larger tide of the literary and
intellectual unrest of the Continent.
Mixing more and more amongst the Bohemians, he found himself amongst
frank and fearless thinking; he was roused by the inquisitive genius
of France--heard the first words of the daring speculations of German
thought. He realized that religious teaching had passed from the Church
to the newspaper--to literature--and to the arts; that religion, from
being a fierce war of priests, was become a searching into the everyday
life of the community, was become a fierce desire to better that life.
The angels were flown, theology gone to dust, and man was seeking
after the godhead that is in him--he who had kissed the feet of idols,
cringing for salvation in whimsical heavens, now stood up and looked at
the meaning of manhood.
Thou Shalt Not was giving place to Thou Shalt.