was working there. His new friend was a very simple-minded man; he
seemed to Hugh the only man of great gifts he had ever known, who was
absolutely untouched by any shadow of worldliness. Hugh knew of men
who resisted the temptations of the world very successfully, to whom
indeed they were elementary temptations, long since triumphed over; but
this man was the only man he had ever known who was gifted with
qualities that commanded the respect and admiration of the world, yet
to whom the temptations of ambition and success seemed never to have
appeared even upon the distant horizon. He was an interesting talker,
a fine preacher, and a very accomplished writer; but his interest was
entirely centred upon his work, and not upon the rewards of it. He was
very poor; but he had no regard for anything--luxury, power,
position--that the world could give him. He had no wish to obtain
influence; he only cared to make the work on which he was engaged as
perfect as he could. The man was really an artist pure and simple; he
seemed to have little taste even for pastoral work.
One day they sat together, on a hot breathless afternoon, in a college
garden, on a seat beneath some great shady chestnut-trees, and looked
out lazily upon the heavy-seeded grass of the meadow and the bright
flower-borders. The priest said to Hugh suddenly, "I have often
wondered what your religion really is. Do you mind my speaking of it?
You seem to me exactly the sort of man who needs a strong, definite
faith to make him happy."
Hugh smiled and said, "Well, I am trying, not very successfully I fear,
to find out what I really do believe. I am trying to construct my
faith from the bottom; and I am anxious not to put into the foundations
any faulty stones, anything that I have not really tested."
"That is a very good thing to do," said the priest. "But how are you
setting to work?"
"Well," said Hugh, "I have never had time before to think my religion
out; I seem to have accepted all kinds of loose ideas and shaky
traditions. I want to arrive at some certainties; I try to apply a
severe intellectual test to everything: and the result is that I seem
obliged to discard one thing after another that I once believed."
"Perhaps," said the priest after a silence, "you are doing this too
drastically? Religion, it seems to me, has to be apprehended in a
different region, the mystical region, the region of intuition rather
than logic."
"Yes," said Hugh, "and intuitions are what one practically lives by;
but I think that they ought to be able to stand an intellectual test
too--for, after all, it is only intellectually that one can approach
them."
The priest shook his head at this, with a half-smile. And Hugh added,
"I wish you would give me a short sketch, in a few words if you can, of
how you reached your present position."
"That is not very easy," said the priest; "but I will try." He sate
for a moment silent, and then he said, "When one looks back into
antiquity, before the coming of Christ, one sees a general searching
after God in the world; the one idea that seems to run through all
religions, is the idea of sacrifice--a coarse and brutal idea
originally, perhaps; but the essence of it is that there is such a
thing as sinfulness, and such a thing as atonement; and that only
through death can life be reached. The Jews came nearest to the idea
of a personal, ruling God: and the sacrificial system is seen in its
fullest perfection with them. Then, in the wise counsels of God, it
came about that our Saviour was born a Jew. You will say that I beg
the question here; but approaching the subject intellectually, one
satisfies oneself that the purest and completest religion that the
world has ever seen was initiated by Him; it is impossible, in the
light of that religion, not to feel that one must give the greatest
weight to the credentials which such a teacher put forward; and we find
that the claim that He made was that He was Himself Very God. The
moment that one realises that, one also realises that there is no
_prima facie_ impossibility that God should so reveal Himself--for
indeed it seems an idea which no human mind would dare to originate,
except in a kind of insane delusion; and the teaching of Christ, His
utter modesty and meekness, His perfect sanity and clear-sightedness,
make it evident to me that we may put out of court the possibility that
He was under the influence of a delusion. He, it seems to me, took all
the old vague ideas of sacrifice and consummated them; He showed that
the true spirit was there, hidden under the ancient sacrifices; that
one must offer one's best freely to God; and in this spirit He gave
Himself to suffering and death. He founded a society with a definite
constitution, He provided it with certain simple rules, and said that,
when He was gone, it would be inspired and developed by the workings of
His Spirit. He left this society as a witness in the world; it has
developed in many ways, holding its own, gaining strength, winning
adherents in a marvellous manner. And I look upon the Church as the
witness to God in the world; I accept its developments as the
developments of the Spirit. I see many things in it which I cannot
comprehend; but then the whole world is full of mysteries--and the
mysteries of the Church I accept in a tranquil faith. I have put it, I
fear, very clumsily and awkwardly; but that is the outline of my
belief--and it seems to me to interpret the world and its secrets, not
perfectly indeed, but more perfectly than any other theory."
"I see!" said Hugh, "but I will tell you at once my initial difficulty.
I grant at the outset that the teaching of Christ is the purest and
best religious teaching that the world has ever seen; but I look upon
Him, not as the founder of a system, but as the most entire
individualist that the world has ever known. It seems to me that all
His teaching was directed to the end that we should believe in God as a
loving Father, and regard all men as brothers; the principle which was
to direct His followers was to be the principle of perfect love, and I
think that His idea was that, if men could accept that, everything else
mattered little. They must live their lives with that intuition to
guide them: the Church seems to me to be but the human spoiling and
complicating of that great simple idea. I look round and see the other
religious systems of the world--Mahomedanism, Buddhism, and the rest.
In each I see a man of profound religious ideals, whose system has been
adopted, and then formalised and vitiated by his followers. I do not
see that there is anything to make me believe that the same process has
not taken place in Christianity. The elaborate system of dogma and
doctrine seems to me a perfectly natural human process of trying to
turn ideas, essentially poetical, into definite and scientific truths,
and half its errors to arise from feeling the necessity of reconciling
and harmonising ideas, which I have described as poetical, which were
never meant to be reconciled or harmonised. And then there is the
added difficulty that, owing to the system of the Church, the ideas of
the earliest Christian teachers, like St. Paul, have been accepted as
infallible too; and hence arises the dilemma of having to bring into
line a whole series of statements, made, as in St. Paul's case, by a
man of intense emotion, which are neither consistent with each other,
nor, in all cases, with the teaching of Christ. My idea of
Christianity is to get as close to Christ's own teaching as possible.
I do not concern myself with the historical accuracy of the Gospel
narratives, or even with the incidents there recorded. Those records
are the work of men of very imperfect education, and feeble
intellectual grasp, in the grip of the prejudices and beliefs of their
age. But their very imperfection makes me feel more strongly the
august personality of Christ, because the principles, which they
represent Him as maintaining, seem to me to be entirely beyond anything
that they could themselves have originated. It seems to me, if I
discern Christ rightly--speaking of Him now purely as a man--that if He
could return to the earth, and be confronted with the system of any of
the Churches that bear His name, He would declare it to be all a
horrible mistake. It seems to me that what He aimed at was a strictly
individualistic system, an attitude of sincerity, simplicity, and
loving-kindness, free from all formalism (which He seems to have
detested above everything), and free, too, from all elaborate and
metaphysical dogma. Instead of this, He would find that men had seized
upon the letter, not the spirit, of His teaching, and had devised a
huge mundane organisation, full of pomp and policy, elaborate, severe,
hard, unloving. Now if I apply my intellectual tests to the central
truths of Christianity, such as the law of Love, the power of
self-sacrifice, the brotherhood of men, they stand the test; they seem
to contain a true apprehension of the needs of the world, of the
methods by which the happiness of humanity may be attained. But when I
apply the intellectual test to the superstructure of any Church, there
are innumerable doctrines which appear to me to be contrary to reason.
It is difficult indeed, in this world of mystery, to affirm that any
mystical claim is not true, but such claims ought not to appear to be
repugnant to reason, but to confirm the processes of reason, in a
region to which reason cannot scientifically and logically attain.
Such doctrines, for instance, as prayers to saints for their
intercession, or the efficacy of Masses for the dead, seem to me to
have a certain poetical beauty about them, but to be contrary both to
reason and experience. I do not see the slightest hint of them in the
teaching of Christ, or anything which can be taken as giving them any
support whatever. They seem to me purely human fancies, hardened into
a painful mechanical form, which forfeit all claim to be inspired by
the Spirit of Christ. But I must apologise for giving you such an
harangue--still, you brought it on yourself."
The priest smiled quietly. "I quite see your point," he said, "and we
are at one in your main position; the difficulty of the Church is that
it has to organise its system for people of all kinds of temperament,
and at all stages of development. But the spirit is there--and if one
lets go of the letter, the grasp of many human beings is so weak that
they tend to lose the spirit. The Church no doubt appears to many to
be over-organised, over-definite, but that is a practical difficulty
which every system which has to deal with large masses of people is
confronted with. It is the same with education; boys have to do many
definite and precise things which seem at the time to have no
educational value; but at the end of their time they see the need of
these processes."
Hugh laughed. "I wish they did!" he said; "my own belief is that, in
education as well as religion, we want more individualism, more
elasticity. I think it is very doubtful whether great ideas, rigidly
interpreted and mechanically enforced, have any value at all for
undeveloped minds; the whole secret lies in their being liberally and
freely apprehended."
"What really divides us," said the priest--"and I do not think we are
very far apart--is my belief that God has not left the world without a
definite witness to Himself--which I believe the Church to be."
"Yes," said Hugh, "I believe that the Church is a witness to God: any
system which teaches pure morality is that; but I could not limit His
witness to a single system; Nature, beauty, music, poetry, art--to say
nothing of sweet and kindly persons--they are all the witnesses of His
spirit; and the Church is, in my belief, simply hampered and restricted
from doing what she might, by the woeful rigidity, the mechanical and
hard precision, which she has imported into the spiritual region. The
moment that the liberty of the spirit is restricted, and grace is made
to flow in definite traditional channels, that moment the stream loses
its force and brightness."
"I should rather believe," said the priest, "that, with all the obvious
disadvantages of organisation, left to itself, the stream welters into
a shapeless marsh, instead of making glad the City of God! And may I
say that you, and those like you, with ardent spiritual instincts, make
the mistake of thinking that we exclude you; indeed it is not so. You
would find the yoke as easy and the burden as light as ever. In
submission you would gain and not lose the liberty of which you are in
search."
The priest soon after this took his leave. Hugh sate long pondering,
as the evening faded into dusk. Was there no certainty, then,
attainable? And the answer of his own spirit was that no ready-made
certainty was of avail; that a man must begin from the beginning, and
construct his own faith from the foundation; that reason must play its
part, lead the soul as far as it could, and set it in the right way;
but that the spirit must not halt there, but pass courageously and
serenely into the trackless waste, content, if need be, to make
mistakes, to retrace its path, only sincerely and gently advancing,
waiting for any hint that might fall from the divine spirit,
interpreting rather than selecting, divesting itself of preferences and
prejudices one by one, and conscious that One waited, smiling and
encouraging, but a little ahead upon the road, and that any turn in the
path might reveal his bright coming to the faithful eye.
XIII
Waiting for Light
The charm of the Cambridge life was to Hugh the alternation of society
and solitude. He was soon fortunate enough to obtain a post at his old
college, and to be allotted a set of rooms there. He was sociably
enough inclined, and the stir and movement of the minute society was
interesting and enlivening. He had a little definite work to do, and
he tried to cultivate relations with every one in the college. It was
pleasant that he had no connection with disciplinary matters; and thus
he was able to enter into a friendly intercourse with the
undergraduates, not checked or hampered by any necessity to find fault
or to offer advice. He occupied his rooms during term-time, and lived
the life of the college with quiet enjoyment. But he retained his
little house as well, and when the vacation began, he retired there,
and spent his days much in solitude. He preferred this indeed to the
life of the college, but he was well aware that it owed half its
pleasure to its being an interlude in the busier life. But it was thus
that what he felt were his best thoughts came to him; thoughts, that is
to say, that pierced below the surface, and had a quality of reality
which his mind, when he was employed and full of schemes, often seemed
to himself to lack. But, like all speculative people who spend much
time in solitary thought, he seemed to himself very soon to cross the
debateable ground in which people of definite religious views appeared
to him to linger gladly. Here he left behind all the persons who
depended upon systems. Here remained Roman Catholics, who depended
chiefly upon the authority and tradition of the Church, and
Protestants, depending no less blindly and complacently upon the
authority of the Bible. The real and crucial difficulty lay further
on; and it was simply this: he saw a world full of joy, and full too of
suffering; sometimes one of his fellow-pilgrims would be stricken down
with some incurable malady, and through slow gradations of pain, sink
wretchedly to death; was this suffering remedial, educative,
benevolent? He hoped it was, he believed that it was, in the sense, at
least, that he could not bear to feel that it might not be; but however
ardently and eagerly he might try to believe it, there was always the
dark alternative that pain might not be either remedial or educative;
there was the terrible possibility that identity and personal
consciousness were absolutely extinguished by death; for there was no
sort of evidence to the contrary; and if this was the case, what
remained of all human belief, philosophies, and creeds? They might
simply be beautiful dreams, adorable mistakes, exquisite fallacies: but
they could supply no inspiration for life, unless there was an element
of absolute certainty about them, which was just the element that they
lacked; and, in any case, the sad fact that such certainties as men
professed differed from and even contradicted each other, introduced a
new bewilderment upon the scene. A Romanist maintained the absolute
divinity of the Church; a Protestant maintained the absolute
reliability of the Bible; both of these could not be true, because in
many points they contravened each other; the authority of the Church
contradicted the authority of the Bible, while neither was perfectly
consistent even with itself. They could not both be true, and Hugh was
forced to believe that the point in which they were both in error, was
in their claim to any absolute certainty at all. The conclusion seemed
to be that one must take refuge in a perfect sincerity, not formulate
one's hopes as beliefs, but wait for light, and keep the eyes of the
mind open to all indications of any kind--that one must, in the words
of the old wise proverb, be ready to begin one's life afresh many
times, in the light of any new knowledge, any hint of truth. And thus
one kind of happiness became impossible for Hugh, the happiness that
comes of absolute certainty, when one may take a thing for granted, and
not argue any more about it; that was the sort of happiness which many
of his friends seemed to him to attain; and if life did indeed end with
death, it was probably the best practical system to adopt; but Hugh
could not adopt it; and therefore the only happiness he could expect
was a candid and patient waiting upon truth, a welcoming of any new
experience with a balanced and eager mind. To some a human love, a
human passion, seemed the one satisfying thing, but this was denied to
Hugh; and the only thing in his life which was of the nature of a
passion was the sight of the beautiful world about him, which appealed
to him day by day with a hundred delicate surprises, unnumbered
novelties of rapture. He realised that the one thing that he dreaded
was a cold tranquillity, uncheered by hope, unresponsive to beauty.
He rode one day, in the height of summer, for miles across the fenland.
To left and right lay the huge plain with its wide fields, its solitary
trees; to his left, between grassy flood-banks, ran the straight reedy
river, full to-day of the little yellow water-lily, golden stars rising
from the cool floating leaves; far ahead ran a low wooded ridge, with
house-roofs clustering round a fantastic church tower, with a crown of
pinnacles. Cattle grazed peacefully, and the whole scene was brimful
of sweet passionless life, ineffable content. If he could only have
shared it! Yet the sight of it all filled him with a sweet
hopefulness; he travelled on, a lonely pilgrim, eager and wistful,
desiring knowledge and love and serenity. He felt that they were
waiting, certainly waiting; that they were tenderly and wisely
withheld. That was the nearest that he could come to his heart's
desire.
XIV
Dreariness--Romance--The Choice of Work--Dulness--A Creed
It was always a great pleasure to Hugh to explore an unfamiliar
countryside, and the same pleasure was derivable to a certain extent
from railway travelling, though the vignettes that one saw from the
windows of a swiftly-rolling train were so transitory and so numerous,
that one had soon the same sense of fatigue that comes from turning
over a book of photographs, or from visiting a picture-gallery. If one
explored the country in a leisurely manner it was less fatiguing,
because one could taste the savour of a sight at one's ease. Hugh came
to the conclusion, as life advanced, that he preferred a landscape on
which humanity had set its mark to a landscape of a pure, natural
wildness, though that indeed had a beauty of its own, a more solemn
beauty, though not so near to the heart. But the great red-brick
house, peering through its sun-blinds, among the flower-beds, with a
rookery behind in the tall trees of a grove, and the cupola of
stable-buildings among the shrubberies, that one saw in a flash as the
train emerged from the low cutting; or the tiled roofs of houses, with
an old mouldering church-tower peering out above them, in a gap between
green downs; or a quiet manor-house among pastures, seen at the close
of day when the shadows began to lengthen, gave him a sense of the long
succession of peaceable lives--the boy returning from school to the
familiar home, or the old squire, after a life of pleasant activities,
walking among the well-known fields, and knowing that he must soon make
haste to begone and leave his place for others. There was a sense of
romance and pathos about it all; and the scenes thus unfolded suddenly
before his eyes were dear to him because they had been dear to others,
and stood for so much old tenderness and anxious love. There was
always, too, a feeling in his mind of how easy, how sweet and tranquil,
life would be under such conditions. Seen from outside, certain lives,
lived in beautiful surroundings and tinged with seemly traditions,
seemed to have a romantic quality, even in their sufferings and
sorrows. No amount of experience, no accumulation of the certainty
that life was interwoven with a sordid and dreary fibre, seemed ever to
dispel this illusion, just as sorrows and miseries depicted in a book
or in a drama appeared to have a romance about them which, seen from
inside, they lacked. There were in Hugh's own memory a few places and
a few houses, where by some happy fortune the hours had always been
touched with this poetical quality, and into which no touch of
dreariness had ever entered. Something of the same romance lingered
for Hugh over certain of the colleges at Cambridge. To wander through
their courts, to read the mysterious names inscribed over unknown
doors, to think of the long succession of inmates, grave or
light-hearted, that lived within, either for a happy space of youth, or
through long quiet years; this never ceased to communicate to him a
certain thrill of emotion.
The only period of his life that seemed to Hugh to lack this quality of
poetry were the years of his official life in London, the years that
the locust had eaten. He did not grudge having spent them so, for they
had given a sort of solidity and gravity to life; but now that he was
free to live as he chose, he determined that he would, if he could, so
spend his days, that there should be as little as possible of this dull
and ugly quality intermixed with them; the sadness and incompleteness
of countless lives seemed to Hugh to arise from the fact that so many
men settled down to mechanical toil, which first robbed them of their
freshness, and then routine became essential to them. But Hugh
determined that neither his work nor his occupation should have this
sunless and dismal quality; that he would deliberately eschew the
things that brought him dreariness, and the people who took a mean and
conventional view; that he would not take up, in a spirit of heavy
rectitude, work for which he knew himself to be unfit; and that such
mechanical work as he felt bound to undertake should be regarded by him
in the light of a tonic, which should enable him to return to his
chosen work with a sense of gladness and relief.
This would demand a certain sustained effort, he foresaw. But whatever
qualities he possessed, he knew that he could reckon upon a vital
impatience of things that were dull and common; moreover it was
possible to determine that, whatever happened, he would not do things
in a dull way; so much depended upon how they were handled and
executed. One of the dullest things in the world was the
multiplication of unnecessary business. So many people made the
mistake of thinking that by minute organisation the success of a system
could be guaranteed. Hugh knew that the real secret was to select the
right personalities, and to leave systems elastic and simple, and that
thus the best results were achieved; the most depressing thing in the
world was a dull person administering faithfully an elaborate system;
one of the most inspiring sights was an original man making the best of
a bad system.