THE CONCLUSION OF THE WHOLE MATTER.
"But," said Wingfold--"only pray do not think I am opposing you; I
am in the straits you have left so far behind: how am I to know that
I should not merely have wrought myself up to the believing of that
which I should like to be true?"
"Leave that question, my dear sir, until you know what that really
is which you want to believe. I do not imagine that you have more
than the merest glimmer of the nature of that concerning which you,
for the very reason that you know not what it is, most rationally
doubt. Is a man to refuse to withdraw his curtains lest some flash
in his own eyes should deceive him with a vision of morning while
yet it is night? The truth to the soul is as light to the eyes: you
may be deceived, and mistake something else for light, but you can
never fail to know the light when it really comes."
"What then would you have of me?--what am I to DO?" said Wingfold,
who, having found his master, was docile as a child, but had not
laid firm enough hold upon what he had last said.
"I repeat," said Polwarth, "that the community whose servant you are
was not founded to promulgate or defend the doctrine of the
existence of a Deity, but to perpetuate the assertion of a man that
he was the son and only revealer of the Father of men, a fact, if it
be a fact, which precludes the question of the existence of a God,
because it includes the answer to it. Your business, therefore, even
as one who finds himself in your unfortunate position as a
clergyman, is to make yourself acquainted with that man: he will be
to you nobody save in revealing, through knowledge of his inmost
heart, the Father to you. Take then your New Testament as if you had
never seen it before, and read--to find out. If in him you fail to
meet God, then go to your consciousness of the race, your
metaphysics, your Plato, your Spinosa. Till then, this point
remains: there was a man who said he knew him, and that if you would
give heed to him, you too should know him. The record left of him is
indeed scanty, yet enough to disclose what manner of man he was--his
principles, his ways of looking at things, his thoughts of his
Father and his brethren and the relations between them, of man's
business in life, his destiny, and his hopes."
"I see plainly," answered the curate, "that what you say, I must do.
But how, while on duty as a clergyman, I DO NOT KNOW. How am I, with
the sense of the unreality of my position ever growing upon me, and
my utter inability to supply the wants of the congregation, save
from my uncle's store of dry provender, which it takes me a great
part of my time so to modify as, in using it, to avoid direct
lying--with all this pressing upon me, and making me restless and
irritable and self-contemptuous, how AM I to set myself to such
solemn work, wherein a man must surely be clear-eyed and
single-hearted, if he would succeed in his quest?--I must resign my
curacy."
Mr. Polwarth thought a little.
"It would be well, I think, to retain it for a time at least while
you search," he said. "If you do not within a month see prospect of
finding him, then resign. In any case, your continuance in the
service must depend on your knowledge of the lord of it, and his
will concerning you."
"May not a prejudice in favour of my profession blind and deceive
me?"
"I think it will rather make YOU doubtful of conclusions that
support it."
"I will go and try," said Wingfold, rising; "but I fear I am not the
man to make discoveries in such high regions."
"You are the man to find what fits your own need if the thing be
there," said Polwarth. "But to ease your mind for the task: I know
pretty well some of our best English writers of the more practical
and poetic sort in theology--the two qualities go together--and if
you will do me the favour to come again to-morrow, I shall be able,
I trust, to provide you wherewithal to feed your flock, free of that
duplicity which, be it as common as the surplice, and as fully
connived as laughed at by that flock, is yet duplicity. There is no
law that sermons shall be the preacher's own, but there is an
eternal law against all manner of humbug. Pardon the word."
"I will not attempt to thank you," said Wingfold, "but I will do as
you tell me. You are the first real friend I have ever had--except
my brother, who is dead."
"Perhaps you have had more friends than you are aware of. You owe
something to the man, for instance, who, with his outspoken
antagonism, roused you first to a sense of what was lacking to you."
"I hope I shall be grateful to God for it some day," returned
Wingfold. "I cannot say that I feel much obligation to Mr. Bascombe.
And yet when I think of it,--perhaps--I don't know--what ought a man
to be more grateful for than honesty?"
After a word of arrangement for next day the curate took his leave,
assuredly with a stronger feeling of simple genuine respect than he
had ever yet felt for man. Rachel bade him good night with her fine
eyes filled with tears, which suited their expression, for they
always seemed to be looking through sorrow to something beyond it.
"If this be a type of the way the sins of the fathers are visited
upon the children," said the curate to himself, "there must be more
in the progression of history than political economy can explain. It
would drive us to believe in an economy wherein rather the
well-being of the whole was the result of individual treatment, and
not the well-being of the individual the result of the management of
the whole?"
I will not count the milestones along the road on which Wingfold now
began to journey. Some of the stages, however, will appear in the
course of my story. When he came to any stiff bit of collar-work,
the little man generally appeared with an extra horse. Every day
during the rest of that week he saw his new friends.