BROTHER COPAS ON RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCE.
"Ah, good evening, Mr. Simeon!"
In the British Isles--search them all over--you will discover no more
agreeable institution of its kind than the Venables Free Library,
Merchester; which, by the way, you are on no account to confuse with
the Free Public Library attached to the Shire Hall. In the latter
you may study the newspapers with all the latest financial, police
and betting news, or borrow all the newest novels--even this novel
which I am writing, should the Library Sub-Committee of the Town
Council (an austerely moral body) allow it to pass. In the Venables
Library the books are mostly mellowed by age, even when naughtiest
(it contains a whole roomful of Restoration Plays, an unmatched
collection), and no newspapers are admitted, unless you count the
monthly and quarterly reviews, of which _The Hibbert Journal_ is the
newest-fangled. By consequence the Venables Library, though open to
all men without payment, has few frequenters; "which," says Brother
Copas, "is just as it should be."
But not even public neglect will account for the peculiar charm of
the Venables Library. That comes of the building it inhabits:
anciently a town house of the Marquesses of Merchester, abandoned
at the close of the great Civil War, and by them never again
inhabited, but maintained with all its old furniture, and from time
to time patched up against age and weather--happily not restored.
When, early in the last century, the seventh Marquess of Merchester
very handsomely made it over to a body of trustees, to house a
collection of books bequeathed to the public by old Dean Venables,
Merchester's most scholarly historian, it was with a stipulation that
the amenities of the house should be as little as possible disturbed.
The beds, to be sure, were removed from the upper rooms, and the old
carpets from the staircase; and the walls, upstairs and down, lined
with bookcases. But a great deal of the old furniture remains; and,
wandering at will from one room to another, you look forth through
latticed panes upon a garth fenced off from the street with railings
of twisted iron-work and overspread by a gigantic mulberry-tree, the
boughs of which in summer, if you are wise enough to choose a
window-seat, will filter the sunlight upon your open book,
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade.
Lastly, in certain of the rooms smoking is permitted; some bygone
trustee--may earth lie lightly on him!--having discovered and taught
that of all things a book is about the most difficult to burn.
You may smoke in 'Paradise,' for instance. By this name, for what
reason I cannot tell, is known the room containing the Greek and
Latin classics.
Brother Copas, entering Paradise with a volume under his arm, found
Mr. Simeon seated there alone with a manuscript and a Greek lexicon
before him, and gave him good evening.
"Good evening, Brother Copas! . . . You have been a stranger to us
for some weeks, unless I mistake?"
"You are right. These have been stirring times in politics, and for
the last five or six weeks I have been helping to save my country, at
the Liberal Club."
Mr. Simeon--a devoted Conservative--came as near to frowning as his
gentle nature would permit.
"You disapprove, of course," continued Brother Copas easily.
"Well, so--in a sense--do I. We beat you at the polls; not in
Merchester--we shall never carry Merchester--though even in
Merchester we put up fight enough to rattle you into a blue funk.
But God help the pair of us, Mr. Simeon, if our principles are to be
judged by the uses other men make of 'em! I have had enough of my
fellow-Liberals to last me for some time. . . . Why are you studying
Liddell and Scott, by the way?"
"To tell the truth," Mr. Simeon confessed, "this is my fair copy of
the Master's Gaudy Sermon. I am running it through and correcting
the Greek accents. I am always shaky at accents."
"Why not let me help you?" Brother Copas suggested. "Upon my word,
you may trust me. I am, as nearly as possible, impeccable with Greek
accents, and may surely say so without vanity, since the gift is as
useless as any other of mine."
Mr. Simeon, as we know, was well aware of this.
"I should be most grateful," he confessed, in some compunction.
"But I am not sure that the Master--if you will excuse me--would care
to have his sermon overlooked. Strictly speaking, indeed, I ought
not to have brought it from home: but with six children in a very
small house--and on a warm evening like this, you understand--"
"I once kept a private school," said Brother Copas.
"They are high-spirited children, I thank God." Mr. Simeon sighed.
"Moreover, as it happened, they wanted my Liddell and Scott to play
at forts with."
"Trust me, my dear sir. I will confine myself to the Master's
marginalia without spying upon the text."
Brother Copas, as Mr. Simeon yielded to his gentle insistence, laid
his own book on the table, and seated himself before the manuscript,
which he ran through at great speed.
"H'm--h'm . . . psyche here is _oxyton_--here and always . . . and
anoetos proparoxyton: you have left it unaccented."
"I was waiting to look it up, having some idea that it held a
contraction."
Brother Copas dipped pen and inserted the accent without comment.
"I see nothing else amiss," he said, rising.
"It is exceedingly kind of you."
"Well, as a matter of fact it is; for I came here expressly to
cultivate a bad temper, and you have helped to confirm me in a good
one. . . . Oh, I know what you would say if your politeness allowed:
'Why, if bad temper's my object, did I leave the Liberal Club and
come here?' Because, my dear sir, at the Club--though there's
plenty--it's of the wrong sort. I wanted a _religiously_ bad temper,
and an intelligent one to boot."
"I don't see what religion and bad temper have to do with one
another," confessed Mr. Simeon.
"That is because you are a good man, and therefore your religion
doesn't matter to you."
"But really," Mr. Simeon protested, flushing; "though one doesn't
willingly talk of these inmost things, you must allow me to say that
my religion is everything to me."
"You say that, and believe it. Religion, you believe, colours
all your life, suffuses it with goodness as with a radiance.
But actually, my friend, it is your own good heart that colours and
throws its radiance into your religion."
'O lady, we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live'--
"--Or religion either. . . . Pardon me, but a thoroughly virtuous or a
thoroughly amiable man is not worth twopence as a touchstone for a
creed; he would convert even Mormonism to a thing of beauty. . . .
Whereas the real test of any religion is--as I saw it excellently
well put the other day--'not what form it takes in a virtuous mind,
but what effects it produces on those of another sort.' Well, I have
been studying those effects pretty well all my life, and they may be
summed up, roughly but with fair accuracy, as Bad Temper."
"Good men or bad," persisted Mr. Simeon, "what _can_ the Christian
religion do but make them both better?"
"_Which_ Christian religion? Catholic or Protestant? Anglican or
Nonconformist? . . . I won't ask you to give away your own side.
So we'll take the Protestant Nonconformists. There are a good many
down at the Club: you heard some of the things they said and printed
during the Election; and while your charity won't deny that they are
religious--some of 'em passionately religious--you will make haste to
concede that their religion and their bad temper were pretty well
inseparable. They would say pretty much the same of you
Anglo-Catholics."
"You will not pretend that we show bad temper in anything like the
same degree."
"Why should you? . . . I don't know that, as a fact, there is much to
choose between you; but at any rate the worse temper belongs very
properly to the under dog. Your Protestant is the under dog in
England to-day; socially, if not politically. . . . Yes, and
politically, too; for he may send what majority he will to the House
of Commons pledged to amend the Education Act of 1902: he does it in
vain. The House of Lords--which is really not a political but a
social body, the citadel of a class--will confound his politics,
frustrate his knavish tricks. Can you wonder that he loses his
temper, sometimes inelegantly? And when the rich Nonconformist tires
of striving against all the odds--when he sets up his carriage and
his wife and daughters find that it won't carry them where they had
hoped--when he surrenders to their persuasions and goes over to the
enemy--why, then, can you wonder that his betrayed coreligionists
roar all like bears or foam like dogs and run about the city? . . .
I tell you, my dear Mr. Simeon, this England of ours stands in real
peril to-day of merging its class warfare in religious differences."
"You mean it, of course, the other way about--of merging our religion
in class warfare."
"I mean it as I said it. Class warfare is among Englishmen a quite
normal, healthy function of the body politic: it keeps the blood
circulating. It is when you start infecting it with religion the
trouble begins. . . . We are a sane people, however, on the whole;
and every sane person is better than his religion."
"How can you say such a thing?"
"How can you gainsay it--nay, or begin to doubt it--if only you will
be honest with yourself? Consider how many abominable things
religion has taught, and man, by the natural goodness of his heart,
has outgrown. Do you believe, for example, that an unchristened
infant goes wailing forth from the threshold of life into an eternity
of punishment? Look me in the face, you father of six! No, of
course you don't believe it. Nobody does. And the difference is not
that religion has ceased to teach it--for it hasn't--but that men
have grown decent and put it, with like doctrines, silently aside in
disgust. So it has happened to Satan and his fork: they have become
'old hat.' So it will happen to all the old machinery of hell: the
operating decency of human nature will grow ashamed of it--that is
all . . . Why, if you look into men's ordinary daily conduct--which
is the only true test--they _never_ believed in such things. Do you
suppose that the most frantic Scotch Calvinist, when he was his douce
daily self and not temporarily intoxicated by his creed, ever treated
his neighbours in practice as men predestined to damnation?
Of course he didn't!"
"But religion," objected Mr. Simeon, "lifts a man out of himself--his
daily self, as you call it."
"It does that, by Jove!" Brother Copas felt for his snuff-box.
"Why, what else was I arguing?"
"And," pursued Mr. Simeon, his voice gaining assurance as it happened
on a form of words he had learnt from somebody else, "the efficacy of
religion is surely just here, that it lifts the individual man out of
his personality and wings him towards Abba, the all-fatherly--as I
heard it said the other day," he added lamely.
"Good Lord!"--Brother Copas eyed him over a pinch. "You must
have been keeping pretty bad company, lately. Who is it? . . .
That sounds a trifle too florid even for Colt--the sort of thing Colt
would achieve if he could . . . Upon my word, I believe you must have
been sitting under Tarbolt!"
Mr. Simeon blushed guiltily to the eyes. But it was ever the
mischief with Brother Copas's worldly scent that he overran it on the
stronger scent of an argument.
"But it's precisely a working daily religion, a religion that
belongs to a man when he _is_ himself, that I'm after," he ran on.
"You fellows hold that a sound religious life will ensure you an
eternity of bliss at the end. Very well. You fellows know that the
years of a man's life are, roughly, threescore and ten. (Actually it
works out far below that figure, but I make you a present of the
difference.) Very well again. I take any average Christian aged
forty-five, and what sort of premium do I observe him paying--I won't
say on a policy of Eternal Bliss--but on any policy a business-like
Insurance Company would grant for three hundred pounds? There _is_
the difference too," added Brother Copas, "that _he_ gets the eternal
bliss, while the three hundred pounds goes to his widow."
Brother Copas took a second pinch, his eyes on Mr. Simeon's face.
He could not guess the secret of the pang that passed over it--that
in naming three hundred pounds he had happened on the precise sum in
which Mr. Simeon was insured, and that trouble enough the poor man
had to find the yearly premium, due now in a fortnight's time.
But he saw that somehow he had given pain, and dexterously slid off
the subject, yet without appearing to change it.
"For my part," he went on, "I know a method by which, if made
Archbishop of Canterbury and allowed a strong hand, I would undertake
to bring, within ten years, every Dissenter in England within the
Church's fold."
"What would you do?"
"I would lay, in one pastoral of a dozen sentences, the strictest
orders on my clergy to desist from all politics, all fighting; to
disdain any cry, any struggle; to accept from Dissent any rebuff,
persecution, spoliation--while steadily ignoring it. In every parish
my Church's attitude should be this: 'You may deny me, hate me,
persecute me, strip me: but you are a Christian of this parish and
therefore my parishioner; and therefore I absolutely defy you to
escape my forgiveness or my love. Though you flee to the uttermost
parts of the earth, you shall not escape these: by these, as surely
as I am the Church, you shall be mine in the end.' . . . And do you
think, Mr. Simeon, any man in England could for ever resist that
appeal? A few of us agnostics, perhaps. But we are human souls,
after all; and no one is an agnostic for the fun of it. We should be
tempted--sorely tempted--I don't say rightly."
Mr. Simeon's eyes shone. The picture touched him.
"But it would mean that the Church must compromise," he murmured.
"That is precisely what it would not mean. It would mean that all
her adversaries must compromise; and with love there is only one
compromise, which is surrender. . . . But," continued Brother Copas,
resuming his lighter tone, "this presupposes not only a sensible
Archbishop but a Church not given up to anarchy as the Church of
England is. Let us therefore leave speculating and follow our noses;
which with me, Mr. Simeon--and confound you for a pleasant
companion!--means an instant necessity to cultivate bad temper."
He picked up his volume from the table and walked off with it to the
window-seat.
"You are learning bad temper from a book?" asked Mr. Simeon, taking
off his spectacles and following Brother Copas with mild eyes of
wonder.
"Certainly. . . . If ever fortune, my good sir, should bring you
(which God forbid!) to end your days in our College of Noble Poverty,
you will understand the counsel given by the pilot to Pantagruel and
his fellow-voyagers--that considering the gentleness of the breeze
and the calm of the current, as also that they stood neither in hope
of much good nor in fear of much harm, he advised them to let the
ship drive, nor busy themselves with anything but making good cheer.
I have done with all worldly fear and ambition; and therefore in
working up a hearty Protestant rage (to which a hasty promise commits
me), I can only tackle my passion on the intellectual side.
Those fellows down at the Club are no help to me at all. . . . My
book? It is the last volume of Mr. Froude's famous _History of
England_. Here's a passage now--
"'The method of Episcopal appointments, instituted by Henry VIII,
as a temporary expedient, and abolished under Edward as an
unreality, was re-established by Elizabeth, not certainly
because she believed that the invocation of the Holy Ghost was
required for the completeness of an election which her own
choice had already determined, not because the bishops obtained
any gifts or graces in their consecration which she herself
respected, but because the shadowy form of an election, with a
religious ceremony following it, gave them the semblance of
spiritual independence, the semblance without the substance,
which qualified them to be the instruments of the system which
she desired to enforce. They were tempted to presume on their
phantom dignity, till a sword of a second Cromwell taught them
the true value of their Apostolic descent. . . .
"That's pretty well calculated to annoy, eh? Also, by the way, in
its careless rapture it twice misrelates the relative pronoun; and
Froude was a master of style. Or what do you say to this?--
"'But neither Elizabeth nor later politicians of Elizabeth's
temperament desired the Church of England to become too genuine.
It has been more convenient to leave an element of unsoundness
at the heart of an institution which, if sincere, might be
dangerously powerful. The wisest and best of its bishops have
found their influence impaired, their position made equivocal,
by the element of unreality which adheres to them. A feeling
approaching to contempt has blended with the reverence attaching
to their position, and has prevented them from carrying the
weight in the councils of the nation which has been commanded by
men of no greater intrinsic eminence in other professions.'
"Yet another faulty relative!
"'Pretensions which many of them would have gladly abandoned have
connected their office with a smile. The nature of it has for
the most part filled the Sees with men of second-rate abilities.
The latest and most singular theory about them is that of the
modern English Neo-Catholic, who disregards his bishop's advice,
and despises his censures; but looks on him nevertheless as some
high-bred, worn-out animal, useless in himself, but infinitely
valuable for some mysterious purpose of spiritual propagation.'"
Brother Copas laid the open volume face-downward on his knee--a
trivial action in itself; but he had a conscience about books, and
would never have done this to a book he respected.
"Has it struck you, Mr. Simeon," he asked, "that Froude is so
diabolically effective just because in every fibre of him he is at
one with the thing he attacks?"
"He had been a convert of the Tractarians in his young days, I have
heard," said Mr. Simeon.
"Yes, it accounts for much in him. Yet I was not thinking of that--
which was an experience only, though significant. The man's whole
cast of mind is priestly despite himself. He has all the
priesthood's alleged tricks: you can never be sure that he is not
faking evidence or garbling a quotation. . . . My dear Mr. Simeon,
truly it behoves us to love our enemies, since in this world they are
often the nearest we have to us."