I.
_Ambrose Bradley to Alma Craik._
Versailles,--, 18--.
Dearest Alma,--I came here from Rouen this day week, and have more than
once sat down to write to you; but my heart was too full, and the words
would not come, until to-day. Since we parted--since at your loving
intercession I consented to wander abroad for a year, and to write you
the record of my doings from time to time--I have been like a man in the
Inferno, miserable, despairing, thinking only of the Paradise from which
he has fallen; in other words, my sole thought has been of the heavenly
days now past, and of you.
Well, I must not talk of that; I must conquer my passionate words and
try to write coldly, dispassionately, according to promise, of the
things that I have seen. That I can do so at all, will be a proof to
you, my darling, that I am already much better. Another proof is that
I am almost able (as you will see when you read on) to resume my old
British prerogative of self-satisfied superiority over everything
foreign, especially over everything French. It is extraordinary how
thoroughly national even a cold-blooded cosmopolite becomes when
he finds himself daily confronted by habits of thought he does not
understand.
I am staying at a small hotel on the Paris side of Versailles, within
easy reach of the gay city either by train or tram. I have exchanged my
white neckcloth for a black necktie, and there is nothing in my dress
or manner to mark me out for that most disagreeable of fishes out
of water--a Parson in Paris! I see my clerical brethren sometimes,
white-tied, black-coated, broad-brim’d-hatted, striding along the
boulevards defiantly, or creeping down bye-streets furtively, or peeping
like guilty things into the windows of the photograph shops in the Rue
Rivoli. As I pass them by in my rough tourist’s suit, they doubtless
take me for some bagman out for a holiday; and I--I smile in my sleeve,
thinking how out of place they seem, here in Lutetia of the Parisians.
But my heart goes out most to those other brethren of mine, who draw
their light from Rome. One pities them deeply _now_, in the time of
their tribulation, as they crawl, forlorn and despised, about their
weary work. The public prints are full of cruel things concerning them,
hideous lampoons, unclean caricatures; what the Communist left surviving
the journalist daily hacks and stabs. And indeed, the whole of this city
presents the peculiar spectacle of a people without religion, without
any sort of spiritual aspiration. Even that vague effluence of
transcendental liberalism, which is preached by some of their leading
poets and thinkers, is pretty generally despised, Talking with a
leading bookseller the other day concerning your idol, Victor Hugo, and
discussing his recent utterances on religious subjects, I found the good
_bourgeois_ to be of opinion that the great poet’s brain was softening
through old age and personal vanity! The true hero of the hour, now
all the tinsel of the Empire is rubbed away, is a writer named Zola,
originally a printer’s devil, who is to modern light literature
what Schopenhauer is to philosophy--a dirty, muddy, gutter-searching
pessimist, who translates the ‘anarchy’ of the ancients into the bestial
_argot_ of the Quarties Latin.
It has been very well said by a wit of this nation that if on any fine
day the news arrived in Paris that ‘_God was dead_,’ it would not cause
the slightest astonishment or interest in a single _salon_; indeed, to
all political intents and purposes the Divinity is regarded as extinct.
A few old-fashioned people go to church, and here and there in the
streets you see little girls in white going to confirmation; but the
majority of the people are entirely without the religious sentiment in
any form. A loathsome publication, with hideous illustrations, called
the _Bible pour Rire_, is just now being issued in penny numbers; and
the character of its humour may be guessed when I tell you that one of
the pictures represents the ‘bon Dieu,’ dressed like an old clothesman,
striking a lucifer on the sole of his boot, while underneath are the
words, ‘And God said, Let there be Light!’ The same want of good taste,
to put reverence aside as out of the question, is quite as manifest in
the higher literature, as where Hugo himself, in a recent poem, thus
describes the Tout-Puissant, or All-Powerful:-
Pris d’un vieux rhumatisme incurable à l’échine,
Après avoir créé le monde, et la machine
Des astres pêle-mêle au fond des horizons,
La vie et l’engrenage énorme des saisons,
La fleur, l’oiseau, la femme, et l’abîme, et la terre,
Dieu s’est laissé tomber dans son fauteuil-Voltaire!
Is it any wonder that a few simple souls, who still cherish a certain
reverence for the obsolete orthodox terminology should go over in
despair to Rome?
One of the great questions of the day, discussed in a spirit of the
most brutal secularity, is Divorce. I know your exalted views on this
subject, your love of the beautiful old fashion which made marriage
eternal, a sacrament of souls, not to be abolished even by death itself.
Well, our French neighbours wish to render it a simple contract, to be
dissolved at the whim of the contracting-parties. Their own social life,
they think, is a living satire on the old dispensation.
But I sat down to write you a letter about myself, and here I am prosing
about the idle topics of the day, from religion to the matrimonial
musical glasses. I am wonderfully well in body; in fact, never better.
But oh, my Alma, I am still miserably sick of soul! More than ever do I
perceive that the world wants a creed. When the idea of God is effaced
from society, it becomes--this Paris--a death’s head with a mask of
pleasure:--
The time is out of joint--ah cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!
All my foolish plans have fallen like a house of cards. I myself seem
strangling in the evils of the modern snake of Pessimism. If it were
not for you, my guardian angel, my star of comfort, I think I should try
euthanasia. Write to me! Tell me of yourself, of Fensea; no news that
comes from my heaven on earth will fail to interest and soothe me. What
do you think of my successor? and what does the local Inquisition think
of him? Next to the music of your voice will be the melody of your
written words. And forgive this long rambling letter. I write of
trifles light as air, because I _cannot_ write of what is deepest in my
heart.--Yours always,
Ambrose Bradley.
II.
_From Alma Craik to Ambrose Bradley._
Thanks, dearest Ambrose, for your long and loving letter. It came to me
in good season, when I was weary and anxious on your account, and I am
grateful for its good tidings and its tone of growing cheerfulness. You
see my prescription is already working wonders, for you wrote like your
old self--almost! I am so glad that you are well in health, so thankful
you are beginning to forget your trouble. If such a cure is possible in
a few short weeks, what will time not do in a year?
There is no news, that is, none worth telling.
Your successor (since you ask concerning him) is a mild old gentleman
with the most happy faith in _all_ the articles of the Athanasian
creed--particularly that of eternal punishment, which he expounds with
the most benevolent of smiles. I should say he will be a favourite;
indeed, he is a favourite already, though he has the disadvantage, from
the spinster point of view, of being a very, very married man. He has a
wife and seven children, all girls, and is far too poor in this world’s
goods to think much of his vested interest in those of the next world. I
have heard him preach once, which has sufficed.
What you say of life in France interests me exceedingly, and my heart
bleeds for those poor priests of the despised yet divine creed. If you
had not taught me a purer and a better faith, I think I should be a
Roman Catholic, and even as it is, I can feel nothing but sympathy for
the Church which, after all, possesses more than all others the form of
the Christian tradition.
Agatha Combe has returned to London. She is still full of that beautiful
idea (was it yours or mine, or does it belong to both of us?) of the New
Church, in which Religion, Science, and Art should all meet together in
one temple, as the handmaids of God. I hope you have not dismissed
it from your mind, or forgotten that, at a word from you, it may be
realised. Agatha’s conception of it was, I fear, a little too secular;
her Temple of worship would bear too close a resemblance to her
brother’s dingy Hall of Science. She has just finished a treatise, or
essay, to be published in one of the eclectic magazines, the subject,
‘Is growth possible to a dogmatic religion?’ Her answer is in the
negative, and she is dreadfully severe on what she calls the ‘tinkering’
fraternity, particularly her _bête noire_, young Mr. Mallock. Poor
Agatha! She should have been a man by rights, but cruel fate, by just a
movement of the balance, made her the dearest of old maids, and a Blue!
Under happier conditions, with just a little less of the intellectual
leaven, she would have made a capital wife for such a parson as your
successor; for in spite of her cleverness, and what they call her
infidelity, she is horribly superstitious--won’t pass a pin in the road
without lifting it up, throws salt over her shoulder if she happens
to spill a morsel, and can tell your fortune by the cards! Besides all
this, she is a born humanitarian; her thoughts for ever running on
the poor, and flannel, and soup-kitchens, and (not to leave the lower
animals out of her large heart) the woes of the vivisected dogs and
rabbits. And yet, when the pen is in her hand and her controversial vein
is open, she hurls her argumentative thunderbolts about like a positive
Demon!
There, I am trying to rattle on, as if I were a giddy girl of eighteen.
But my heart, like yours, is very full. Sometimes I feel as if you were
lost to me for ever; as if you were gone into a great darkness,
and would never come back. Dearest, you think of me sometimes--nay,
often?--and when your wound is healed, you will come back to me, better
and stronger and happier than ever, will you not? For am I not your
Rachel, who still follows you in soul wherever you go? I sit here for
hours together, thinking of the happy days that are fled for ever; then
I wander out to the churchyard, and look at the dear old vicarage, and
wherever I go I find some traces of him I love. Yesterday I went over to
the abbey. Do you remember, dear, when we last met there, and swore our
troth in the moonlight, with our ears full of the solemn murmuring of
the sea?
That reminds me of what you say concerning the French agitation on the
subject of Divorce. I read some time ago an abstract of M. Naquet’s
famous discourse--it was published in the English newspapers--and I felt
ashamed and sad beyond measure. How low must a nation have fallen when
one of its politicians dares to measure with a social foot-rule
the holiest of human covenants! If marriage is a bond to be worn or
abandoned at pleasure, if there is nothing more sacred between man and
woman than the mere union of the body, God help us women, and _me_ most
of all! For has not God already united my soul to yours, not as yet by
the sacrament of the Church, but by that sacrament of Love which is also
eternal; and if we were spiritually sundered, should I not die; and if
I thought that Death could break our sacrament of Love, should I not
become even as those outcast ones who believe there is no God? I have
never loved another man; you have never loved (how often have you not
sworn it to me!) another woman. Well, then, can man ever separate what
God has so joined together? Even if we were never man and wife in the
conventional sense, even if we never stand together at the earthly
altar, in the eyes of Heaven we are man and wife, and we have been
united at the altar of God. This, at least, is my conception of
Marriage.
Between those that love, Divorce (as these hucksters call it) is
impossible.
Alas! I write wildly, and my Abelard will smile at his handmaid’s eager
words. ‘Me-thinks the lady doth protest too much,’ I hear him exclaim
with Shakespeare. But I know that you hold with me that those things are
holy beyond vulgar conception.
Write to me again soon. All my joy in life is hearing from you.--Ever
your own,
Alma.
III.
_From Ambrose Bradley to Alma Craik._
Dearest Alma,--Just a few lines to say that I am going on to Germany;
I will write to you again directly I come to an anchorage in that brave
land. For I am sick of France and Frenchmen; sick of a people that have
not been lessoned by misfortune, but still hunger for aggression and
revenge; sick of the Dead Sea fruit of Parisian pleasure, poisoned
and heart-eaten by the canker-worm of unbelief. Our English poetess
is virtuously indignant (you remember) with those who underrate this
nation.
The English have a scornful insular way
Of calling the French light, &c.
And it is true they are not light, but with the weight of their own
blind vanity, heavy as lead. The curse of spiritual dulness is upon
them. They talk rhodomontade and believe in nothing. How I burn for the
pure intellectual air of that nobler people which, in the name of the
God of Justice, recently taught France so terrible a lesson! Here, in
France, every man is a free agent, despising everything, the government
which he supports! the ideas which he fulminates, despising most his
own free, frivolous, miserable self: there, in Germany, each man is
a patriot and a pillar of the state, his only dream to uphold the
political fabric of a great nation. To efface one’s selfish interest is
the first step to becoming a good citizen; to believe in the government
of God, follows as a natural consequence.
What you say about our spiritual union, touches me to the soul, though
it is but the echo of my own fervent belief. But I am not so sure that
_all_ earthly unions, even when founded in affection and good faith, are
indissoluble. Surely also, there are marriages which it is righteous to
shatter and destroy?
You are a pure woman, to whom even a thought of impurity is impossible;
but alas! all women are not made in the same angelic mould, and we
see every day the spectacle of men linked to partners in every respect
unworthy. Surely you would not hold that the union of a true man with
a false woman, a woman who (for example) was untrue to her husband
in thought and deed, is to last for ever? I know that is the Catholic
teaching, that marriage is a permanent sacrament, and that no act of
the parties, however abominable, can render either of them free to
marry again; and we find even such half-hearted Liberals as Gladstone
upholding it (see his ‘Ecclesiastical Essays’), and flinging mud in the
blind face of Milton, because (out of the bitterness of his own cruel
experience) he argued the contrary. Divorce is recognised in our own
country and countenanced by our own religion; and I believe it to be
necessary for the guarantee of human happiness. What is most hideous in
our England is the horrible institution of the civil Court, where causes
that should be heard _in camerâ_ are exposed shamefully to the light of
day; so that men would rather bear their life-long torture than submit
to the ordeal of a degrading publicity, and only shameless men and women
dare to claim their freedom at so terrible a price.
I intended to write only a few lines, and here am I arguing with you on
paper, just as we used to argue in the old times _viva voce_, on a quite
indifferent question. Forgive me! And yet writing so seems like having
one of our nice, long, cosy, serious talks. Discussions of this kind are
like emptying one’s pocket to find what they contain; I never thought I
had any ideas on the subject till I began, schoolboy-like, to turn them
out!
God bless you, my darling! When you hear from me next, I shall be in
the land ol the ‘ich’ and the ‘nicht ich,’ of beer and philosophy, of
Deutschthum and Strasbourg pies.
Ambrose Bradley.
IV.
_The Same to the Same._
Dearest,--I wrote to you the other day from Berlin--merely a line to say
that my movements were uncertain, and asking you to address your next
letter care of Gradener the banker, here at Frankfort. I suppose there
must have been some delay in the transmission, or the letter must have
gone astray: at all events, here I am, and grievously disappointed to
find you have not written. Darling, do not keep me in suspense; but
answer this by return, and then you shall have a long prosy letter
descriptive of my recent experiences. Write! write!
Ambrose Bradley.
V.
_Alma Craik to Ambrose Bradley._
Dearest Ambrose,--You are right in supposing that your letter from
Berlin went astray; it has certainly never reached me, and you can
imagine my impatience in consequence. However, all’s well that ends
well; and the sight of your dear handwriting is like spring sunshine.
Since I last wrote to you I have been reading-in a French translation
those wonderful letters of Héloïse to the great Abelard, and his to her;
and somehow they seemed to bring you close to me, to recall your dear
face, the very sound of your beautiful voice. Dearest, what would you
have said if I had addressed this letter to you in the old sweet terms
used by my prototype--not for the world to see, but for your loving eyes
alone? ‘A son maître, ou plutôt à son père; à son époux, ou plutôt à son
frère: sa servante, ou plutôt sa fille; son épouse, ou plutôt sa sour;
à Ambrose, Alma.’ All these and more are you to me, my master and my
father, my husband and my brother; while I am at once your servant and
your daughter, your sister and your spouse. Do you believe, did you
ever feel inclined to believe, in the transmigration of souls? As I
read these letters, I seem to have lived before, in a stranger, stormier
time; and every word _she_ wrote seemed to be the very echo of my
burning heart. Ah! but our lot is happier, is it not? There is no shadow
of sin upon _us_ to darken our loving dream: we have nothing to undo,
nothing to regret; and surely our spiritual union is blest by God. For
myself, I want only one thing yet to complete my happiness--to see you
raised as _he_ was raised to a crown of honour and glory in the world.
What I think of you, all mankind must think of you, when they know you
as I know you, my apostle of all that is great and good. Ah, dearest, I
would gladly die, if by so doing I could win you the honour you deserve.
But I must stop now. When I begin to write to you, I scarcely know when
to cease. _Adieu, tout mon bien!_
Alma.
VI.
_Ambrose Bradley to Alma Craik_
‘A Alma, sa bien-aimée épouse et sour en Jésus-Christ, Ambrose son époux
et frère en Jésus-Christ!’ Shall I begin thus, dearest, in the very
words of the great man to whom, despite my undeserving, you have
lovingly compared me? You see I remember them well. But alas! Abelard
was thrown on different days, when at least faith was _possible_. What
would he have become, I wonder, had he been born when the faith was
shipwrecked, and when the trumpet of Euroclydon was sounding the
destruction of all the creeds? Yonder, in France, one began to doubt
everything, even the divinity of love; so I fled from the Parisian
Sodom, trusting to find hope and comfort among the conquerors of Sedan.
Alas! I begin to think that I am a sort of modern Diogenes, seeking in
vain for a people with a Soul. I went first to Berlin, and found
there all the vice of Paris without its beauty, all the infidelity of
Frenchmen without their fitful enthusiasm in forlorn causes. The people
of Germany, it appears to me, put God and Bismarck in the same category;
they accept both as a solution of the political difficulty, but
they truly reverence neither. The typical German is a monstrosity,
a living-contradiction: intellectually an atheist, he assents to the
conventional uses of Deity; politically a freethinker, he is a slave to
the idea of nationality and a staunch upholder of the divine right of
kings. Long ago, the philosophers, armed with the jargon of an insincere
idealism, demolished Deism with one hand and set it up with the other;
what they proved by elaborate treatises not to exist, they established
as the only order of things worth believing; till at last the
culmination of philosophic inconsistency was reached in Hegel, who began
by the destruction of all religion and ended in the totem-worship of
second childhood. In the course of a very short experience, I have
learned cordially to dislike the Germans, and to perceive that, in spite
of their tall talk and their splendid organisation, they are completely
without ideas. In proportion as they have advanced politically, they
have retrograded intellectually. They have no literature now and no
philosophy; in one word, no spiritual zeal. They have stuck up as
their leader a man with the moral outlook of Brander in ‘Faust,’ a
swashbuckler politician, who swaggers up and down Europe and frowns
down liberalism wherever it appears. Upon my word, I even preferred the
Sullen Talent which he defeated at Sedan.
I think I see you smiling at my seeming anger; but I am not angry at
all--only woefully disenchanted.
This muddy nation stupefies me like its own beer. Its morality is
a sham, oscillating between female slavery in the kitchen and
male drunkenness in the beer-garden. The horrible military element
predominates everywhere; every shopkeeper is a martinet, every
philosopher a dull sergeant. And just in time to reap the fruit of the
predominant materialism or realism, has arisen the new Buddha Gautama
without his beneficence, his beauty, his tenderness, or his love for the
species.
Here in Frankfort (which I came to eagerly, thinking of its famous
Judenstrasse, and eager to find the idea of the ‘one God’ at least among
the Jews), I walk in the new Buddha’s footsteps wherever I go.
His name was Arthur Schopenhauer, a German of Germans, with the one
non-national merit, that he threw aside the mask of religion and
morality. He was a piggish, selfish, conceited, _honest_ scoundrel,
fond of gormandising, in love with his own shadow, miserable, and a
money-grubber like all his race. One anecdote they tell of him is worth
a thousand, as expressing the character of the man. Seated at the table
d’hôte here one day, and observing a stranger’s astonishment at the
amount he was consuming, Schopenhauer said, ‘I see you are astonished,
sir, that I eat twice as much as you, but the explanation is simple--_I
have twice as much brains!_’
The idea of this Heliogabalus of pessimism was that life is altogether
an unmixed evil; that all things are miserable of necessity, even the
birds when they sing on the green boughs, and the babes when they crow
upon the breast; and that the only happiness, to be secured by every man
as soon as possible, and the sooner the better, was in Nirwâna, or total
extinction. A cheerful creed, without a God of any kind--nay, without a
single godlike sentiment! There are pessimists and pessimists. Gautama
Buddha himself, _facile princeps_, based his creed upon infinite pity;
his sense of the sorrows of his fellow-creatures was so terrible as
to make existence practically unbearable. John Calvin was a Christian
pessimist; his whole nature was warped by the sense of infinite sin and
overclouded by the shadow of infinite justice. But this Buddha of
the Teutons is a different being; neither love nor pity, only a
predominating selfishness complicated with constitutional suspicion.
And yet, poor man, he was happy enough when his disciples hailed him
as the greatest philosopher of the age, the clearest intellect on
the planet; and nothing is more touching than to witness how, as his
influence grew, and he emerged from neglect, his faith in human nature
brightened. Had he lived a little longer and risen still higher in
esteem--had the powers that be crowned him, and the world applauded him,
he too, like Hegel, would doubtless have added to his creed a corollary
that, though there is no God, religion is an excellent thing; that
though there is no goodness, virtue is the only living truth!
Be that as it may, I am thoroughly convinced that there is no _via
media_ between Christ’s Christianity and Schopenhauer’s pessimism;
and these two religions, like the gods of good and evil, are just now
preparing for a final struggle on the battle-field of European thought.
Just at present I feel almost a pessimist myself, and inclined to laugh
more than ever at poor Kingsley’s feeble twaddle about this ‘singularly
well-constructed world.’ Every face I see, whether of Jew or Gentile,
is scribbled like the ledger with figures of addition and subtraction;
every eye is crowsfooted with tables of compound interest; and the
moneybags waddle up and down the streets, and look out of the country
house windows, like things without a soul. But across the river, at
Sachsenhausen, there are trees, in which the birds sing, and pretty
children, and lovers talking in the summer shade. I go there in the
summer afternoons and smoke my pipe, and think over the problem of the
time. Think you, dearest, that Schopenhauer was right, and that there
is no gladness or goodness in the world? Is the deathblow of foolish
supernaturalism the destruction also of heavenly love and hope? Nay, God
forbid! But this hideous pessimism is the natural revolt of the human
heart, after centuries of optimistic lies. Perhaps, when another century
has fled, mankind may thank God for Schopenhauer, who proved the potency
of materialistic Will, and for Strauss, who has shown the fallacy of
human judgment. The Germans have given us these two men as types of
their own degradation; and when we have thoroughly digested their bitter
gospel, we shall know how little hope for humanity lies _that_ way.
Meantime, the Divine Ideal, the spiritual Christ survives--the master of
the secret of sorrow, the lord of the shadowy land of hope. He turns his
back upon the temple erected in his name; he averts his sweet eyes
from those who deny He is, or ever was. He is patient, knowing that his
kingdom must some day come.
More than ever now do I feel what a power the Church might be if it
would only reconstruct itself by the light of the new knowledge. Without
it, both France and Germany are plunged into darkness and spiritual
death. As if man, constituted as he is, can exist without religion!
As if the creed of cakes and ale, or the gospel of Deutschthum and
Sauer-kraut were in any true sense of the word religion at all! No,
the hope and salvation of the human race lies now, as it lay eighteen
hundred years ago, in the Christian promise. If this life were all, if
this world were the play and not the prelude, then the new Buddha would
have conquered, and nothing be left us but Nirwâna. But the Spirit of
Man, which has created Christ and imagined God, knows better. It trusts
its own deathless instinct, and by the same law through which the
swallow wings its way, it prepares for flight to a sunnier zone.
Pray, my Alma, that even this holy instinct is not merely a dream! Pray
that God may keep us together till the time comes to follow the summer
of our love to its bright and heavenly home!--Yours till death, and
after death,
Ambrose Bradley.
VII.
_Alma Craik to Ambrose Bradley._
Your last letter, dearest Ambrose, has reached me here in London, where
I am staying for a short time with Agatha Combe. Everybody is out of
town, and even the Grosvenor Club (where I am writing this letter) is
quite deserted.
I never like London so much as when it is empty of everybody that one
knows.
And so you find the Germans as shallow as the French, and as far away
from the living truth it is your dream to preach? For my own part,
I think they must be rather a _stupid_ people, in spite of their
philosophic airs. Agatha has persuaded me lately to read a book by a man
called Haeckel, who is constructing the whole history of Evolution as
children make drawings, out of his own head; and when the silly man is
at a loss for a link in the chain, he invents one, and calls it by a
Latin name! I suppose Evolution is true (and I know you believe in it),
but if I may trust my poor woman’s wit, it proves nothing whatever. The
mystery of life remains just the same when all is said and done; and
I see as great a miracle in a drop of albumen passing through endless
progressions till it flowers in sense and soul, as in the creation of
all things at the fiat of an omnipotent personal God and Father. The
poor purblind German abolishes God altogether!
Agatha has read your Schopenhauer, and thinks him a wonderful man; I
believe, too, he has many disciples in this country. To me, judging
from what I hear of him, and also from your description of him, he seems
another _stupid_ giant--a Fee-fo-fi-fum full of self-conceit and hasty
pudding, and sure to fall a victim, some day, to Little Jack Horner.
But every word you write (it seems always like your own dear voice
speaking!) makes me think of yourself, of your quarrel with the Church,
and of your justification before the world. If purblind men like these
can persuade the world to listen to them, why should your ‘one talent,
which is death to lose,’ be wasted or thrown away? When you have
wandered a little longer, you must return and take your place as a
teacher and a preacher in the land, You must not continue to be an
exile. You are my hero, my Abelard, my teacher of all that is great
and good to a perverse generation, and I shall never be happy until
you reach the summit of your spiritual ambition and are recognised as a
modern apostle. You _must not_ leave the ministry; you must not abandon
your vocation; or if you do so, it must be only to change the scene of
your labours. Agatha Combe tells me that there is a great field for a
man like you in London; that the cultivated people here are sick of the
old dogmas, and yet equally sick of mere materialism; that what they
want is a leader such as you, who would take his stand upon the laws of’
reason, and preach a purified and exalted Christian ideal. Well, since
the English Establishment has rejected you, why not, in the greatest
city of the world, form a Church of your own? I have often thought
of this, but never so much as lately. There you are tongue-tied and
hand-tied, at the mercy of the ignorant who could never comprehend you;
_here_ you could speak with a free voice, as the great Abelard did when
he defied the thunders of the Vatican. Remember, I am rich. You have
only to say the word, and your handmaid (am I not still _that_, and your
spouse and your _sister_?) will upbuild you a Temple! Ah, how proudly!
Yes, think of _this_, think of the great work of your life, not of its
trivial disappointments. Be worthy of my dream of you, my Abelard.
When I see you wear your crown of honour with all the world worshipping
the new teaching, I shall be blest indeed.
Alma.
VIII.
_Ambrose Bradley to Alma Craik._
Dearest Alma,--How good you are! How tenderly do you touch the core
of my own secret thought, making my whole spirit vibrate to the old
ambition, and my memory tremble with the enthusiasm of my first youth.
Oh, to be a modern Apostle, as you say! to sway the multitude with
words of power, to overthrow at once the tables of the money-changers of
materialism, and the dollish idols of the Old Church.
But I know too well my own incapacity, as compared with the magnitude
of that mighty task. I believe at once too little and too much; I should
shock the priests of Christ, and to the priests of Antichrist I should
be a standing jest; neither Montague nor Capidet would spare me, and I
should lose my spiritual life in some miserable polemical brawl.
It is so good of you, so like you, to think of it, and to offer out of
your own store to build me a church; but I am not so lost, so unworthy,
as to take advantage of your loving charity, and to secure my own
success--or rather, my almost certain failure--on such a foundation.
And that reminds me, dearest, of what in my mad vanity I had nearly
forgotten--the difference between our positions in the world. You are a
rich woman; I, as you know, am very poor. It was different, perhaps,
when I was an honoured member of the Church, with all its prizes and
honours before me; I certainly felt it to be different, though the
disparity always existed. But _now!_ I am an outcast, a ruined man,
without property of any kind. It would be base beyond measure to think
of dragging you down to my present level; and, remember, I have now no
opportunity to rise. If you linked your lot with mine, all the world
would think that I loved you, not for your dear self, but for your gold;
they would despise me, and think you were insane. No, dearest, I have
thought it sadly over, again and again, and I see that it is hopeless. I
have lost you for ever.
When you receive this, I shall be on my way to Rome.
How the very writing of that word thrills me, as if there were still
magic in the name that witched the world! Rome! the City of the Martyrs!
the City of the Church! the City of the Dead! Her glory is laid low,
her pride is dust and ashes, her voice is senile and old, and yet... the
name, the mighty deathless name, one to conjure with yet. Sometimes, in
my spiritual despair, I hear a voice whispering in my ear that one word
‘Rome’; and I seem to hear a mighty music, and a cry of rejoicing, and
to see a veiled Figure arising with the keys of all the creeds,--behind
her on the right her handmaid Science, behind her on the left her
handmaid Art, and over her the effulgence of the new-risen sun of
Christ.
And if such a dream were real, were it not possible, my Alma, that you
and I might enter the new Temple, not as man and wife, but as sister
and brother? There was something after all in that old idea of the
consecrated priest and the vestal virgin. I often think with St. Paul
that there is too much marrying and giving in marriage. ‘Brother and
sister’ sounds sweetly, does it not?
Forgive my wild words. I hardly know what I am writing. Your loving
letter has stirred all the fountains of my spirit, your kindness has
made me ashamed.
You shall hear from me again, from the very heart of the Seven Hills!
Meantime, God bless you!--Ever your faithful and devoted,
Ambrose Bradley.
IX.
_Alma Cram to Ambrose Bradley._
Be true to your old dream, dearest Ambrose, and remember that in its
fruition lies _my_ only chance of happiness. Do not talk of unworthiness
or unfitness; you are cruel to me when you distrust yourself. Will you
be very angry if I tell you a secret? Will you forgive me if I say to
you that even now the place where you shall preach the good tidings is
rising from the ground, and that in a little while, when you return, it
will be ready to welcome its master? But there, I have said too much.
If there is anything more you would know, you must guess it, dearest!
Enough to say that you have friends who love you, and who are not idle.
If I thought you meant what you said in your last I should indeed
despair; but it was the shadow of that abominable Schopenhauer who
spoke, and not my Abelard. To tell me that I am rich, and you are
poor--as if even a _mountain_ of money, high as Ararat, could separate
those whom God has joined! To talk of the world’s opinion, the people’s
misconception--as if the poor things who crawl on the ground could alter
the lives of those who soar with living thoughts to heaven! Get thee
behind me, Schopenhauer! When any voice, however like his own, talks of
the overthrow of the man I love, I only smile. I know better than to be
deceived by a trick of the ventriloquist. You and I know, my Ambrose,
that you have not been overthrown at all--that you have not fallen, but
risen--how high, the world shall know in a very little while.
Meantime, gather up strength, both of the body and the mind. Drink
strength from the air of the holy city, and come back to wear your
priestly robes. Your dream will be realised, be sure of that!
Do you think to daunt me when you say that I must not be your wife? Do
you think your handmaid cares so long as she may serve at your feet?
Call her by what name you please, spouse or sister, is it not all
the same? Your hope is my hope, your country my country, your God
my God--now and for ever. Only let us labour together earnestly,
truthfully, patiently, and all will be well.--Yours always faithfully
and affectionately,
Alma.
END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.