One day that summer, I came away from a luncheon in company of an old
College chum. Always exciting to meet those one hasn't seen for years;
and as we walked across the Park together I kept looking at him askance.
He had altered a good deal. Lean he always was, but now very lean, and
so upright that his parson's coat was overhung by the back of his long
and narrow head, with its dark grizzled hair, which thought had not yet
loosened on his forehead. His clean-shorn face, so thin and oblong, was
remarkable only for the eyes: dark-browed and lashed, and coloured like
bright steel, they had a fixity in them, a sort of absence, on one
couldn't tell what business. They made me think of torture. And his
mouth always gently smiling, as if its pinched curly sweetness had been
commanded, was the mouth of a man crucified--yes, crucified!
Tramping silently over the parched grass, I felt that if we talked, we
must infallibly disagree; his straight-up, narrow forehead so suggested a
nature divided within itself into compartments of iron.
It was hot that day, and we rested presently beside the Serpentine. On
its bright waters were the usual young men, sculling themselves to and
fro with their usual sad energy, the usual promenaders loitering and
watching them, the usual dog that swam when it did not bark, and barked
when it did not swim; and my friend sat smiling, twisting between his
thin fingers the little gold cross on his silk vest.
Then all of a sudden we did begin to talk; and not of those matters of
which the well-bred naturally converse--the habits of the rarer kinds of
ducks, and the careers of our College friends, but of something never
mentioned in polite society.
At lunch our hostess had told me the sad story of an unhappy marriage,
and I had itched spiritually to find out what my friend, who seemed so
far away from me, felt about such things. And now I determined to find
out.
"Tell me," I asked him, "which do you consider most important--the letter
or the spirit of Christ's teachings?"
"My dear fellow," he answered gently, "what a question! How can you
separate them?"
"Well, is it not the essence of His doctrine that the spirit is all
important, and the forms of little value? Does not that run through all
the Sermon on the Mount?"
"Certainly."
"If, then," I said, "Christ's teaching is concerned with the spirit, do
you consider that Christians are justified in holding others bound by
formal rules of conduct, without reference to what is passing in their
spirits?"
"If it is for their good."
"What enables you to decide what is for their good?"
"Surely, we are told."
"Not to judge, that ye be not judged."
"Oh! but we do not, ourselves, judge; we are but impersonal ministers of
the rules of God."
"Ah! Do general rules of conduct take account of the variations of the
individual spirit?"
He looked at me hard, as if he began to scent heresy.
"You had better explain yourself more fully," he said. "I really don't
follow."
"Well, let us take a concrete instance. We know Christ's saying of the
married that they are one flesh! But we know also that there are wives
who continue to live the married life with dreadful feelings of spiritual
revolt wives who have found out that, in spite of all their efforts, they
have no spiritual affinity with their husbands. Is that in accordance
with the spirit of Christ's teaching, or is it not?"
"We are told----" he began.
"I have admitted the definite commandment: 'They twain shall be one
flesh.' There could not be, seemingly, any more rigid law laid down; how
do you reconcile it with the essence of Christ's teaching? Frankly, I
want to know: Is there or is there not a spiritual coherence in
Christianity, or is it only a gathering of laws and precepts, with no
inherent connected spiritual philosophy?"
"Of course," he said, in his long-suffering voice, "we don't look at
things like that--for us there is no questioning."
"But how do you reconcile such marriages as I speak of, with the spirit
of Christ's teaching? I think you ought to answer me."
"Oh! I can, perfectly," he answered; "the reconciliation is through
suffering. What a poor woman in such a case must suffer makes for the
salvation of her spirit. That is the spiritual fulfilment, and in such a
case the justification of the law."
"So then," I said, "sacrifice or suffering is the coherent thread of
Christian philosophy?"
"Suffering cheerfully borne," he answered.
"You do not think," I said, "that there is a touch of extravagance in
that? Would you say, for example, that an unhappy marriage is a more
Christian thing than a happy one, where there is no suffering, but only
love?"
A line came between his brows. "Well!" he said at last, "I would say, I
think, that a woman who crucifies her flesh with a cheerful spirit in
obedience to God's law, stands higher in the eyes of God than one who
undergoes no such sacrifice in her married life." And I had the feeling
that his stare was passing through me, on its way to an unseen goal.
"You would desire, then, I suppose, suffering as the greatest blessing
for yourself?"
"Humbly," he said, "I would try to."
"And naturally, for others?"
"God forbid!"
"But surely that is inconsistent."