We were silent. At last I said: "Yes, that makes much which was dark
quite clear to me."
"Oh?" he asked.
I answered slowly: "Not many men, you know, even in your profession, have
really suffered. That is why they do not feel the difficulty which you
feel in desiring suffering for others."
He threw up his head exactly as if I had hit him on the jaw: "It's
weakness in me, I know," he said.
"I should have rather called it weakness in them. But suppose you are
right, and that it's weakness not to be able to desire promiscuous
suffering for others, would you go further and say that it is Christian
for those, who have not experienced a certain kind of suffering, to force
that particular kind on others?"
He sat silent for a full minute, trying evidently to reach to the bottom
of my thought.
"Surely not," he said at last, "except as ministers of God's laws."
"You do not then think that it is Christian for the husband of such a
woman to keep her in that state of suffering--not being, of course, a
minister of God?"
He began stammering at that: "I--I----" he said. "No; that is, I think
not-not Christian. No, certainly."
"Then, such a marriage, if persisted in, makes of the wife indeed a
Christian, but of the husband--the reverse."
"The answer to that is clear," he said quietly: "The husband must
abstain."
"Yes, that is, perhaps, coherently Christian, on your theory: They would
then both suffer. But the marriage, of course, has become no marriage.
They are no longer one flesh."
He looked at me, almost impatiently as if to say: Do not compel me to
enforce silence on you!
"But, suppose," I went on, "and this, you know; is the more frequent
case, the man refuses to abstain. Would you then say it was more
Christian to allow him to become daily less Christian through his
unchristian conduct, than to relieve the woman of her suffering at the
expense of the spiritual benefit she thence derives? Why, in fact, do
you favour one case more than the other?"
"All question of relief," he replied, "is a matter for Caesar; it cannot
concern me."
There had come into his face a rigidity--as if I might hit it with my
questions till my tongue was tired, and it be no more moved than the
bench on which we were sitting.
"One more question," I said, "and I have done. Since the Christian
teaching is concerned with the spirit and not forms, and the thread in it
which binds all together and makes it coherent, is that of suffering----"
"Redemption by suffering," he put in.
"If you will--in one word, self-crucifixion--I must ask you, and don't
take it personally, because of what you told me of yourself: In life
generally, one does not accept from people any teaching that is not the
result of firsthand experience on their parts. Do you believe that this
Christian teaching of yours is valid from the mouths of those who have
not themselves suffered--who have not themselves, as it were, been
crucified?"
He did not answer for a minute; then he said, with painful slowness:
"Christ laid hands on his apostles and sent them forth; and they in turn,
and so on, to our day."
"Do you say, then, that this guarantees that they have themselves
suffered, so that in spirit they are identified with their teaching?"
He answered bravely: "No--I do not--I cannot say that in fact it is
always so."
"Is not then their teaching born of forms, and not of the spirit?"
He rose; and with a sort of deep sorrow at my stubbornness said: "We are
not permitted to know the way of this; it is so ordained; we must have
faith."
As he stood there, turned from me, with his hat off, and his neck
painfully flushed under the sharp outcurve of his dark head, a feeling of
pity surged up in me, as if I had taken an unfair advantage.
"Reason--coherence--philosophy," he said suddenly. "You don't
understand. All that is nothing to me--nothing--nothing!"
1911