THE CURATE AT HOME.
If we could arrive at the feelings of a fish of the northern ocean
around which the waters suddenly rose to tropical temperature, and
swarmed with strange forms of life, uncouth and threatening, we
should have a fair symbol of the mental condition in which Thomas
Wingfold now found himself. The spiritual fluid in which his being
floated had become all at once more potent, and he was in
consequence uncomfortable. A certain intermittent stinging, as if
from the flashes of some moral electricity, had begun to pass in
various directions through the crude and chaotic mass he called
himself, and he felt strangely restless. It never occurred to
him--as how should it?--that he might have commenced undergoing the
most marvellous of all changes,--one so marvellous, indeed, that for
a man to foreknow its result or understand what he was passing
through, would be more strange than that a caterpillar should
recognise in the rainbow-winged butterfly hovering over the flower
at whose leaf he was gnawing, the perfected idea of his own
potential self--I mean the change of being born again. Nor were the
symptoms such as would necessarily have suggested, even to a man
experienced in the natural history of the infinite, that the process
had commenced.
A restless night followed his reflections in the churchyard, and he
did not wake at all comfortable. Not that ever he had been in the
way of feeling comfortable. To him life had not been a land flowing
with milk and honey. He had had few smiles, and not many of those
grasps of the hand which let a man know another man is near him in
the battle--for had it not been something of a battle, how could he
have come to the age of six-and-twenty without being worse than he
was? He would not have said: "All these have I kept from my youth
up;" but I can say that for several of them he had shown fight,
although only One knew anything of it. This morning, then, it was
not merely that he did not feel comfortable: he was consciously
uncomfortable. Things were getting too hot for him. That infidel
fellow had poked several most awkward questions at him--yes, into
him, and a good many more had in him--self arisen to meet them.
Usually he lay a little while before he came to himself; but this
morning he came to himself at once, and not liking the interview,
jumped out of bed as if he had hoped to leave himself there behind
him.
He had always scorned lying, until one day, when still a boy at
school, he suddenly found that he had told a lie, after which he
hated it--yet now, if he was to believe--ah! whom? did not the
positive fellow and his own conscience say the same thing?--his
profession, his very life was a lie! the very bread he ate grew on
the rank fields of falsehood!--No, no; it was absurd! it could not
be! What had he done to find himself damned to such a depth? Yet the
thing must be looked to. He batht himself without remorse and never
even shivered, though the water in his tub was bitterly cold,
dressed with more haste than precision, hurried over his breakfast,
neglected his newspaper, and took down a volume of early church
history. But he could not read: the thing was hopeless--utterly.
With the wolves of doubt and the jackals of shame howling at his
heels, how could he start for a thousand-mile race! For God's sake
give him a weapon to turn and face them with! Evidence! all of it
that was to be had, was but such as one man received, another man
refused; and the popular acceptance was worth no more in respect of
Christianity than of Mahometanism, for how many had given the
subject at all better consideration than himself? And there was
Sunday with its wolves and jackals, and but a hedge between! He did
not so much mind reading the prayers: he was not accountable for
what was in them, although it was bad enough to stand up and read
them. Happy thing he was not a dissenter, for then he would have had
to pretend to pray from his own soul, which would have been too
horrible! But there was the sermon! That at least was supposed to
contain, or to be presented as containing, his own sentiments. Now
what were his sentiments? For the life of him he could not tell. Had
he ANY sentiments, any opinions, any beliefs, any unbeliefs? He had
plenty of sermons--old, yellow, respectable sermons, not
lithographed, neither composed by mind nor copied out by hand
unknown, but in the neat writing of his old D.D. uncle, so legible
that he never felt it necessary to read them over beforehand--just
saw that he had the right one. A hundred and fifty-seven such
sermons, the odd one for the year that began on a Sunday, of
unquestionable orthodoxy, had his kind old uncle left him in his
will, with the feeling probably that he was not only setting him up
in sermons for life, but giving him a fair start as well in the race
of which a stall in some high cathedral was the goal. For his own
part he had never made a sermon, at least never one he had judged
worth preaching to a congregation. He had rather a high idea, he
thought, of preaching, and these sermons of his uncle he considered
really excellent. Some of them, however, were altogether doctrinal,
some very polemical: of such he must now beware. He would see of
what kind was the next in order; he would read it and make sure it
contained nothing he was not, in some degree at least, prepared to
hold his face to and defend--if he could not absolutely swear he
believed it purely true.
He did as resolved. The first he took up was in defence of the
Athanasian creed! That would not do. He tried another. That was upon
the Inspiration of the Scriptures. He glanced through it--found
Moses on a level with St. Paul, and Jonah with St. John, and doubted
greatly. There might be a sense--but--! No, he would not meddle with
it. He tried a third: that was on the Authority of the Church. It
would not do. He had read each of all these sermons, at least once,
to a congregation, with perfect composure and following
indifference, if not peace of mind, but now he could not come on one
with which he was even in sympathy--not to say one of which he was
certain that it was more true than false. At last he took up the odd
one--that which could come into use but once in a week of years--and
this was the sermon Bascombe heard and commented upon. Having read
it over, and found nothing to compromise him with his conscience,
which was like an irritable man trying to find his way in a windy
wood by means of a broken lantern, he laid all the rest aside and
felt a little relieved.
Wingfold had never neglected the private duty of a clergyman in
regard of morning and evening devotions, but was in the habit of
dressing and undressing his soul with the help of certain chosen
contents of the prayer-book--a somewhat circuitous mode of
communicating with Him who was so near him,--that is, if St. Paul
was right in saying that he lived, and moved, and was, IN Him; but
that Saturday he knelt by his bedside at noon, and began to pray or
try to pray as he had never prayed or tried to pray before. The
perplexed man cried out within the clergyman, and pressed for some
acknowledgment from God of the being he had made.
But--was it strange to tell? or if strange, was it not the most
natural result nevertheless?--almost the same moment he began to
pray in this truer fashion, the doubt rushed up in him like a
torrent-spring from the fountains of the great deep--Was
there--could there be a God at all? a real being who might actually
hear his prayer? In this crowd of houses and shops and churches,
amidst buying and selling, and ploughing and praising and
backbiting, this endless pursuit of ends and of means to ends, while
yet even the wind that blew where it listed blew under laws most
fixed, and the courses of the stars were known to a hair's-breadth,
--was there--could there be a silent invisible God working his own
will in it all? Was there a driver to that chariot whose
multitudinous horses seemed tearing away from the pole in all
directions? and was he indeed, although invisible and inaudible,
guiding that chariot, sure as the flight of a comet, straight to its
goal? Or was there a soul to that machine whose myriad wheels went
grinding on and on, grinding the stars into dust, matter into man,
and man into nothingness? Was there--could there be a living heart
to the universe that did positively hear him--poor, misplaced,
dishonest, ignorant Thomas Wingfold, who had presumed to undertake a
work he neither could perform nor had the courage to forsake, when
out of the misery of the grimy little cellar of his consciousness he
cried aloud for light and something to make a man of him? For now
that Thomas had begun to doubt like an honest being, every ugly
thing within him began to show itself to his awakened probity.
But honest and of good parentage as the doubts were, no sooner had
they shown themselves than the wings of the ascending prayers
fluttered feebly and failed. They sank slowly, fell, and lay as
dead, while all the wretchedness of his position rushed back upon
him with redoubled inroad. Here was a man who could not pray, and
yet must go and read prayers and preach in the old attesting church,
as if he too were of those who knew something of the secrets of the
Almighty, and could bring out from his treasury, if not things new
and surprising, then things old and precious! Ought he not to send
round the bell-man to cry aloud that there would be no service? But
what right had he to lay his troubles, the burden of his dishonesty,
upon the shoulders of them who faithfully believed, and who looked
to him to break to them their daily bread? And would not any attempt
at a statement of the reasons he had for such an outrageous breach
of all decorum be taken for a denial of those things concerning
which he only desired most earnestly to know that they were true.
For he had received from somewhere, he knew not how or whence, a
genuine prejudice in favour of Christianity, while of those
refractions and distorted reflexes of it which go by its name and
rightly disgust many, he had had few of the tenets thrust upon his
acceptance.
Thus into the dark pool of his dull submissive life, the bold words
of the unbeliever had fallen--a dead stone perhaps, but causing a
thousand motions in the living water. Question crowded upon
question, and doubt upon doubt, until he could bear it no longer,
and starting from the floor on which at last he had sunk prostrate,
he rushed in all but involuntary haste from the house, and scarcely
knew where he was until, in a sort, he came to himself some little
distance from the town, wandering hurriedly in field-paths.