Produced by David Widger
THE INSIDE OF THE CUP
By Winston Churchill
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Volume 1.
I. THE WARING PROBLEMS
II. MR. LANGMAID'S MISSION
III. THE PRIMROSE PATH
IV. SOME RIDDLES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Volume 2.
V. THE RECTOR HAS MORE FOOD FOR THOUGHT.
VI. “WATCHMAN, WHAT OF THE NIGHT”
VII. THE KINGDOMS OF THE WORLD
VIII. THE LINE of LEAST RESISTANCE.
Volume 3.
IX. THE DIVINE DISCONTENT
X. THE MESSENGER IN THE CHURCH
XI. THE LOST PARISHIONER
XII. THE WOMAN OF THE SONG
Volume 4.
XIII. WINTERBOURNE
XIV. A SATURDAY AFTERNOON
XV. THE CRUCIBLE
XVI. AMID THE ENCIRCLING GLOOM
Volume 5.
XVII. RECONSTRUCTION
XVIII. THE RIDDLE OF CAUSATION
XIX. MR. GOODRICH BECOMES A PARTISAN
Volume 6.
XX. THE ARRAIGNMENT
XXI. ALISON GOES TO CHURCH
XXII. WHICH SAY TO THE SEERS, SEE NOT!
Volume 7.
XXIII. THE CHOICE
XXIV. THE VESTRY MEETS
XXV. “RISE, CROWNED WITH LIGHT!”
XXVI. THE CURRENT OF LIFE
Volume 8.
XXVII. RETRIBUTION
XXVIII. LIGHT
THE INSIDE OF THE CUP
Volume 1.
CHAPTER I. THE WARING PROBLEMS
I
With few exceptions, the incidents recorded in these pages take place in
one of the largest cities of the United States of America, and of
that portion called the Middle West,--a city once conservative and
provincial, and rather proud of these qualities; but now outgrown them,
and linked by lightning limited trains to other teeming centers of the
modern world: a city overtaken, in recent years, by the plague which has
swept our country from the Atlantic to the Pacific--Prosperity. Before
its advent, the Goodriches and Gores, the Warings, the Prestons and the
Atterburys lived leisurely lives in a sleepy quarter of shade trees
and spacious yards and muddy macadam streets, now passed away forever.
Existence was decorous, marriage an irrevocable step, wives were wives,
and the Authorized Version of the Bible was true from cover to cover. So
Dr. Gilman preached, and so they believed.
Sunday was then a day essentially different from other days--you could
tell it without looking at the calendar. The sun knew it, and changed
the quality of his light the very animals, dogs and cats and horses,
knew it: and most of all the children knew it, by Sunday school, by Dr.
Gilman's sermon, by a dizzy afternoon connected in some of their minds
with ceramics and a lack of exercise; by a cold tea, and by church
bells. You were not allowed to forget it for one instant. The city
suddenly became full of churches, as though they had magically been let
down from heaven during Saturday night. They must have been there on
week days, but few persons ever thought of them.
Among the many church bells that rang on those bygone Sundays was that
of St. John's, of which Dr. Gilman, of beloved memory, was rector. Dr.
Gilman was a saint, and if you had had the good luck to be baptized or
married or buried by him, you were probably fortunate in an earthly as
well as heavenly sense. One has to be careful not to deal exclusively in
superlatives, and yet it is not an exaggeration to say that St. John's
was the most beautiful and churchly edifice in the city, thanks
chiefly to several gentlemen of sense, and one gentleman, at least, of
taste--Mr. Horace Bentley. The vicissitudes of civil war interrupted its
building; but when, in 1868, it stood completed, its stone unsoiled as
yet by factory smoke, its spire delicately pointing to untainted skies,
its rose window glowing above the porch, citizens on Tower Street often
stopped to gaze at it diagonally across the vacant lot set in order by
Mr. Thurston Gore, with the intent that the view might be unobstructed.
Little did the Goodriches and Gores, the Warings and Prestons and
Atterburys and other prominent people foresee the havoc that prosperity
and smoke were to play with their residential plans! One by one, sooty
commerce drove them out, westward, conservative though they were, from
the paradise they had created; blacker and blacker grew the gothic
facade of St. John's; Thurston Gore departed, but leased his corner
first for a goodly sum, his ancestors being from Connecticut; leased
also the vacant lot he had beautified, where stores arose and hid the
spire from Tower Street. Cable cars moved serenely up the long hill
where a panting third horse had been necessary, cable cars resounded in
Burton Street, between the new factory and the church where Dr. Gilman
still preached of peace and the delights of the New-Jerusalem. And
before you could draw your breath, the cable cars had become electric.
Gray hairs began to appear in the heads of the people Dr. Gilman had
married in the '60's and their children were going East to College.
II
In the first decade of the twentieth century, Asa, Waring still clung to
the imposing, early Victorian mansion in Hamilton Street. It presented
an uncompromising and rather scornful front to the sister mansions with
which it had hitherto been on intimate terms, now fast degenerating into
a shabby gentility, seeking covertly to catch the eye of boarders, but
as yet refraining from open solicitation. Their lawns were growing a
little ragged, their stone steps and copings revealing cracks.
Asa Waring looked with a stern distaste upon certain aspects of modern
life. And though he possessed the means to follow his friends and
erstwhile neighbours into the newer paradise five miles westward, he had
successfully resisted for several years a formidable campaign to
uproot him. His three married daughters lived in that clean and verdant
district surrounding the Park (spelled with a capital), while Evelyn and
Rex spent most of their time in the West End or at the Country Clubs.
Even Mrs. Waring, who resembled a Roman matron, with her wavy white
hair parted in the middle and her gentle yet classic features, sighed
secretly at times at the unyielding attitude of her husband, although
admiring him for it. The grandchildren drew her.
On the occasion of Sunday dinner, when they surrounded her, her heart
was filled to overflowing.
The autumn sunlight, reddened somewhat by the slight haze of smoke,
poured in at the high windows of the dining-room, glinted on the silver,
and was split into bewildering colors by the prisms of the chandelier.
Many precious extra leaves were inserted under the white cloth, and Mrs.
Waring's eyes were often dimmed with happiness as she glanced along
the ranks on either side until they rested on the man with whom she had
chosen to pass her life. Her admiration for him had gradually grown into
hero-worship. His anger, sometimes roused, had a terrible moral quality
that never failed to thrill her, and the Loyal Legion button on his
black frock coat seemed to her an epitome of his character. He sat for
the most part silent, his remarkable, penetrating eyes, lighting
under his grizzled brows, smiling at her, at the children, at the
grandchildren. And sometimes he would go to the corner table, where the
four littlest sat, and fetch one back to perch on his knee and pull at
his white, military mustache.
It was the children's day. Uproar greeted the huge white cylinder
of ice-cream borne by Katie, the senior of the elderly maids; uproar
greeted the cake; and finally there was a rush for the chocolates,
little tablets wrapped in tinfoil and tied with red and blue ribbon.
After that, the pandemonium left the dining-room, to spread itself over
the spacious house from the basement to the great playroom in the attic,
where the dolls and blocks and hobby-horses of the parental generation
stoically awaited the new.
Sometimes a visitor was admitted to this sacramental feat, the dearest
old gentleman in the world, with a great, high bridged nose, a slight
stoop, a kindling look, and snow white hair, though the top of his
head was bald. He sat on Mrs. Waring's right, and was treated with the
greatest deference by the elders, and with none at all by the children,
who besieged him. The bigger ones knew that he had had what is called
a history; that he had been rich once, with a great mansion of his own,
but now he lived on Dalton Street, almost in the slums, and worked among
the poor. His name was Mr. Bentley.
He was not there on the particular Sunday when this story opens,
otherwise the conversation about to be recorded would not have taken
place. For St. John's Church was not often mentioned in Mr. Bentley's
presence.
“Well, grandmother,” said Phil Goodrich, who was the favourite
son-in-law, “how was the new rector to-day?”
“Mr. Hodder is a remarkable young man, Phil,” Mrs. Waring declared, “and
delivered such a good sermon. I couldn't help wishing that you and Rex
and Evelyn and George had been in church.”
“Phil couldn't go,” explained the unmarried and sunburned Evelyn, “he
had a match on of eighteen holes with me.”
Mrs. Waring sighed.
“I can't think what's got into the younger people these days that they
seem so indifferent to religion. Your father's a vestryman, Phil, and
I believe it has always been his hope that you would succeed him. I'm
afraid Rex won't succeed his father,” she added, with a touch of regret
and a glance of pride at her husband. “You never go to church, Rex. Phil
does.”
“I got enough church at boarding-school to last me a lifetime, mother,”
her son replied. He was slightly older than Evelyn, and just out of
college. “Besides, any heathen can get on the vestry--it's a financial
board, and they're due to put Phil on some day. They're always putting
him on boards.”
His mother looked a little distressed.
“Rex, I wish you wouldn't talk that way about the Church--”
“I'm sorry, mother,” he said, with quick penitence. “Mr. Langmaid's a
vestryman, you know, and they've only got him there because he's the
best corporation lawyer in the city. He isn't exactly what you'd call
orthodox. He never goes.”
“We are indebted to Mr. Langmaid for Mr. Hodder.” This was one of Mr.
Waring's rare remarks.
Eleanor Goodrich caught her husband's eye, and smiled.
“I wonder why it is,” she said, “that we are so luke-warm about church
in these days? I don't mean you, Lucy, or Laureston,” she added to her
sister, Mrs. Grey. “You're both exemplary.” Lucy bowed ironically. “But
most people of our ages with whom we associate. Martha Preston, for
instance. We were all brought up like the children of Jonathan Edwards.
Do you remember that awful round-and-round feeling on Sunday afternoons,
Sally, and only the wabbly Noah's Ark elephant to play with, right in
this house? instead of THAT!” There was a bump in the hall without, and
shrieks of laughter. “I'll never forget the first time it occurred to
me--when I was reading Darwin--that if the ark were as large as Barnum's
Circus and the Natural History Museum put together, it couldn't have
held a thousandth of the species on earth. It was a blow.”
“I don't know what we're coming to,” exclaimed Mrs. Waring gently.
“I didn't mean to be flippant, mother,” said Eleanor penitently, “but I
do believe the Christian religion has got to be presented in a different
way, and a more vital way, to appeal to a new generation. I am merely
looking facts in the face.”
“What is the Christian religion?” asked Sally's husband, George Bridges,
who held a chair of history in the local flourishing university. “I've
been trying to find out all my life.”
“You couldn't be expected to know, George,” said his wife. “You were
brought up an Unitarian, and went to Harvard.”
“Never mind, professor,” said Phil Goodrich, in a quizzical,
affectionate tone. “Take the floor and tell us what it isn't.”
George Bridges smiled. He was a striking contrast in type to his
square-cut and vigorous brother-in-law; very thin, with slightly
protruding eyes the color of the faded blue glaze of ancient pottery,
and yet humorous.
“I've had my chance, at any rate. Sally made me go last Sunday and hear
Mr. Hodder.”
“I can't see why you didn't like him, George,” Lucy cried. “I think he's
splendid.”
“Oh, I like him,” said Mr. Bridges.
“That's just it!” exclaimed Eleanor. “I like him. I think he's sincere.
And that first Sunday he came, when I saw him get up in the pulpit and
wave that long arm of his, all I could think of was a modern Savonarola.
He looks one. And then, when he began to preach, it was maddening. I
felt all the time that he could say something helpful, if he only would.
But he didn't. It was all about the sufficiency of grace,--whatever that
may be. He didn't explain it. He didn't give me one notion as to how to
cope a little better with the frightful complexities of the modern
lives we live, or how to stop quarrelling with Phil when he stays at the
office and is late for dinner.”
“Eleanor, I think you're unjust to him,” said Lucy, amid the laughter
of the men of the family. “Most people in St. John's think he is a
remarkable preacher.”
“So were many of the Greek sophists,” George Bridges observed.
“Now if it were only dear old Doctor Gilman,” Eleanor continued, “I
could sink back into a comfortable indifference. But every Sunday this
new man stirs me up, not by what he says, but by what he is. I hoped
we'd get a rector with modern ideas, who would be able to tell me what
to teach my children. Little Phil and Harriet come back from Sunday
school with all sorts of questions, and I feel like a hypocrite. At
any rate, if Mr. Hodder hasn't done anything else, he's made me want to
know.”
“What do you mean by a man of modern ideas, Eleanor?” inquired Mr.
Bridges, with evident relish.
Eleanor put down her coffee cup, looked at him helplessly, and smiled.
“Somebody who will present Christianity to me in such a manner that it
will appeal to my reason, and enable me to assimilate it into my life.”
“Good for you, Nell,” said her husband, approvingly. “Come now,
professor, you sit up in the University' Club all Sunday morning and
discuss recondite philosophy with other learned agnostics, tell us what
is the matter with Mr. Hodder's theology. That is, if it will not shock
grandmother too much.”
“I'm afraid I've got used to being shocked, Phil,” said Mrs. Waring,
with her quiet smile.
“It's unfair,” Mr. Bridges protested, “to ask a prejudiced pagan like me
to pronounce judgment on an honest parson who is labouring according to
his lights.”
“Go on, George. You shan't get out of it that way.”
“Well,” said George, “the trouble is, from the theological point of
view, that your parson is preaching what Auguste Sabatier would call a
diminished and mitigated orthodoxy.”
“Great heavens!” cried Phil. “What's that?”
“It's neither fish, flesh, nor fowl, nor good red herring,” the
professor declared. “If Mr. Hodder were cornered he couldn't maintain
that he, as a priest, has full power to forgive sins, and yet he won't
assert that he hasn't. The mediaeval conception of the Church, before
Luther's day, was consistent, at any rate, if you once grant the
premises on which it was based.”
“What premises?”
“That the Almighty had given it a charter, like an insurance company, of
a monopoly of salvation on this portion of the Universe, and agreed
to keep his hands off. Under this conception, the sale of
indulgences, masses for the soul, and temporal power are perfectly
logical--inevitable. Kings and princes derive their governments from the
Church. But if we once begin to doubt the validity of this charter, as
the Reformers did, the whole system flies to pieces, like sticking a pin
into a soap bubble.
“That is the reason why--to change the figure--the so-called Protestant
world has been gradually sliding down hill ever since the Reformation.
The great majority of men are not willing to turn good, to renounce the
material and sensual rewards under their hands without some definite and
concrete guaranty that, if they do so, they are going, to be rewarded
hereafter. They demand some sort of infallibility. And when we let go
of the infallibility of the Church, we began to slide toward what looked
like a bottomless pit, and we clutched at the infallibility of the
Bible. And now that has begun to roll.
“What I mean by a mitigated orthodoxy is this: I am far from accusing
Mr. Hodder of insincerity, but he preaches as if every word of the Bible
were literally true, and had been dictated by God to the men who held
the pen, as if he, as a priest, held some supernatural power that could
definitely be traced, through what is known as the Apostolic Succession,
back to Peter.”
“Do you mean to say, George,” asked Mrs. Waring, with a note of pain
in her voice, “that the Apostolic Succession cannot be historically
proved?”
“My dear mother,” said George, “I hope you will hold me innocent of
beginning this discussion. As a harmless professor of history in our
renowned University (of which we think so much that we do not send our
sons to it) I have been compelled by the children whom you have brought
up to sit in judgment on the theology of your rector.”
“They will leave us nothing!” she sighed.
“Nothing, perhaps, that was invented by man to appeal to man's
superstition and weakness. Of the remainder--who can say?”
“What,” asked Mrs. Waring, “do they say about the Apostolic Succession?”
“Mother is as bad as the rest of us,” said Eleanor.
“Isn't she, grandfather?”
“If I had a house to rent,” said Mr. Bridges, when the laughter had
subsided, “I shouldn't advertise five bath rooms when there were only
two, or electricity when there was only gas. I should be afraid my
tenants might find it out, and lose a certain amount of confidence in
me. But the orthodox churches are running just such a risk to-day, and
if any person who contemplates entering these churches doesn't examine
the premises first, he refrains at his own cost.
“The situation in the early Christian Church is now a matter of history,
and he who runs may read. The first churches, like those of Corinth and
Ephesus and Rome, were democracies: no such thing as a priestly line to
carry on a hierarchy, an ecclesiastical dynasty, was dreamed of. It may
be gathered from the gospels that such an idea was so far from the
mind of Christ that his mission was to set at naught just such another
hierarchy, which then existed in Israel. The Apostles were no more
bishops than was John the Baptist, but preachers who travelled from
place to place, like Paul. The congregations, at Rome and elsewhere,
elected their own 'presbyteri, episcopoi' or overseers. It is, to say
the least, doubtful, and it certainly cannot be proved historically,
that Peter ever was in Rome.”
“The professor ought to have a pulpit of his own,” said Phil.
There was a silence. And then Evelyn, who had been eating quantities of
hothouse grapes, spoke up.
“So far as I can see, the dilemma in which our generation finds itself
is this,--we want to know what there is in Christianity that we can
lay hold of. We should like to believe, but, as George says, all our
education contradicts the doctrines that are most insisted upon. We
don't know where to turn. We have the choice of going to people
like George, who know a great deal and don't believe anything, or to
clergymen like Mr. Hodder, who demand that we shall violate the reason
in us which has been so carefully trained.”
“Upon my word, I think you've put it rather well, Evelyn,” said Eleanor,
admiringly.
“In spite of personalities,” added Mr. Bridges.
“I don't see the use of fussing about it,” proclaimed Laureston Grey,
who was the richest and sprucest of the three sons-in-law. “Why can't we
let well enough alone?”
“Because it isn't well enough,” Evelyn replied. “I want the real thing
or nothing. I go to church once a month, to please mother. It doesn't do
me any good. And I don't see what good it does you and Lucy to go every
Sunday. You never think of it when you're out at dinners and dances
during the week. And besides,” she added, with the arrogance of modern
youth, “you and Lucy are both intellectually lazy.”
“I like that from you, Evelyn,” her sister flared up.
“You never read anything except the sporting columns and the annual
rules of tennis and golf and polo.”
“Must everything be reduced to terms?” Mrs. Waring gently lamented. “Why
can't we, as Laury suggests, just continue to trust?”
“They are the more fortunate, perhaps, who can, mother,” George Bridges
answered, with more of feeling in his voice than he was wont to show.
“Unhappily, truth does not come that way. If Roger Bacon and Galileo
and Newton and Darwin and Harvey and the others had 'just trusted,' the
world's knowledge would still remain as stationary as it was during
the thousand-odd years the hierarchy of the Church was supreme, when
theology was history, philosophy, and science rolled into one. If God
had not meant man to know something of his origin differing from
the account in Genesis, he would not have given us Darwin and his
successors. Practically every great discovery since the Revival we owe
to men who, by their very desire for truth, were forced into opposition
to the tremendous power of the Church, which always insisted that
people should 'just trust,' and take the mixture of cosmogony and Greek
philosophy, tradition and fable, paganism, Judaic sacerdotalism, and
temporal power wrongly called spiritual dealt out by this same Church
as the last word on science, philosophy, history, metaphysics, and
government.”
“Stop!” cried Eleanor. “You make me dizzy.”
“Nearly all the pioneers to whom we owe our age of comparative
enlightenment were heretics,” George persisted. “And if they could have
been headed off, or burned, most of us would still be living in mud
caves at the foot of the cliff on which stood the nobleman's castle; and
kings would still be kings by divine decree, scientists--if there
were any--workers in the black art, and every phenomenon we failed to
understand, a miracle.”
“I choose the United States of America,” ejaculated Evelyn.
“I gather, George,” said Phil Goodrich, “that you don't believe in
miracles.”
“Miracles are becoming suspiciously fewer and fewer. Once, an eclipse of
the sun was enough to throw men on their knees because they thought it
supernatural. If they were logical they'd kneel today because it has
been found natural. Only the inexplicable phenomena are miracles; and
after a while--if the theologians will only permit us to finish the
job--there won't be any inexplicable phenomena. Mystery, as I believe
William James puts it may be called the more-to-be-known.”
“In taking that attitude, George, aren't you limiting the power of God?”
said Mrs. Waring.
“How does it limit the power of God, mother,” her son-in-law asked, “to
discover that he chooses to work by laws? The most suicidal tendency in
religious bodies today is their mediaeval insistence on what they are
pleased to call the supernatural. Which is the more marvellous--that God
can stop the earth and make the sun appear to stand still, or that he
can construct a universe of untold millions of suns with planets and
satellites, each moving in its orbit, according to law; a universe
wherein every atom is true to a sovereign conception? And yet this
marvel of marvels--that makes God in the twentieth century infinitely
greater than in the sixteenth--would never have been discovered if the
champions of theology had had their way.”
Mrs. Waring smiled a little.
“You are too strong for me, George,” she said, “but you mustn't expect
an old woman to change.”
“Mother, dear,” cried Eleanor, rising and laying her hand on Mrs.
Waring's cheek, “we don't want you to change. It's ourselves we wish to
change, we wish for a religious faith like yours, only the same teaching
which gave it to you is powerless for us. That's our trouble. We have
only to look at you,” she added, a little wistfully, “to be sure there
is something--something vital in Christianity, if we could only get at
it, something that does not depend upon what we have been led to believe
is indispensable. George, and men like him, can only show the weakness
in the old supports. I don't mean that they aren't doing the world a
service in revealing errors, but they cannot reconstruct.”
“That is the clergyman's business,” declared Mr. Bridges. “But he must
first acknowledge that the old supports are worthless.”
“Well,” said Phil, “I like your rector, in spite of his
anthropomorphism--perhaps, as George would say, because of it. There is
something manly about him that appeals to me.”
“There,” cried Eleanor, triumphantly, “I've always said Mr. Hodder had a
spiritual personality. You feel--you feel there is truth shut up inside
of him which he cannot communicate. I'll tell you who impresses me in
that way more strongly than any one else--Mr. Bentley. And he doesn't
come to church any more.”
“Mr. Bentley,” said her, mother, “is a saint. Your father tried to get
him to dinner to-day, but he had promised those working girls of his,
who live on the upper floors of his house, to dine with them. One of
them told me so. Of course he will never speak of his kindnesses.”
“Mr. Bentley doesn't bother his head about theology,” said Sally. “He
just lives.”
“There's Eldon Parr,” suggested George Bridges, mentioning the name of
the city's famous financier; “I'm told he relieved Mr. Bentley of his
property some twenty-five years ago. If Mr. Hodder should begin to
preach the modern heresy which you desire, Mr Parr might object. He's
very orthodox, I'm told.”
“And Mr. Parr,” remarked the modern Evelyn, sententiously, “pays the
bills, at St. John's. Doesn't he, father?”
“I fear he pays a large proportion of them,” Mr. Waring admitted, in a
serious tone.
“In these days,” said Evelyn, “the man who pays the bills is entitled to
have his religion as he likes it.”
“No matter how he got the money to pay them,” added Phil.
“That suggests another little hitch in the modern church which will have
to be straightened out,” said George Bridges.
“'Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye make clean
the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of
extortion and excess.'”
“Why, George, you of all people quoting the Bible!” Eleanor exclaimed.
“And quoting it aptly, too,” said Phil Goodrich.
“I'm afraid if we began on the scribes and Pharisees, we shouldn't stop
with Mr. Parr,” Asa Wiring observed, with a touch of sadness.
“In spite of all they say he has done, I can't help feeling sorry for
him,” said Mrs. Waring. “He must be so lonely in that huge palace of
his beside the Park, his wife dead, and Preston running wild around the
world, and Alison no comfort. The idea of a girl leaving her father as
she did and going off to New York to become a landscape architect!”
“But, mother,” Evelyn pleaded, “I can't see why a woman shouldn't lead
her own life. She only has one, like a man. And generally she doesn't
get that.”
Mrs. Waring rose.
“I don't know what we're coming to. I was taught that a woman's place
was with her husband and children; or, if she had none, with her family.
I tried to teach you so, my dear.”
“Well,” said Evelyn, “I'm here yet. I haven't Alison's excuse. Cheer up,
mother, the world's no worse than it was.”
“I don't know about that,” answered Mrs. Waring.
“Listen!” ejaculated Eleanor.
Mrs. Waring's face brightened. Sounds of mad revelry came down from the
floor above.