A Book of Revelation
by
Laurence Housman
*
With a
frontispiece from a recent portrait
by Kapp
[Illustration]
Jonathan Cape Ltd
Eleven Gower Street London
FIRST PUBLISHED IN MCMXXIV
SECOND IMPRESSION IN MCMXXIV
MADE & PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
BY BUTLER & TANNER LTD
FROME AND
LONDON
[Illustration]
_Contents_
¶ EDITORIAL. The Editor excuses himself from
allegiance to the god of Mr. Trimblerigg 9
¶ CHAPTER 1. Mr. Trimblerigg becomes acquainted
with his deity and finds him useful:
contends with his sister for virtue, and
acquires grace: converts his uncle as by a
miracle, and receives the call 17
¶ CHAPTER 2. Seeking guidance of Scripture,
zeal for the Lord’s house consumes him:
the Lord’s house is consumed also, and the
cause of religion is well served 30
¶ CHAPTER 3. The eye of Davidina: he puts
on himself a price, which she takes off again.
In search of a career he turns to True Belief 39
¶ CHAPTER 4. He wrestles mightily with his
Uncle Phineas over the interpretation of
Scripture, and by subtlety prevails. His
uncle sends him to college 49
¶ CHAPTER 5. Calculating his future chances he
stands in a minority for truth: advocates the
ministry of women: preaches his first sermon 64
¶ CHAPTER 6. Having tried, and failed, to save
Davidina from drowning, he tells a modest
story of himself, which is allowed to stand 72
¶ CHAPTER 7. He tries to save himself from
Davidina, and fails. The wicked incredulity
of Davidina, and its effect upon his after-life 82
¶ CHAPTER 8. Meaning to choose a wife, he has
a wife chosen for him. His Uncle Phineas
dies: he finds his future is provided for 88
¶ CHAPTER 9. He enters the ministry of True
Belief, and prepares for himself a way out:
is saved by Davidina from an early indiscretion:
marries, and has a family 97
¶ CHAPTER 10. The ministry of women a burning
question: embarrasses his oratory. On
the question of verbal inspiration True
Belief turns him out 105
¶ CHAPTER 11. He becomes a Free Evangelical: from
the militancy of women takes refuge
in the organization of foreign missions 118
¶ CHAPTER 12. Mr. Trimblerigg’s deity exercises
his divine prerogative, and watches him
take a bath: his honesty under trying circumstances:
his success as an organizer 124
¶ CHAPTER 13. His liking for adventure and
experiment exposes him to danger: escaping
without loss of character, he finds cause to
complain of his wife’s 129
¶ CHAPTER 14. Invents his famous doctrine of
‘Relative Truth’: his success in the mission
field. He begins to invest: looks for a
popular cause, and finds one 137
¶ CHAPTER 15. His popular cause being
threatened by his investments, he makes a
sacrifice, and wins: becomes a power in the
financial world, and achieves fame 144
¶ CHAPTER 16. By a very slight departure from
the truth (relative), he gets the better of
Davidina, whereby his conscience is greatly
comforted 156
¶ CHAPTER 17. He tastes the sweets of popular
success: forgives an enemy: sees his star in
the ascendant, reads poetry, and sleeps the
sleep of the just 161
¶ CHAPTER 18. A strange awakening: finds
himself the recipient of an embarrassing
honour: his difficulty in finding a place for
it under present conditions 168
¶ CHAPTER 19. The effect of heavenly signs
on the young and innocent. His wife discovers
for the first time that he is a holy
man: her remorse 181
¶ CHAPTER 20. To escape from the beauty of
holiness Mr. Trimblerigg contemplates a life
of sin, but finds himself stuck fast in virtue.
Effects of his wife’s confession: his fear of
Davidina: he narrowly escapes death 189
¶ CHAPTER 21. Refusing to make an exhibition
of himself, he becomes unpopular: escapes
the fury of the mob, meets Davidina, and is
saved from further embarrassment. The
story of an onlooker 200
¶ CHAPTER 22. Mr. Trimblerigg comes out
top: Relative Truth in war-time the only
solution: attends funeral of a celebrity, and
makes arrangements for his own 209
¶ CHAPTER 23. He becomes the voice of the
nation: secures the ministry of women:
makes peace-mottoes for the million: hears
a voice from the Beyond forbidding him to
hew Agag 215
¶ CHAPTER 24. Relative Truth in black and
white becomes a problem. For the rescue of
his own reputation adopts the policy of
reprisals: the Free Churches are divided 225
¶ CHAPTER 25. Puto-Congo: friendly comparison
of Mr. Trimblerigg to a crocodile:
why, in the Puto-Congo, a crocodile policy
had become indispensable 232
¶ CHAPTER 26. The peaceful penetration of
Davidina: her wonderful ways: their effect
on savages. She returns to civilization, and
encounters Mr. Trimblerigg 241
¶ CHAPTER 27. Mr. Trimblerigg’s prayer
misses fire: he finds Davidina a comfortable
person to talk to: they go their separate ways 250
¶ CHAPTER 28. Mr. Trimblerigg’s genius for
inconsistency: its brilliant results: risks his
life, and becomes founder of the Puto-Congo
Free State Limited 257
¶ CHAPTER 29. Inspired by a new idea, he
combines Spiritualism with Second Adventism,
and opens campaign to make Heaven
safe for Democracy 263
¶ CHAPTER 30. Mr. Trimblerigg, opening a
box of prophecy, finds that his own coming
has been foretold: his ambition is satisfied 274
¶ CHAPTER 31. He reverts to True Belief as
the best means to Relative Truth when
prophecies are about. Light returns to him:
he uses it to slay an enemy 291
¶ CHAPTER 32. How he conquers America for
the new faith, competes with the Movies,
and starts building the New Jerusalem 295
¶ CHAPTER 33. The New Jerusalem encounters
unexpected opposition. The effect of
sticky gas on Second Adventism. Davidina
puts out Mr. Trimblerigg’s light, and in the
darkness that ensues his deity loses sight of
him 308
_Editorial_
The tribal deity to whom Mr. Trimblerigg owed his origin would, I
think, have shown a better sense of the eternal fitness of things had
he chosen for his amanuensis one whose theological antecedents were
more within his keeping and jurisdiction than my own. But when he
visited me with the attack of verbal inspiration which I was powerless
to throw off in any other form than that which here follows, he seems
rather to have assumed an intellectual agreement which certainly does
not exist, and to have ignored as unimportant a divergence of view
which I now wish to place on record. For, to put it plainly, I do not
worship the god of Mr. Trimblerigg; and had these pages been a complete
expression of my own feelings, they would have borne hostile witness
not so much against Mr. Trimblerigg, as against his deity.
When nations declare war, or when gods deliver judgment against
criminals who are so largely of their own making,--fastening in
self-justification on some flagrant instance of wrong-doing which,
for those who do not wish to reflect, puts the culprit wholly out of
court,--they would do well to select their official historians from
minds too abject and submissive to form views of their own; and of
course verbal inspiration, as in the case of Balaam, is one way of
getting the thing done. But whereas, in that historical instance, it
was the ass and not the prophet who kicked last, in this instance,
having delivered my message, I claim the right to exonerate myself in a
foreword which is entirely my own. And so here, in this place--before
he makes revelation or utters prophecy--Balaam speaks his own mind.
I do not think that Mr. Trimblerigg’s deity has dealt fairly by
him. To me he seems chargeable with the same exploitive elasticity
as that which he exposes in Mr. Trimblerigg, whom he first cockered
up in his own conceit by a course of tribal theology, and then
callously abandoned to its logical consequences when tribal theology
went suddenly out of fashion. For Mr. Trimblerigg was emphatically a
product of that self-worship of the tribe or clan, on which divine
Individualism has so long fattened itself. He was brought up to
believe himself one of a chosen sect of a chosen people, and to judge
from a theocratic standpoint the ways, doings, and morals of other
sects, communities, principalities, and powers. He could not remotely
conceive, without being false to his deity, that his own was not
immeasurably the best religion in the world, his god a god of perfect
balance and proportion, and himself a chosen vessel of the Lord. In
that character he was always anointing himself with fresh oil, which,
losing its balance, ran far further than it ought to have done. But if,
in consequence, he became an oleaginous character, whose mainly was the
blame?
I cannot acquit the deity in whose tenets he had been trained. Having
been brought up to read history as a pre-eminent dispensation of
mercies and favours to his own race, with a slight push of miracle
at the back of it--is it any wonder that, when he applied his gospel
to propaganda for the interests of that same race, or went out a
missionary to the heathen, it was with a conscientious conviction that
a little compulsion was necessary for the saving of souls?
And so, in that shadiest episode of all his career, presented to us
by his deity in such an unfavourable light, when the poor benighted
heathen began painting Mr. Trimblerigg’s fellow-missionaries black and
tan, and other horrible colours to indicate their hearty dislike for
a blended gospel of free salvation in Christ and duty and allegiance
to the Puto-Congo Rubber shareholders; when they did that, he--quite
naturally--invoked the law of the Mosaic dispensation, and did the same
to them: and defended himself for these gospel-reprisals by saying
that it would have been very unreasonable not to protect Christian
missionaries by the only method which savages could understand as a
stepping-stone to the methods of Christianity.
The picture as presented is true: that was Mr. Trimblerigg all over.
He had a lively notion that Christianity could be induced by pagan
methods. But has his deity the right to cast either the first or the
last stone at him? If he seemed to be always carrying the New Testament
in his coat-tail pocket and making it his foundation for occasions of
sitting down and doing nothing, while, up and doing, it was the law of
Moses with which he stuffed his breast: and if, when he wanted to thump
the big drum (as he so often did), he thumped the Old Testament, he
was only doing with more momentary conviction and verve and personal
magnetism what the larger tribalism of his day had been doing all
along; and his tribal deity never seems to have had the slightest
qualms in allowing Mr. Trimblerigg to regard himself as a Christian.
Yet all the time the deity himself knew better, as this record
abundantly shows; for having made Mr. Trimblerigg partly but not
entirely in his own image, he then used him as a plaything, an object
of curiosity; and committing him to that creed of racial aggrandisement
of which he himself was beginning to tire, thereby reduced him
to ridicule, made a fool of him, exalted him to the likeness and
similitude of a god, and then--let him go. And though, in the ensuing
pages, he has helped himself freely to my opinions, as though
they were his own, I do not feel that they were honestly adopted.
For a god who tires of his handiwork is still responsible for it,
however disillusioned; and when, employing me as his mouthpiece, Mr.
Trimblerigg’s maker mocks at the tribal religions which have brought
the world so near to ruin, he remains nevertheless a deity tribal in
character, albeit a disgruntled one. And if he has manœuvred this
record in order to wash his hands of responsibility, it comes, I fear,
too late; the source is too suspect to be regarded as impartial, and he
himself very much more of a Mr. Trimblerigg than he seems to be aware.
And so my business here is to express an utter disbelief (which I hope
readers will bear in mind) that Mr. Trimblerigg’s deity was one about
whom it is possible to entertain the larger hope, even in the faint
degree suggested by Tennyson,--or that he was anything except a tribal
survival to whom Mr. Trimblerigg and others gave names which did not
properly belong to him.
What finally laid Mr. Trimblerigg by the heels was the fact that having
picked up this god as he went along (finding him favourable to the main
chance) it was the main chance--idealized as ‘the larger hope’--which
he really worshipped without knowing it. Upon the strength of that
inspiration environment intoxicated him, and he drew his spiritual life
from the atmosphere around him. Then he was like a bottle of seltzer,
which at the first touch of the outer air begins almost explosively to
expand; whereas, for the bulk of us, we unbottle to it like still wine
without sound or foam, accepting it as the natural element for which we
were born. To Mr. Trimblerigg, on the other hand, it came as a thing
direct from God: at the first touch of the herd-instinct he bubbled,
and felt himself divine. And in the rush of pentecostal tongues amid
which he lost his head, he forgot that atmosphere and environment
are but small local conditions, and that, outside these, vacuum and
interstellar space hold the true balances of Heaven more surely and
correctively than do the brief and shifting lives of men.
This spiritual adventurer, with his alert vision so curiously reduced
in scale to seize the opportunities of day and hour, missed the march
of time from listening too acutely to the ticks of the clock. And if he
offers us an example for our better learning, it is mainly as showing
what belittling results the herd-instinct and tribal-deism may produce
in a mercurial and magnetic temperament,--making him imagine himself
something quite other from what he really is, and his god a person far
removed from that category in which he has been placed.
My own interpretation of this ‘Revelation,’ which has made me its
involuntary mouthpiece, is that it shows the beginning--but the
beginning only--of mental change in a god who has become tired of
deceiving himself about the work of his creation; and that it has
begun to dawn upon his mind--though he denies it in words--that, in
making Mr. Trimblerigg, he has made another little mistake, and that
his creation was really stuffed as full of them as a plum-pudding is
stuffed with plums. And I have a hope that when tribal deity becomes
properly apologetic for its many misshapings of a divided world,
humanity will begin to come by its own, and acquire a theology which is
not an organized hypocrisy for the bolstering up of nationalities and
peoples.
For here we have a world full of mistakes, which is governed,
according to the theologians, by a God who makes none. And what
between predestination and free-will, and grace abounding mixed up
with original sin, and orthodoxy and heterodoxy at such universal dash
throughout the world that not one honest soul in a million has an even
chance of being really right,--when that is the spectacle presented to
us in the life of the human race, it becomes something of a mockery
to minds of intelligence to be told that their gods have never made
mistakes.
Those who have been blessed with good parents, do not like them less
because of certain failings and limitations which go to the shaping of
their characters; and when, arrived at the age of discretion, they have
to withstand their failings and recognize their limitations, they do
so with a certain amount of deference and with undiminished affection;
but they do not, if they are wise, or if they have the well-being of
their parents really at heart,--they do not let it be thought that they
regard them either as immaculate or infallible.
I have come to the conclusion that a like duty towards its tribal
deities belongs to the human race; and that man has made many mistakes
simply by regarding these tribal emanations as immune from error,
all-seeing, all-wise, all-loving--which they certainly are not. And I
believe that Mr. Trimblerigg would have been a very much better and
more useful man if he could have conceived his tribal deity as one
liable to error like himself. The terrible Nemesis which seized the
soul of Mr. Trimblerigg and hurled it to destruction was a very limited
and one-sided conception of what was good and right, embodied in the
form of a personal deity who could do no wrong.
So here, as I read it, we have the revelation of the detriment done to
a human soul by an embodied belief in itself under cover of a religious
creed. And the record of that process has been handed over to me, I
suppose, because the tribal deity responsible for the results has got
a little tired of the abject flattery of his worshippers, and a little
doubtful whether that relation between the human and the divine is
really the right one. He is suffering in fact, as I read him, from a
slight attack of creative indigestion, and is anxious to get rid of
certain by-products which his system cannot properly assimilate: he is
anxious, amongst other things, to get rid of responsibility for Mr.
Trimblerigg. But the responsibility is there; and I allow myself this
foreword in order to declare it in spite of the things which hereafter
I am made to say.
‘You cannot unscramble eggs,’ is a dictum as applicable to gods as to
mortals. And if people would remember that in their prayers, prayers
would be less foolish and fatuous than they often are.
You cannot unscramble eggs. And so, having scrambled Mr. Trimblerigg in
the making, his god was attempting a vain thing in trying to unscramble
him; and when Mr. Trimblerigg went on his knees and prayed, as he
occasionally did, to be unscrambled, he was only scrambling himself yet
more in the fry-pan of his tribal theology.
And indeed, when I look at him, I have to admire what a scramble of
a man he was!--how the yolk and the white of it, the good and the
evil, the thick and the thin of his character did mix, ‘yea, meet
and mingle,’ as he would have said himself when his platform sense
of poetry got the better of him. And so, in the exercise of those
contradictory agilities of soul and brain which made him so mixed
yet so divided a character, he skipped through life like a flea to
Abraham’s bosom, and there--after so many an _alias_ hastily assumed
and as hastily discarded--lies waiting to answer to his true name when
true names are called.
What kind of a name, one wonders, did he finally make for himself
in the Book of Life? In that desperate saving of his own face which
constitutes his career, he put out of countenance many that were
his betters; but it was himself that, in the process, he put out of
countenance most of all. Yet in the end revelation came to him; and
when, in that ghastly moment of self-discovery, he stood fully charged
with the truth, who shall say what miraculous, what fundamental change
it may not have wrought in him? When he followed the upward rope
which led him so expeditiously Elsewhere, it may have been with the
equipment of a new self capable of much better and more honest things
that he finally entered Heaven. I cannot believe that such a genius for
self-adaptation has incontinently missed its mark. But, in that forward
aim, it may well be that he and his tribal deity have parted company;
for it is to be noted that, at the last gasp, the god loses sight--does
not know what has become of him: thinks, perhaps, that he has gone
irretrievably and abysmally--Down. I, on the contrary, have a suspicion
and a hope that his tendency may have been--UP.