_MAN OF THE WORLD AND MYSTIC_
“There be no zarvice in the church to-day, my lady--not to St.
Bride’s,” said a garden lad to Bride one bright Sunday morning in
February as she was returning from a walk along the cliff in time for
the eight-o’clock breakfast. Eustace had met her strolling homewards
and had joined her. This had happened once or twice lately, and the
strangeness of the feeling of having a companion was beginning to wear
off.
“No service?” questioned the girl, pausing in her walk. “Is Mr.
Tremodart ill? I had not heard of it.”
The lad scratched his head as he replied in the slow drawl of his
native place--
“’Tisn’t ezactly that, my lady. Passon isn’t zick; but he du have
one of his hens a settin’ in the pulpit, and zo he du not wish her
distarbed.”
Eustace broke into a peal of laughter. It seemed a delicious notion to
him that the service of the parish church was to be suspended because
an erratic hen had chosen to sit herself in the sacred building. It
chimed in with many notions he already held of the effeteness and
deadness of the Church. He glanced into his companion’s face for an
answering smile, but Bride was looking straight before her with an
expression in her liquid dark eyes which he was quite unable to fathom.
“You can go to hear Mr. St. Aubyn at St. Erme, George,” she said kindly
to the lad, after a moment’s pause, but he only scratched his head
again, and said--
“Mappen I’ll go tu Dan’s and year Maister Tresithny. They du zay as
he’ll read a bit out o’ the book and tell folks what it all means.”
“That will be better than getting into mischief,” said the lady, with a
grave though kindly look at the lad; and then she passed onwards to the
house, Eustace walking beside her, smiling still.
“Are the services of the Church often suspended here for such weighty
reasons?” he asked.
“Not often,” answered Bride, still in the same gravely quiet way; “but
Mr. Tremodart is hardly alive to the sacredness of his calling nor the
sanctity of his office. He is a kind man, but he does not win souls by
his teaching. The church is very badly attended: no doubt he thinks
one service more or less of small importance. The people, I believe,
like him all the better for giving them an occasional holiday from
attendance, even though they may be very irregular in coming.”
“I should think that highly probable,” answered Eustace, still
examining Bride’s face with some curiosity, as if anxious to gauge her
thoughts on this subject and to seek to find in them some accord with
his own. “My experiences of the services at St. Bride’s Church are not
very stirring. The smell of dry-rot suggests the idea that it has been
caught from the calibre of the discourses heard there. Our friend Mr.
Tremodart may have many virtues, but he has not the gift of eloquence.”
Bride made no response. In her eyes there was a look akin to pain, as
though she felt the truth of the stricture, and yet it went against her
to admit its truth.
Eustace waited for a moment and then continued in the same light way--
“And will the service of the parish church be suspended for three
Sundays?--for, if my boyish recollections serve me, that is the time
required by a hen for bringing off her brood.”
“Oh, no,” answered Bride, with a quick earnestness and energy, “that
will certainly not be. Poor Mr. Tremodart, he knows no better perhaps;
but it is very, very sad. I suppose it was only found out last night
or this morning. There was no sermon last Sunday, so I suppose the
eggs collecting in the pulpit were not noticed. Of course they should
have been taken away at once. But Mr. Tremodart is very fond of his
animals, and he does not think of sacred things quite as--as--others
do. Of course it will be done before next Sunday. Oh, I am sorry it has
happened. I am sorry for the poor people.”
Eustace could not understand her mood. He saw only the humorous side
of the incident, but he would not say so to her. He was very anxious
to approach nearer in thought and feeling to his beautiful cousin, who
was as yet almost as much of a stranger to him as she had been upon
the day of his arrival. Although he saw her daily, sat at table with
her, and sometimes spent an hour over the piano with her in the evening
(for both were good musicians, as things went in those days), he still
felt as though she were a thing apart from him, wrapped in a world
of her own of which he knew nothing. The barrier which divided them
was at once impenetrable and invisible, yet he had never succeeded in
discovering wherein its power lay, and what might be done to break it
down and bring them together.
“You will go to St. Erme’s Church to-day, I suppose?” he said next,
without trying to solve the problem suggested by her speech. “I have
never attended St. Erme for a service, although I have met Mr. St.
Aubyn. Will you let me be your escort there? I suppose your father
will hardly walk as far.”
“No, I think not. He seldom goes out when there is no service at St.
Bride. He does not care for Mr. St. Aubyn’s preaching as I do: he
prefers that of Mr. Tremodart.”
Eustace secretly thought it must be a queer sort of preaching that
could be inferior to that of the parson of St. Bride’s; but he made no
remark, and merely asked--
“Then you will let me be your escort?”
“Thank you,” answered Bride quietly; “if you wish to go, I think you
will be rewarded.”
Eustace felt that his reward would be in the pleasure of the walk to
and fro with his cousin; but he did not say so, even though rather
exaggerated and high-flown compliments were then the fashion of the
day more than they have since become. Something in Bride’s aspect and
manner always withheld him from uttering words of that kind, and his
own honesty and common-sense kept him at all times within bounds, so
that he had never acquired the foolish foppery that was fashionable
amongst the gilded youth of the aristocracy. In one thing at least he
and Bride were agreed--that life was given for something more than mere
idle amusement and pleasure-seeking. And when they started off together
for their two miles’ walk across cliff and down for the little church
of St. Erme, Eustace began to ask questions of her as to the condition
of the people, their ignorance, their poverty, their state of apathy
and neglect, which all at once aroused her interest and sympathy, and
caused her to open out towards him as she had never done before.
Bride loved the people--that was the first fact he gathered from the
answers she made him. She loved them--and he loved them too. He was
conscious that they loved them with a difference--that when they
spoke of raising them and making them better and happier, she was
thinking of one thing and he of another. He was conscious of this, but
he did not think she was; and he was very careful to say no word to
check the impulse of confidence which had arisen between them. Bride
was grieved for the state of things about her: she mourned over the
degradation, the apathy, the almost bestial indifference to higher
things that reigned amongst the humble folks about her home. She spoke
with a glimmer as of tears in her eyes of their absolute indifference
to all that was high and noble and true; of the deep superstitions,
which stultified their spiritual aspirations, and the blind error and
folly of those who, turning away from God, sought wisdom and help from
those calling themselves witches--many of whom did possess, or appear
to possess, occult powers that it was impossible altogether to explain
away or disbelieve.
“Yes, Bride, it is very sad to hear of,” said Eustace gravely, “and it
all points to the same thing. We must teach the people. We must raise
them. We must feed them with wholesome food, and then they will turn
away in disgust from these effete superstitions, which are only the
outcome of ignorance and degraded minds.”
“I fear me there is something worse in them than that, Eustace,” said
Bride, looking out before her with that luminous gaze he often noticed
in her, which suggested a mind moving in a sphere above that of the
common earth. “It is the work of something more than blind ignorance.
It is the work of the devil himself. The powers many of these witches
exert is something beyond what any mere trickery can account for. There
is an agency beyond anything of that sort--it is the devil who endows
these miserable beings with powers above those of their fellows. God
have mercy on the souls of such! For in an evil hour, and for the hope
of worldly gain, they have placed their neck beneath an awful yoke, and
God alone knows whether for such there can be pardon and restoration!”
Eustace listened in silent amazement. He knew that gross superstition
reigned amongst the degraded and ignorant; but he had always believed
that it was confined to them, and that those who had enjoyed the
advantages of education were far above anything so credulous as a
belief in a personal devil working through the medium of men. It
was an age when materialism and rationalism in one form or another
stalked triumphantly over the earth. Spirituality was at a low ebb;
the Catholic revival was in its infancy. The wave of earnestness and
spiritual light which had been awakened by Wesley had dwindled and
spent itself, leaving many traces behind of piety and zeal, but without
accomplishing that work of awakening its founders had hoped to do. The
Court set a bad example; the people followed it more or less. It was
an age of laxity both in morals and in thought; but the prevailing
tone of ordinary men was one of condescending scepticism--tolerating
religion, but believing that a new era was coming upon the world in
which Christianity should be superseded by “natural religion”--a thing
far purer and higher in the estimation of its devotees.
That the world was evil, and in the greatest need of reform, Eustace
would be the last man to deny; but to refer the gross superstitions
of a benighted peasantry to the direct agency of a personal devil
savoured to his mind of utter childishness, although possibly it was
not more logically untenable than a belief in a personal Saviour, from
whom proceeded all holy impulses, all elevating and pardoning love,
all earnest searchings after the higher life. But if he was equally
sceptical on both of these points, he would fain have gauged the soul
of his companion, being keenly interested, not only in herself, but in
every aspect of thought as it presented itself to minds of different
calibre.
“You mean that you still believe in a certain devil-possession?” he
asked tentatively; and Bride turned upon him one long inscrutable
glance as she answered, after a long pause--
“Has the world ever been without devil-possession of one kind or
another, varying infinitely in its forms, to blind and deceive those
who dwell on the earth? What is sin at all but the work in men’s hearts
of the devil and his angels, ever prompting, deceiving, suggesting? But
where ignorance is grossest, and the light of God shines least, there
he finds the readiest victims to listen to his seducing whispers.” She
paused a moment, looked first at Eustace, with the earnestness that
always perplexed and stimulated his curiosity, and then added, in a
much lower tone, “And are we not to look for more and more indications
of his powers, more manifestations of them in forms of every kind, in
the days that are coming?”
“Why?” asked Eustace, in a tone as low as hers.
She clasped her hands lightly together as she made reply--
“Ah! because the days of the end are approaching--because the great
day of Armageddon is coming upon us, and the armies of heaven and hell
are mustering in battle-array for that awful final struggle which
shall mark the end of this dispensation, in which the Antichrist
shall be revealed--the man of sin, in whom the great apostasy shall
be consummated, and whom the Lord shall finally destroy when He rides
triumphant to do the final will of God, with the armies of heaven
following Him on white horses. And will the devil be idle when he knows
that his time is but short? Will he fail to send the strong delusion to
blind men’s eyes, and make them ready to hail the Man of Sin when he
shall arise? Men have thought that they saw him in the great conqueror
whose power was broken but a few short years ago; but there is another
and a greater to arise than he, and the devil is working now in the
hearts of men to prepare them for his coming.”
Eustace regarded her with keen interest and curiosity as she spoke.
Her face had kindled in a wonderful way. In the liquid depths of her
eyes there were strange lights shining. That she saw before her as in
a picture all that she spoke of he could not doubt, nor yet that she
hoped herself to be numbered in the armies of the Lord of Hosts when He
went forth conquering and to conquer. He had never before met mysticism
carried to such a point, and it stirred his pulses with quick thrills
of wonderment and curiosity.
“But, Bride, I would understand more of this,” he said very gently, so
as not to rouse her from her trance of feeling. “How do you know that
the days of the end are approaching so near? Why should not the world
be, as many believe her to be, still in her infancy?”
“Because the voice of God has been awakened in the Church,” answered
Bride, in a low tense tone. “Because God has at last answered the
prayers of those who, ever since those awful days of the uprising in
France, have been sending up supplications to His throne to send us
light and help from above. He has answered. He has shown us through
holy men, who have been, with fasting and prayer, making study of the
prophetic books of Scripture, so long sealed to man, what all this
stirring and uprising of the nations portends; and He has told us that
this is the beginning of those judgments of God, which in the last
days He will pour out upon the earth, when the apostasy of the world
and of the Church shall be avenged, and the Lord will purify the earth
before He comes to reign there. We know, because the voice of the
Lord has spoken it. But the world will not hear His voice. The world
will not listen; and the devil, for fear lest it should, sends false
voices--messages from the dead--teaches men to inquire of spirits that
peep and mutter, instead of inquiring to the living God; and so we see
an awakening of the spirits of evil as well as of those of good; and so
it will go on, each party growing stronger and stronger; though that
of the evil one will have the seeming mastery, till the final struggle
shall be consummated, and the enemies of God overthrown for ever.”
Eustace was saved the perplexity of trying to find an answer by the
sudden approach of Mr. St. Aubyn (whose old-fashioned rectory house
they were now passing) just as he turned out of his gate in the
direction of the church. He greeted Bride and her companion cordially,
made them promise to come to his house at the conclusion of the service
and refresh themselves before their walk home, and then had them
ushered into the rectory pew, which was always empty at this time of
year, for his wife was a great invalid, and could only get out of doors
in the most genial season of the year.
The little church of St. Erme was very antiquated, and interesting
to archæologists; but under Mr. St. Aubyn’s care it had lost the air
of neglect and desolation which was so common in rural churches. The
congregation was good for the size of the place, and the service was
reverently and intelligently conducted. The sermon was very simple,
in accordance with the needs of the flock; but there was a vein of
spirituality and piety running through it that struck Eustace as being
unusual and original, and kept alive his interest in the views of
“pietists,” as he classified them in his mind. He had been taught to
regard every form of belief or unbelief as a portion of a classified
system of speculation or philosophy; and he was glad to think he might
have an opportunity of some conversation with Mr. St. Aubyn after the
service, as he had struck him on other occasions when they had met as
being a man of intellect and wide reading.
The Rector himself escorted the guests to his house, and Bride
went upstairs to see the invalid, who reminded her a little of her
own mother, and whose presence always acted on her soothingly and
gratefully.
She felt refreshed by the hour spent in that quiet room, refreshed in
body and mind. She had had food given her to eat; and communion of
thought with one who sympathised with her, even where their opinions
might not be altogether in accord, was more to her in those days than
any bodily sustenance could be. Since her mother’s death Bride had been
shut up entirely within herself, and it is not good for such an ardent
soul as hers to be deprived of the natural outlet of speech with her
fellow-man.
When the girl went downstairs again, she found the two men deep in
talk, and sat quietly down in a shadowy corner to wait till they had
finished. Mr. St. Aubyn observed her entrance, though Eustace, whose
back was towards her, did not. The two were keenly interested in their
discourse, and continued it with animation. Bride soon began to pick
up the drift of it, and listened with wonder and amaze, a sense of
indignation and sadness inextricably mixed together falling upon her as
she realised what it all meant.
The two scholars were discussing the various phases of German
rationalism which had arisen close on the heels of French and
English deism; and from the tone taken by Eustace it was abundantly
evident that he was deeply bitten by the philosophy of Wolff, by the
destructive rationalism of Semler and Bretschneider, and the subjective
philosophy of Kant and his followers, who evolve all things in heaven
and earth from their own consciousness of them, on the principle that
“cogito, ergo sum.”
He had been educated at Jena and Weimar, where this school of
philosophy had its headquarters; and he was deeply impregnated with
the teaching of those who had followed upon the first bold propounders
of its doctrines. The names of Descartes and Locke, Spinoza and Fichte,
fell glibly from his tongue, as he ran through in a masterly way
the methods of these great thinkers of the different centuries, and
strove to show how, one after another, each in a different way had
struggled to show a blinded world that there could be no religion that
did not appeal to the reason; that the allegorical and the dogmatic
methods of interpreting Scripture had been tried in the balances
and found wanting, and that only the historic--the true rational
interpretation--could be found lasting with thinking men.
It was with a smile, and with great courtesy and patience, that Mr. St.
Aubyn listened to the clear and terse arguments of his intellectual
guest; and then he asked him what he thought of the Berlin school of
thought, which had trodden quickly upon the heels of the one he had
been ardently advocating--asked him what had been the teaching of
Schleiermacher and Neander and De Wette, and whether they had been able
(whilst giving all due weight to the value of reason) to remain where
the destructive rationalist thinkers had left them. Already they had
begun to strive to reconstruct a living and personal Christ out of the
ruins of the historic method, which would have robbed Him of all but a
shadowy existence as a misguided though well-meaning fanatic, deceiving
and deceived. How was it men could never rest without some theory of
a Divine personality, call it by what name they would? Was it not the
most rational deduction to admit that the reason for this inherent
longing (which none of the world’s greatest thinkers had ever attempted
to deny) was that the subjective philosophy never can content the
heart of man; that man _must_ have an object of worship, an external
standard, a living Head, and not an abstraction, simply because there
_is_ a living God, who created him in His own image; because he _has_
been redeemed by a living and incarnate Saviour, and because the Spirit
of the Eternal God the Father and the Son is for ever working in his
heart, and seeking to bring it back to uniformity with the heart of
Christ, overflowing with love towards God and towards man?
That, in brief, was the argument on both sides, only argued out at
length with skill and knowledge and versatility of thought by each
combatant. Bride, in her dim corner, sat and listened, and sometimes
shivered in horror, sometimes glowed with an ecstatic rapture, but
always listened with undivided attention, for these matters were not
to her the dry arguments of philosophers merely, but indications of
the spirit of perversity and blindness at work in the world in the
latter days--the spirit of the lawless one, coming in every insidious
form; first under the guise of liberality of thought and intellect,
then teaching men to throw off from them all the fetters imposed by the
precepts of Christ, all the external authority of the Church; paving
the way for that other rising against kings and rulers and external
authority of any kind whatsoever which she had been warned was one
of the signs of the latter days, when the voice of the people should
prevail once again, and they should give the power to him who should
come “in his own name.”
But the discussion ended at last as all such do, each man thinking as
he did before, though glad of the opportunity of exchanging ideas with
a scholar and person of intellectual acumen.
“We can at least agree to differ,” said Mr. St. Aubyn, as he shook
hands warmly. “We can be friends, even though we have our private
thoughts about each other’s folly. You are young yet. You have
your tilt with the world before you. It is natural to your age and
temperament to take nothing on trust, to examine all for yourself.
Perhaps in the days to come you may learn the lesson which other
philosophers of your own school have done--that there is no living on
systems and philosophies--that the hungry human heart of man must have
more to feed on than husks. Well, there is the Bread of Life waiting
for you when you are willing to receive it. I think the day will come
when you will take it at the hands of the all-forgiving and all-loving
Father.”
Eustace smiled, and pressed the hand he held. He was no bigot, and he
had a vein of poetical imagination within him to which these words
appealed. Besides, Bride was standing by, and he would not willingly
have pained her. He did not know how much she had heard of the previous
discussion, nor how much she would have understood if she had heard. He
said his adieus cordially, hoped he and Mr. St. Aubyn would often meet,
and gave his arm to his cousin to escort her home again.
He was sufficiently thoughtful himself that his silence did not strike
him till they had walked some way; but when he did strive to speak
on subjects which generally commanded her interest, he found her
absolutely unresponsive.
He looked at her, and saw that her face was cold and tranquil in its
statuesque beauty. The light which so often beamed in her eyes was
extinguished now. She was very pale, and moved mechanically, and as
though with something of an effort. He asked her if she were tired, but
received a monosyllabic negative; and then he made one more effort to
interest her by a theme which had never failed heretofore.
The ignorance of the peasantry was with her, as with him, a source
of pain and dissatisfaction. She and her mother had been planning,
before the death of the latter, how some small beginning might be
made to get the children taught just such rudiments of knowledge as
should raise them above the level of the beasts they tended. Hardly a
single labourer or respectable working man in country districts could
either read or write. Sometimes a substantial farmer could do no more
than set his name to a bill; and clever lads, who might have raised
themselves in the world, were kept down and hampered all their lives by
the inability to master the rudiments of education. Bride’s grief was
that none of the villagers and fisher-folks could read the Bible--that
it must remain to them a sealed book, save when others expounded it to
them. Eustace’s objection to ignorance was very differently grounded;
but hitherto the subject had been one of common interest, and when
together they had taken pleasure in discussing Bride’s favourite plan
of erecting a small school in memory of her mother, where such men,
women, and children as could find time and had the desire to learn
might be taught by a qualified person, and gradually win for the
place a higher standard of life and faith than was to be found in the
surrounding villages.
But even this subject to-day did not rouse in the girl any spark of her
wonted interest. She looked at him with steadfast sadness, as he spoke
of what he meant to try to do in this matter in other places (he did
not, from motives of delicacy, identify himself too much with St. Bride
in talking to his cousin), and said very gently, but with a severity
which was not altogether without intention--
“I am not sure that the people will not be better as they are, Eustace,
than taught as you will be likely to teach them.”
The young man flushed quickly. Philosopher though he was, he was human,
and this was a taunt he hardly cared to let pass.
“Do you mean to say that you think I should do them harm and not good
by helping them out of their mists of darkness?” he asked, with slight
incisiveness of manner.
“Do you think you _would_ be helping them out of the mists of
darkness?” asked the girl, suddenly turning her eyes upon him, with a
look he could not fathom.
“Certainly,” he answered quickly, and without hesitation.
Her face was turned away then. He only saw the pale pure profile
outlined against the sky.
“I am afraid not,” she answered, in a quiet serious way, that indicated
sadness if not depression; “there are worse forms of darkness than
intellectual darkness.”
“Do you think so?” he answered, in a tone that implied absolute
disagreement.
“I know it,” she answered, without the smallest hesitation.
“Intellectual darkness is sad, carried to the extent we see it here.
But spiritual darkness is a thousand times sadder, and, oh! how much
more difficult to enlighten!”
He said nothing. “Why try to argue with a fanatic?” he thought, and
they took their homeward way in silence.
Bride left him at the castle door and went quietly up to her room.
Eustace stood looking after her.
“You are very beautiful, my cousin,” he said to himself, “and you
fascinate me as no woman has fascinated me yet; but you are a mystic
and a fanatic both--and both these are beings inexplicable to me--and
yet I shall try to find you out, and teach you that there are nobler
things a woman can be than you have dreamed of as yet.”
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