HOME AGAIN.
The curate had entered the draper’s shop in the full blaze of sunset,
but the demon of unbelief sat on his shoulders; he could get no nearer
his heart, but that was enough to make of the “majestical roof fretted
with golden fire .... a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.”
When he left the shop, the sun was far below the horizon, and the
glory had faded out of the west; but the demon had fled, and the brown
feathers of the twilight were beautiful as the wings of the silver dove,
sprung heavenwards from among the pots. And as he went he reasoned with
himself--
“Either there is a God, and that God the perfect heart of truth and
loveliness, or all poetry and art is but an unsown, unplanted, rootless
flower, crowning a somewhat symmetrical heap of stones. The man who sees
no beauty in its petals, finds no perfume in its breath, may well accord
it the parentage of the stones; the man whose heart swells beholding it
will be ready to think it has roots that reach below them.”
The curate’s search, it will be remarked, had already widened greatly
the sphere of his doubts; but, the larger the field, the greater the
chance of finding a marl-pit; and, if there be such a thing as truth,
every fresh doubt is yet another finger-post pointing towards its
dwelling.--So talked the curate to himself, and, full in the face,
rounding the corner of a street, met George Bascombe.
The young barrister held out his large hospitable hand at the full
length of his arm, and spread abroad his wide chest to greet him, and
they went through the ceremony of shaking hands,--which, even in their
case, I cannot judge so degrading and hypocritical as the Latin nations
seem to consider it. Then Wingfold had the first word.
“I have not yet had an opportunity of thanking you for the great service
you have done me,” he said.
“I am glad to know I have such an honour; but--”
“I mean, in opening my eyes to my true position.”
“Ah, my dear fellow! I was sure you only required to have your attention
turned in the right direction. When--?--ah!--I--I was on the verge of
committing the solecism of asking you when you thought of resigning. Ha!
ha!”
“Not yet,” replied Wingfold to the question thus at once withdrawn and
put. “The more I look into the matter, the more reason I find for hoping
it may be possible for me to--to--keep the appointment.”
“Oh!”
“The further I inquire, the more am I convinced that, if not in a
certain portion of what the church teaches, then nowhere else, and
assuredly not in what you teach, shall I find anything by which life can
either account for or justify itself.”
“But if what you find is not true!” cried George, with a burst of
semi-grand indignation.
“But if what I find should be true, even though you should never be able
to see it!” returned the curate. And as if disjected by an explosion
between them, the two men were ten paces asunder, each hurrying his own
way.
“If I can’t prove there is a God,” said Wingfold to himself, “as little
surely can he prove there is none.”
But then came the thought--“The fellow will say that, there being no
sign of a God, the burden of proof lies with me.” And therewith he saw
how useless it would be to discuss the question with any one who, not
seeing him, had no desire to see him.
“No,” he said, “my business is not to prove to any other man that there
is a God, but to find him for myself. If I should find him, then will be
time enough to think of showing him.” And with that his thoughts turned
from Bascombe, and went back to the draper.
When he reached home, he took out his sonnet, but, after working at
it for a little while, he found that he must ease his heart by writing
another. Here it is:
Methought that in a solemn church I stood.
Its marble acres, worn with knees and feet,
Lay spread from, door to door, from street to street.
Midway the form hung high upon the rood
Of him who gave his life to be our good;
Beyond, priests flitted, bowed, and murmured meet
Among the candles shining still and sweet.
Men came and went, and worshipped as they could,
And still their dust a woman with her broom,
Bowed to her work, kept sweeping to the door.
Then saw I, slow through all the pillared gloom,
Across the church a silent figure come;
“Daughter,” it said, “thou sweepest well my floor!”
It is the Lord! I cried; and saw no more.
I suppose, if one could so stop the throat of the blossom-buried
nightingale, that, though he might breathe at will, he could no longer
sing, he would drop from his bough, and die of suppressed song. Perhaps
some men so die--I do not know; it were better than to live, and to bore
their friends with the insuppressible. But, however this may be, the
man who can utter himself to his own joy in any of the forms of human
expression--let him give thanks to God; and, if he give not his verses
to the printer, he will probably have cause to give thanks again. To the
man’s self, the utterance is not the less invaluable. And so Wingfold
found it.
He went out again, and into the churchyard, where he sat down on a
stone.
“How strange,” he said to himself, “that out of faith should have sprung
that stone church! A poor little poem now and then is all that stands
for mine--all that shows, that is! But my heart does sometimes burn,
within me. If only I could be sure they were HIS words that set it
burning!”