"You are a severe critic, Francesca!"
"Not I. I'm not criticising at all. But I can't help seeing
resemblances. And sometimes they are quite appalling. Now you, for
instance,"--here she laid a hand tentatively on mine--"you, in your
mysterious ideas of religion, actually believe that persons who lead
evil lives and encourage evil thoughts, descend the scale from which
they have risen and go back to the lowest forms of life--"
"I do believe that certainly"--I answered--"But--"
"'But me no buts,'"--she interrupted--"I tell you there are people in
this world whom I see IN THE VERY ACT OF DESCENDING! And it makes me
grow cold!"
I could well understand her feeling. I had experienced it often.
Nothing has ever filled me with a more hopeless sense of inadequacy and
utter uselessness than to watch, as I am often compelled to watch, the
deplorable results of the determined choice made by certain human
beings to go backward and downward rather than forward and upward,--a
choice in which no outside advice can be of any avail because they will
not take it even if it is offered. It is a life-and-death matter for
their own wills to determine,--and no power, human or divine, can alter
the course they elect to adopt. As well expect that God would revert
His law of gravitation to save the silly suicide who leaps to
destruction from tower or steeple, as that He would change the eternal
working of His higher Spiritual Law to rescue the resolved Soul which,
knowing the difference between good and evil, deliberately prefers
evil. If an angel of light, a veritable 'Son of the Morning' rebels, he
must fall from Heaven. There is no alternative; until of his own
free-will he chooses to rise again.
My friend and I had often talked together on these knotty points which
tangled up what should be the straightness of many a life's career, and
as we mutually knew each other's opinions we did not discuss them at
the moment.
Time passed quickly,--the train rushed farther and farther north, and
by six o'clock on that warm, sunshiny afternoon we were in the grimy
city of Glasgow, from whence we went on to a still grimier quarter,
Greenock, where we put up for the night. The 'best' hotel was a sorry
affair, but we were too tired to mind either a bad dinner or
uncomfortable rooms, and went to bed glad of any place wherein to
sleep. Next morning we woke up very early, refreshed and joyous, in
time to see the sun rise in a warm mist of gold over a huge man-o'-war
outside Greenock harbour,--a sight which, in its way, was very fine and
rather suggestive of a Turner picture.
"Dear old Sol!" said Francesca, shading her eyes as she looked at the
dazzle of glory--"His mission is to sustain life,--and the object of
that war-vessel bathed in all his golden rays is to destroy it. What
unscrupulous villains men are! Why cannot nations resolve on peace and
amity, and if differences arise agree to settle them by arbitration?
It's such a pagan and brutal thing to kill thousands of innocent men
just because Governments quarrel."
"I entirely agree with you,"--I said--"All the same I don't approve of
Governments that preach peace while they drain the people's pockets for
the purpose of increasing armaments, after the German fashion. Let us
be ready with adequate defences,--but it's surely very foolish to
cripple our nation at home by way of preparation for wars which may
never happen."
"And yet they MAY happen!" said Francesca, her eyes still dreamily
watching the sunlit heavens--"Everything in the Universe is engaged in
some sort of a fight, so it seems to me. The tiniest insects are for
ever combating each other. In the very channels of our own blood the
poisonous and non-poisonous germs are constantly striving for the
mastery, and how can we escape the general ordainment? Life itself is a
continual battle between good and evil, and if it were not so we should
have no object in living. The whole business is evidently intended to
be a dose conflict to the end."
"There is no end!" I said.
She looked at me almost compassionately.
"So you imagine!"