|As the vicar entered the chapel, he stopped short, struck with
astonishment at the singular appearance of the interior.
The sunlight streaming through the leaded diamond panes of the
casements, instead of falling on the familiar pews, flagged nave,
and solemn walls, shone with a startling effect on the heterogeneous
contents of a museum and laboratory. Along one side of the building
were ranged several glass cases containing collections of fossils,
arctic and tropical shells, antique implements of flint, stone, and
bronze, and geological specimens. The walls were decorated with savage
curiosities--shields of skin, carved clubs and paddles, spears and
arrows tipped with flint or fishbone, mats of grass, strings of
wampum, and dresses of skins and feathers. On a couple of small
shelves grinned two rows of hideous crania, gathered as ethnic types
from all quarters of the barbarian world, and beside them lay a
plaster cast of a famous paleolithic skull. On the various stands
and tables in different parts of the room were retorts and crucibles,
curious tubes, glasses and flasks, electric jars and batteries,
balances, microscopes, prisms, strange instruments of brass and glass,
and a bewildering litter of odds and ends, for which only a student
of science could find a name or a use. At the further end of the room,
under the coloured east window, stood an escritoire covered with a
confused mass of paper, and beside it stood a small table piled with
books.
As Mrs. Haldane and the vicar entered, the master of Foxglove Manor,
who had been writing, rose, laid down his pipe, buttoned his old
velvet shooting-jacket, and hastened forward to welcome his visitor.
Baptisto gravely set a couple of chairs, and, at a sign from his
master, bowed profoundly, and retired to the further end of the
apartment.
“Do you smoke, Mr. Santley?” Mr. Haldane asked, glancing at a box of
new clay pipes.
“No, thank you; but I do not dislike the smell of tobacco. I find,
however, that smoking disagrees with me--irritates instead of
soothing, as professors of the weed tell me it should do.”
“Touches the solar plexus, eh? Then beware of it! The value of
the solar system is often determined by the condition of the solar
plexus.”
“That does seem to be frequently the case,” replied Mr. Santley,
smiling.
“Invariably, my dear sir, as the ancients were well aware when they
formulated that comprehensive, but little comprehended, proverb of
the sound mind in the sound body. It is curious how frequently modern
science finds herself demonstrating the truth of the guesses of the
old philosophers!”
“I perceive you are devoted to science,” said Mr. Santley, waving his
hand towards the evidences of his host’s taste.
“Oh yes, he is perpetually experimenting in some direction or other,”
said Mrs. Haldane, with a laugh. “I believe he and Baptisto would
pass the night here, boiling germs or mounting all manner of invisible
little monsters for the microscope, if I allowed them. You must know,
Mr. Santley, that Mr. Haldane is writing a _magnum opus_--‘The
History of Morals,’ I believe, is to be the title--and what with his
experiments and his chapters, he can scarcely find time to dine.”
“You have been happy in your subject,” said the vicar, turning to the
master of the Manor. “The history of morals must be an enthralling
book. I can scarcely imagine any subject affording larger scope
for literary genius than this of the development of that divine law
written on the heart of Adam. Why do you smile, may I ask?”
“Pardon me; I was not conscious that I did smile, except mentally. You
will excuse me, however, if I frankly say that I was smiling at your
conception of the genesis of morality. What you term the divine law
written on the heart of Adam represents to me a very advanced stage in
the development of the moral sense. We must begin far beyond Adam,
my dear sir, if we would arrive at a philosophic appreciation of
the subject. We must explore as far as possible into that misty and
enigmatic period which precedes historical record; approach as nearly
as may be to the time when in the savage, possibly semi-simian, brain
of the earliest of our predecessors experience had begun to reiterate
her proofs that what was good was to his personal advantage, and that
what was bad entailed loss and suffering. It has hitherto been the
habit to believe that the Decalogue was revealed from Sinai in thunder
and lightning and clouds of darkness. As a dramatic image or allegory
only should that be accepted. Clouds of darkness do indeed surround
the genesis of the moral in man, and the law has been revealed by the
deadly lightnings of disease and war and famine and misery, through
unknown and innumerable generations. No divine law was written on the
heart of the first man, or society would not be where it is to-day.
No; unhappily, one might say, morality has been like everything else
human--like everything else, human or not,--like the coloured flower
to the plant, the gay plumage to the bird, a dearly bought conquest, a
painfully laboured evolution.”
Once or twice during Mr. Haldane’s remarks, the vicar had raised his
hand in disclaimer, but waited till he had finished before speaking.
“I was about to protest,” he now said, “against several of your
expressions, but I fear controversy is of little good when the
disputants argue from different premises. I perceive that you have
accepted a theory of life which completely shuts out God from His
creation.”
“Pardon me; like the old Greek, I can still raise an altar to the
unknown God.”
“To a cold, remote, indifferent abstraction, then,” replied Mr.
Santley, impulsively; “to a God unknowing as unknown--a vague,
unrealizable, impersonal Power.”
“Impersonal, I grant you, and therefore more logical, even according
to human reason, than the huge, passionate anthropomorphism of Jew and
Christian. Consciousness and personality imply the notion of limits and
conditions; and which is the grander idea--a limited, conditioned
Power, however great, or, an absolute transcendent Godhead, free from
all the limits which govern our finite being? God cannot be conscious
as we understand consciousness, nor personal as we understand
personality-If He were, then indeed we might well believe that we were
made after His image and likeness.”
“And can you find comfort in such a creed? Can you turn for strength,
or grace, or consolation to such a power as you describe?”
“Why should I?” asked Mr. Haldane, smiling. “If I need any of these
things, my need is the result of some law violated or unobserved. The
world is ruled by law, and every breach of law entails an inescapable
penalty. If I suffer I must endure.”
“That is cold comfort for all the sum of misery in the world.”
“It is the only true comfort. The rest is delusion. Preach that every
violated law avenges itself, not in some half mythical hell at the
close of a life that seems illimitable--for men never do realize that
they will one day die--but avenges itself here and now; preach that no
crucified Redeemer can interfere between the violator of the law and
its penalty; preach that if men sin they will infallibly suffer, and
you will really do something to regenerate mankind. Christianity, with
its doctrines of atonement and vicarious suffering and redemption, has
done as much to fill the world with vice, crime, and disease as the
most degraded, creed of pagan or savage. The groaning and travail of
creation are clamant proofs that vicarious suffering and redemption
are the veriest dreams.”
“Either purposely or inadvertently you mix up the physical and the
moral law,” interposed the vicar.
“The physical and the moral are but one law, articles of the one
universal code of nature.”
“True,” said the vicar. “I forgot that you denied man his immortal
soul, as you deny him his divine sonship. And so you are content to
believe that man is born to live, labour, suffer, and perish.”
“Concede that God is content that such should be man’s destiny,”
replied Mr. Haldane, “what then?”
“What then?” echoed the vicar, rising from his chair with flashing
eyes and agitated face; “why, then life is a fiendish mockery!”
Mr. Haldane’s face wore a grim smile as he heard the bitter emphasis
of the vicar’s reply.
“Ah, my worthy friend,” he said, “you illustrate how necessary it is
that when one has his hand full of truth he should only open it one
finger at a time. If you revolt thus angrily against the new gospel,
what can be expected from the ignorant and the vicious? The meaning
and purpose of life does not depend on whether the individual man
shall perish or shall be immortal. If perish he must, he may at least
perish heroically. Annihilation or immortality does not affect the
validity of religion, whose paramount aim is not to prepare for
another world, but to make the best of this--to realize its ideal
greatness and nobility. If life should suddenly appear a mockery,
contrast the present with that remote past of the naked savage of the
stone age, or the brutal condition of his more remote sylvan ancestor,
learning to walk erect and to articulate; and then summon up a
vision of the possible future, when superstition shall have ceased to
embitter man’s life, when a knowledge of natural law shall have made
men virtuous, when disease shall have vanished from the world, and
the nations shall, in a golden age of peace and perfected arts, have
learnt the method of a patriarchal longevity. Millions of individuals
have wept and toiled and perished to secure for us the present; we
and millions shall weep and toil and perish to secure the future for
them.”
“And that you take to be the significance of life, the progress of the
race?”
“And is not that at least as noble a significance as a heaven peopled
with the penitent thief, the drunkard, the gallow’s-bird, the
harlot, the thousand bestial types of humanity redeemed by vicarious
agony--the thousand brutes of civilization who, in this age, are
not fit for life even on this earth, to say nothing of an enlarged
immortality?”
“But with ever-rising grades of immortality before them, even those
bestial types might ascend to a perfect manhood, and shall they
perish?”
“Have they not been ascending ever since the Miocene?” asked Mr.
Haldane, with a scornful laugh. “However, it is little use discussing
the matter. As you have said, we cannot agree upon first principles.
Let me show you, instead, some of my curiosities. Did you ever see the
Mentone skull? Here is a plaster cast of it.”
“And do you accept this dark and comfortless creed of your husband?”
asked Mr. Santley, turning to Mrs. Haldane as he took the cast in his
hand.
“Oh no,” she replied, raising her soft dark eyes to him earnestly;
“the progress of humanity does not satisfy me as an explanation of
the enigma of life in man or woman. I cannot abandon my old faith and
trust in the God-Man for an unknown power who does not care for my
suffering and cannot hear my prayers. What to me can such a god be?
And what can life be but a mockery if my soul, with its yearnings
and aspirations and ideals, ceases to exist after death--has no
other world but this, in which I know its infinite wants can never be
satisfied?”
The vicar’s face brightened, and his heart beat with a strange,
impulsive ardour as he listened to her. Why had this woman, whose
enthusiasm and sympathy might have enabled him to realize his own high
ideal of the spiritual, been denied him? What evil destiny had bound
her for ever to a man whose paralyzing creed must make a perpetual
division between them--a man who could look into her sweet face and
yet think of her as merely a beautiful animal; who could fold her in
his arms, and yet tranquilly accept the teaching that at death that
pure, radiant soul of hers would be for ever extinguished? These
thoughts and feelings went through the vicars consciousness swiftly as
sunshine and shadow over a landscape.
His eyes dropped on the plaster cast in his hand.
“This is very old?” he asked musingly.
“One of the oldest skulls in the world,” replied Mr. Haldane. “It was
discovered by Dr. Rivière in a cave at Mentone, in a cliff overlooking
the sea. The man belonged to the ancient stone age, and was
contemporary with the mammoth and woolly rhinoceros of the
Post-pliocene. The cave was a place of burial, and on the head of the
skeleton was a thickly plaited network of sea-shells, with a fringe
of deers’ teeth around the edge; the limbs were adorned with bracelets
and anklets of shells also; and in front of the face was placed a
little oxide of iron, used as war-paint, no doubt.”
“Even in the Post-pliocene, then,” said the vicar, “it would appear
that man believed in a hereafter.”
“Ah, yes; it is an antique superstition, and even yet we have not
outgrown it-Human progress is slow.”
“And this face was raised to the blue sky ages ago, looking for God!”
Mr. Haldane shrugged his shoulders, and smiled grimly.
“How is it possible that you, who-must share the weaknesses and
sorrows of the human heart, can so stoically accept the horrible
prospect of annihilation?” asked the vicar, half angrily.
“I accept truths. Do you imagine I prefer annihilation? I could
wish that life were ordered otherwise, but wishing’ cannot change
an eternal system. Immortality cannot be achieved by defying’
annihilation.”
“Have you realized death?” exclaimed the vicar, passionately. “Can
you, dare you, look forward to a time when, say, your wife shall lie
cold and lifeless,--and hold to the doctrine that you have lost her
for ever, that never again shall your spirit mingle with hers, that
you and she are for all eternity divorced?”
“You appeal to the passions, and not to the reason,” replied Mr.
Haldane, coldly. “What holds good for the beast which perishes, holds
good for all of us, and will hold good for those who come after us,
and who will be greater and nobler than we.”
“Be it so,” replied the vicar, in an undertone. As he spoke he bit his
lip, and his cheek coloured. The thought was not meant for utterance,
but it slipped into words before he was aware. For the full
significance of that thought was a singular exemplification of the
conflicting spiritual and animal natures of the man. That divorce of
death which had been pronounced inevitable opened before him, in a
dreamy vista of the future, a new world of ecstatic beatitude, where
his soul and the radiant spirit of the woman who stood beside him
should be mingled together in indissoluble communion.