(1)
THE night after his conversation with Eleanor was the first night of the
bishop's insomnia. It was the definite beginning of a new phase in his
life.
Doctors explain to us that the immediate cause of insomnia is always
some poisoned or depleted state of the body, and no doubt the
fatigues and hasty meals of the day had left the bishop in a state of
unprecedented chemical disorder, with his nerves irritated by strange
compounds and unsoothed by familiar lubricants. But chemical disorders
follow mental disturbances, and the core and essence of his trouble was
an intellectual distress. For the first time in his life he was
really in doubt, about himself, about his way of living, about all his
persuasions. It was a general doubt. It was not a specific suspicion
upon this point or that. It was a feeling of detachment and unreality at
once extraordinarily vague and extraordinarily oppressive. It was as
if he discovered himself flimsy and transparent in a world of minatory
solidity and opacity. It was as if he found himself made not of flesh
and blood but of tissue paper.
But this intellectual insecurity extended into his physical sensations.
It affected his feeling in his skin, as if it were not absolutely his
own skin.
And as he lay there, a weak phantom mentally and bodily, an endless
succession and recurrence of anxieties for which he could find no
reassurance besieged him.
Chief of this was his distress for Eleanor.
She was the central figure in this new sense of illusion in familiar and
trusted things. It was not only that the world of his existence which
had seemed to be the whole universe had become diaphanous and betrayed
vast and uncontrollable realities beyond it, but his daughter had as it
were suddenly opened a door in this glassy sphere of insecurity that had
been his abiding refuge, a door upon the stormy rebel outer world, and
she stood there, young, ignorant, confident, adventurous, ready to step
out.
“Could it be possible that she did not believe?”
He saw her very vividly as he had seen her in the dining-room, slender
and upright, half child, half woman, so fragile and so fearless. And the
door she opened thus carelessly gave upon a stormy background like one
of the stormy backgrounds that were popular behind portrait Dianas in
eighteenth century paintings. Did she believe that all he had taught
her, all the life he led was--what was her phrase?--a kind of magic
world, not really real?
He groaned and turned over and repeated the words: “A kind of magic
world--not really real!”
The wind blew through the door she opened, and scattered everything in
the room. And still she held the door open.
He was astonished at himself. He started up in swift indignation. Had
he not taught the child? Had he not brought her up in an atmosphere
of faith? What right had she to turn upon him in this matter? It
was--indeed it was--a sort of insolence, a lack of reverence....
It was strange he had not perceived this at the time.
But indeed at the first mention of “questionings” he ought to have
thundered. He saw that quite clearly now. He ought to have cried out and
said, “On your knees, my Norah, and ask pardon of God!”
Because after all faith is an emotional thing....
He began to think very rapidly and copiously of things he ought to have
said to Eleanor. And now the eloquence of reverie was upon him. In a
little time he was also addressing the tea-party at Morrice Deans'. Upon
them too he ought to have thundered. And he knew now also all that he
should have said to the recalcitrant employer. Thunder also. Thunder is
surely the privilege of the higher clergy--under Jove.
But why hadn't he thundered?
He gesticulated in the darkness, thrust out a clutching hand.
There are situations that must be gripped--gripped firmly. And without
delay. In the middle ages there had been grip enough in a purple glove.
(2)
From these belated seizures of the day's lost opportunities the bishop
passed to such a pessimistic estimate of the church as had never entered
his mind before.
It was as if he had fallen suddenly out of a spiritual balloon into
a world of bleak realism. He found himself asking unprecedented and
devastating questions, questions that implied the most fundamental
shiftings of opinion. Why was the church such a failure? Why had it
no grip upon either masters or men amidst this vigorous life of modern
industrialism, and why had it no grip upon the questioning young? It was
a tolerated thing, he felt, just as sometimes he had felt that the
Crown was a tolerated thing. He too was a tolerated thing; a curious
survival....
This was not as things should be. He struggled to recover a proper
attitude. But he remained enormously dissatisfied....
The church was no Levite to pass by on the other side away from the
struggles and wrongs of the social conflict. It had no right when the
children asked for the bread of life to offer them Gothic stone....
He began to make interminable weak plans for fulfilling his duty to his
diocese and his daughter.
What could he do to revivify his clergy? He wished he had more personal
magnetism, he wished he had a darker and a larger presence. He wished he
had not been saddled with Whippham's rather futile son as his chaplain.
He wished he had a dean instead of being his own dean. With an
unsympathetic rector. He wished he had it in him to make some resounding
appeal. He might of course preach a series of thumping addresses and
sermons, rather on the lines of “Fors Clavigera,” to masters and men,
in the Cathedral. Only it was so difficult to get either masters or men
into the Cathedral.
Well, if the people will not come to the bishop the bishop must go out
to the people. Should he go outside the Cathedral--to the place where
the trains met?
Interweaving with such thoughts the problem of Eleanor rose again into
his consciousness.
Weren't there books she ought to read? Weren't there books she ought to
be made to read? And books--and friends--that ought to be imperatively
forbidden? Imperatively!
But how to define the forbidden?
He began to compose an address on Modern Literature (so-called).
It became acrimonious.
Before dawn the birds began to sing.
His mind had seemed to be a little tranquillized, there had been a
distinct feeling of subsidence sleepwards, when first one and then
another little creature roused itself and the bishop to greet the
gathering daylight.
It became a little clamour, a misty sea of sound in which individuality
appeared and disappeared. For a time a distant cuckoo was very
perceptible, like a landmark looming up over a fog, like the cuckoo in
the Pastoral Symphony.
The bishop tried not to heed these sounds, but they were by their very
nature insistent sounds. He lay disregarding them acutely.
Presently he pulled the coverlet over his ears.
A little later he sat up in bed.
Again in a slight detail he marked his strange and novel detachment from
the world of his upbringing. His hallucination of disillusionment had
spread from himself and his church and his faith to the whole animate
creation. He knew that these were the voices of “our feathered
songsters,” that this was “a joyous chorus” greeting the day. He knew
that a wakeful bishop ought to bless these happy creatures, and join
with them by reciting Ken's morning hymn. He made an effort that was
more than half habit, to repeat and he repeated with a scowling face and
the voice of a schoolmaster:
“Awake my soul, and with the sun
Thy daily stage of duty run....”
He got no further. He stopped short, sat still, thinking what utterly
detestable things singing birds were. A. blackbird had gripped his
attention. Never had he heard such vain repetitions. He struggled
against the dark mood of criticism. “He prayeth best who loveth best--”
No, he did not love the birds. It was useless to pretend. Whatever one
may say about other birds a cuckoo is a low detestable cad of a bird.
Then the bishop began to be particularly tormented by a bird that made a
short, insistent, wheezing sound at regular intervals of perhaps twenty
seconds. If a bird could have whooping-cough, that, he thought, was the
sort of whoop it would have. But even if it had whooping-cough he could
not pity it. He hung in its intervals waiting for the return of the
wheeze.
And then that blackbird reasserted itself. It had a rich boastful note;
it seemed proud of its noisy reiteration of simple self-assertion. For
some obscure reason the phrase “oleographic sounds” drifted into the
bishop's thoughts. This bird produced the peculiar and irrational
impression that it had recently made a considerable sum of money by
shrewd industrialism. It was, he thought grimly, a genuine Princhester
blackbird.
This wickedly uncharitable reference to his diocese ran all unchallenged
through the bishop's mind. And others no less wicked followed it.
Once during his summer holidays in Florence he and Lady Ella had
subscribed to an association for the protection of song-birds. He
recalled this now with a mild wonder. It seemed to him that perhaps
after all it was as well to let fruit-growers and Italians deal with
singing-birds in their own way. Perhaps after all they had a wisdom....
He passed his hands over his face. The world after all is not made
entirely for singing-birds; there is such a thing as proportion.
Singing-birds may become a luxury, an indulgence, an excess.
Did the birds eat the fruit in Paradise?
Perhaps there they worked for some collective musical effect, had some
sort of conductor in the place of this--hullabaloo....
He decided to walk about the room for a time and then remake his bed....
The sunrise found the bishop with his head and shoulders out of the
window trying to see that blackbird. He just wanted to look at it. He
was persuaded it was a quite exceptional blackbird.
Again came that oppressive sense of the futility of the contemporary
church, but this time it came in the most grotesque form. For hanging
half out of the casement he was suddenly reminded of St. Francis of
Assisi, and how at his rebuke the wheeling swallow stilled their cries.
But it was all so different then.
(3)
It was only after he had passed four similar nights, with intervening
days of lassitude and afternoon siestas, that the bishop realized that
he was in the grip of insomnia.
He did not go at once to a doctor, but he told his trouble to every one
he met and received much tentative advice. He had meant to have his
talk with Eleanor on the morning next after their conversation in the
dining-room, but his bodily and spiritual anaemia prevented him.
The fifth night was the beginning of the Whitsuntide Ember week, and
he wore a red cassock and had a distracting and rather interesting day
welcoming his ordination candidates. They had a good effect upon him; we
spiritualize ourselves when we seek to spiritualize others, and he went
to bed in a happier frame of mind than he had done since the day of the
shock. He woke in the night, but he woke much more himself than he had
been since the trouble began. He repeated that verse of Ken's:
“When in the night I sleepless lie, My soul with heavenly thoughts
supply; Let no ill dreams disturb my rest, No powers of darkness me
molest.”
Almost immediately after these there floated into his mind, as if it
were a message, the dear familiar words:
“He giveth his Beloved sleep.”
These words irradiated and soothed him quite miraculously, the clouds of
doubt seemed to dissolve and vanish and leave him safe and calm under a
clear sky; he knew those words were a promise, and very speedily he fell
asleep and slept until he was called.
But the next day was a troubled one. Whippham had muddled his timetable
and crowded his afternoon; the strike of the transport workers had
begun, and the ugly noises they made at the tramway depot, where they
were booing some one, penetrated into the palace. He had to snatch a
meal between services, and the sense of hurry invaded his afternoon
lectures to the candidates. He hated hurry in Ember week. His ideal was
one of quiet serenity, of grave things said slowly, of still, kneeling
figures, of a sort of dark cool spiritual germination. But what sort of
dark cool spiritual germination is possible with an ass like Whippham
about?
In the fresh courage of the morning the bishop had arranged for that
talk with Eleanor he had already deferred too long, and this had proved
less satisfactory than he had intended it to be.
The bishop's experience with the ordination candidates was following
the usual course. Before they came there was something bordering upon
distaste for the coming invasion; then always there was an effect of
surprise at the youth and faith of the neophytes and a real response of
the spirit to the occasion. Throughout the first twenty-four hours
they were all simply neophytes, without individuality to break up their
uniformity of self-devotion. Then afterwards they began to develop
little personal traits, and scarcely ever were these pleasing traits.
Always one or two of them would begin haunting the bishop, giving way
to an appetite for special words, special recognitions. He knew the
expression of that craving on their faces. He knew the way-laying
movements in room and passage that presently began.
This time in particular there was a freckled underbred young man who
handed in what was evidently a carefully prepared memorandum upon what
he called “my positions.” Apparently he had a muddle of doubts about
the early fathers and the dates of the earlier authentic copies of the
gospels, things of no conceivable significance.
The bishop glanced through this bale of papers--it had of course no
index and no synopsis, and some of the pages were not numbered--handed
it over to Whippham, and when he proved, as usual, a broken reed, the
bishop had the brilliant idea of referring the young man to Canon Bliss
(of Pringle), “who has a special knowledge quite beyond my own in this
field.”
But he knew from the young man's eye even as he said this that it was
not going to put him off for more than a day or so.
The immediate result of glancing over these papers was, however, to
enhance in the bishop's mind a growing disposition to minimize the
importance of all dated and explicit evidences and arguments for
orthodox beliefs, and to resort to vague symbolic and liberal
interpretations, and it was in this state that he came to his talk with
Eleanor.
He did not give her much time to develop her objections. He met her
half way and stated them for her, and overwhelmed her with sympathy
and understanding. She had been “too literal.” “Too literal” was his
keynote. He was a little astonished at the liberality of his own views.
He had been getting along now for some years without looking into his
own opinions too closely and he was by no means prepared to discover
how far he had come to meet his daughter's scepticisms. But he did meet
them. He met them so thoroughly that he almost conveyed that hers was a
needlessly conservative and oldfashioned attitude.
Occasionally he felt he was being a little evasive, but she did not
seem to notice it. As she took his drift, her relief and happiness were
manifest. And he had never noticed before how clear and pretty her eyes
were; they were the most honest eyes he had ever seen. She looked at him
very steadily as he explained, and lit up at his points. She brightened
wonderfully as she realized that after all they were not apart, they had
not differed; simply they had misunderstood....
And before he knew where he was, and in a mere parenthetical declaration
of liberality, he surprised himself by conceding her demand for Newnham
even before she had repeated it. It helped his case wonderfully.
“Call in every exterior witness you can. The church will welcome
them.... No, I want you to go, my dear....”
But his mind was stirred again to its depths by this discussion. And
in particular he was surprised and a little puzzled by this Newnham
concession and the necessity of making his new attitude clear to Lady
Ella....
It was with a sense of fatality that he found himself awake again that
night, like some one lying drowned and still and yet perfectly conscious
at the bottom of deep cold water.
He repeated, “He giveth his Beloved sleep,” but all the conviction had
gone out of the words.
(4)
Neither the bishop's insomnia nor his incertitudes about himself and his
faith developed in a simple and orderly manner. There were periods of
sustained suffering and periods of recovery; it was not for a year or
so that he regarded these troubles as more than acute incidental
interruptions of his general tranquillity or realized that he was
passing into a new phase of life and into a new quality of thought.
He told every one of the insomnia and no one of his doubts; these he
betrayed only by an increasing tendency towards vagueness, symbolism,
poetry and toleration. Eleanor seemed satisfied with his exposition; she
did not press for further enlightenment. She continued all her outward
conformities except that after a time she ceased to communicate; and in
September she went away to Newnham. Her doubts had not visibly affected
Clementina or her other sisters, and the bishop made no further attempts
to explore the spiritual life of his family below the surface of its
formal acquiescence.
As a matter of fact his own spiritual wrestlings were almost exclusively
nocturnal. During his spells of insomnia he led a curiously double
existence. In the daytime he was largely the self he had always been,
able, assured, ecclesiastical, except that he was a little jaded and
irritable or sleepy instead of being quick and bright; he believed in
God and the church and the Royal Family and himself securely; in
the wakeful night time he experienced a different and novel self, a
bare-minded self, bleakly fearless at its best, shamelessly weak at its
worst, critical, sceptical, joyless, anxious. The anxiety was quite the
worst element of all. Something sat by his pillow asking grey questions:
“What are you doing? Where are you going? Is it really well with the
children? Is it really well with the church? Is it really well with the
country? Are you indeed doing anything at all? Are you anything more
than an actor wearing a costume in an archaic play? The people turn
their backs on you.”
He would twist over on his pillow. He would whisper hymns and prayers
that had the quality of charms.
“He giveth his Beloved sleep”; that answered many times, and many times
it failed.
The labour troubles of 1912 eased off as the year wore on, and the
bitterness of the local press over the palace abated very considerably.
Indeed there was something like a watery gleam of popularity when he
brought down his consistent friend, the dear old Princess Christiana of
Hoch and Unter, black bonnet, deafness, and all, to open a new wing of
the children's hospital. The Princhester conservative paper took the
occasion to inform the diocese that he was a fluent German scholar and
consequently a persona grata with the royal aunts, and that the Princess
Christiana was merely just one of a number of royalties now practically
at the beck and call of Princhester. It was not true, but it was very
effective locally, and seemed to justify a little the hauteur of which
Lady Ella was so unjustly suspected. Yet it involved a possibility of
disappointments in the future.
He went to Brighton-Pomfrey too upon the score of his general health,
and Brighton-Pomfrey revised his general regimen, discouraged indiscreet
fasting, and suggested a complete abstinence from red wine except white
port, if indeed that can be called a red wine, and a moderate use of
Egyptian cigarettes.
But 1913 was a strenuous year. The labour troubles revived, the
suffragette movement increased greatly in violence and aggressiveness,
and there sprang up no less than three ecclesiastical scandals in
the diocese. First, the Kensitites set themselves firmly to make
presentations and prosecutions against Morrice Deans, who was reserving
the sacrament, wearing, they said, “Babylonish garments,” going beyond
all reason in the matter of infant confession, and generally brightening
up Mogham Banks; next, a popular preacher in Wombash, published a book
under the exasperating title, “The Light Under the Altar,” in which
he showed himself as something between an Arian and a Pantheist, and
treated the dogma of the Trinity with as little respect as one would
show to an intrusive cat; while thirdly, an obscure but overworked
missioner of a tin mission church in the new working-class district at
Pringle, being discovered in some sort of polygamous relationship, had
seen fit to publish in pamphlet form a scandalous admission and defence,
a pamphlet entitled “Marriage True and False,” taking the public
needlessly into his completest confidence and quoting the affairs of
Abraham and Hosea, reviving many points that are better forgotten about
Luther, and appealing also to such uncanonical authorities as
Milton, Plato, and John Humphrey Noyes. This abnormal concurrence of
indiscipline was extremely unlucky for the bishop. It plunged him into
strenuous controversy upon three fronts, so to speak, and involved
a great number of personal encounters far too vivid for his mental
serenity.
The Pringle polygamist was the most moving as Morrice Deans was the most
exacting and troublesome and the Wombash Pantheist the most insidiously
destructive figure in these three toilsome disputes. The Pringle man's
soul had apparently missed the normal distribution of fig-leaves; he
was an illiterate, open-eyed, hard-voiced, freckled, rational-minded
creature, with large expository hands, who had come by a side way into
the church because he was an indefatigable worker, and he insisted upon
telling the bishop with an irrepressible candour and completeness just
exactly what was the matter with his intimate life. The bishop very
earnestly did not want these details, and did his utmost to avoid the
controversial questions that the honest man pressed respectfully but
obstinately upon him.
“Even St. Paul, my lord, admitted that it is better to marry than burn,”
said the Pringle misdemeanant, “and here was I, my lord, married and
still burning!” and, “I think you would find, my lord, considering
all Charlotte's peculiarities, that the situation was really much more
trying than the absolute celibacy St. Paul had in view.”...
The bishop listened to these arguments as little as possible, and did
not answer them at all. But afterwards the offender came and wept and
said he was ruined and heartbroken and unfairly treated because
he wasn't a gentleman, and that was distressing. It was so exactly
true--and so inevitable. He had been deprived, rather on account of
his voice and apologetics than of his offence, and public opinion was
solidly with the sentence. He made a gallant effort to found what
he called a Labour Church in Pringle, and after some financial
misunderstandings departed with his unambiguous menage to join the
advanced movement on the Clyde.
The Morrice Deans enquiry however demanded an amount of erudition that
greatly fatigued the bishop. He had a very fair general knowledge of
vestments, but he had never really cared for anything but the poetry of
ornaments, and he had to work strenuously to master the legal side
of the question. Whippham, his chaplain, was worse than useless as a
helper. The bishop wanted to end the matter as quickly, quietly, and
favourably to Morrice Deans as possible; he thought Morrice Deans a
thoroughly good man in his parish, and he believed that the substitution
of a low churchman would mean a very complete collapse of church
influence in Mogham Banks, where people were now thoroughly accustomed
to a highly ornate service. But Morrice Deans was intractable and his
pursuers indefatigable, and on several occasions the bishop sat far into
the night devising compromises and equivocations that should make the
Kensitites think that Morrice Deans wasn't wearing vestments when he
was, and that should make Morrice Deans think he was wearing vestments
when he wasn't. And it was Whippham who first suggested green tea as
a substitute for coffee, which gave the bishop indigestion, as his
stimulant for these nocturnal bouts.
Now green tea is the most lucid of poisons.
And while all this extra activity about Morrice Deans, these vigils and
crammings and writings down, were using all and more energy than the
bishop could well spare, he was also doing his quiet utmost to keep “The
Light under the Altar” ease from coming to a head.
This man he hated.
And he dreaded him as well as hated him. Chasters, the author of “The
Light under the Altar,” was a man who not only reasoned closely
but indelicately. There was a demonstrating, jeering, air about his
preaching and writing, and everything he said and did was saturated by
the spirit of challenge. He did not so much imitate as exaggerate the
style of Matthew Arnold. And whatever was done publicly against him
would have to be done very publicly because his book had got him a
London reputation.
From the bishop's point of view Chasters was one of nature's ignoblemen.
He seemed to have subscribed to the Thirty-Nine Articles and passed all
the tests and taken all the pledges that stand on the way to ordination,
chiefly for the pleasure of attacking them more successfully from the
rear; he had been given the living of Wombash by a cousin, and filled it
very largely because it was not only more piquant but more remunerative
and respectable to be a rationalist lecturer in a surplice. And in a
hard kind of ultra-Protestant way his social and parochial work was not
badly done. But his sermons were terrible. “He takes a text,” said one
informant, “and he goes on firstly, secondly, thirdly, fourthly, like
somebody tearing the petals from a flower. 'Finally,' he says, and
throws the bare stalk into the dustbin.”
The bishop avoided “The Light under the Altar” for nearly a year. It
was only when a second book was announced with the winning title of “The
Core of Truth in Christianity” that he perceived he must take action.
He sat up late one night with a marked copy, a very indignantly marked
copy, of the former work that an elderly colonel, a Wombash parishioner,
an orthodox Layman of the most virulent type, had sent him. He perceived
that he had to deal with a dialectician of exceptional ability, who had
concentrated a quite considerable weight of scholarship upon the task of
explaining away every scrap of spiritual significance in the Eucharist.
From Chasters the bishop was driven by reference to the works of Legge
and Frazer, and for the first time he began to measure the dimensions
and power of the modern criticism of church doctrine and observance.
Green tea should have lit his way to refutation; instead it lit up the
whole inquiry with a light of melancholy confirmation. Neither by night
nor by day could the bishop find a proper method of opening a counter
attack upon Chasters, who was indisputably an intellectually abler man
and a very ruthless beast indeed to assail, and meanwhile the demand
that action should be taken increased.
The literature of church history and the controversies arising out of
doctrinal development became the employment of the bishop's leisure and
a commanding preoccupation. He would have liked to discuss with some one
else the network of perplexities in which he was entangling himself, and
more particularly with Canon Bliss, but his own positions were becoming
so insecure that he feared to betray them by argument. He had grown up
with a kind of intellectual modesty. Some things he had never yet talked
about; it made his mind blench to think of talking about them. And his
great aching gaps of wakefulness began now, thanks to the green tea, to
be interspersed with theological dreams and visions of an extravagant
vividness. He would see Frazer's sacrificial kings butchered
picturesquely and terribly amidst strange and grotesque rituals; he
would survey long and elaborate processions and ceremonials in which
the most remarkable symbols were borne high in the sight of all men; he
would cower before a gigantic and threatening Heaven. These
green-tea dreams and visions were not so much phases of sleep as an
intensification and vivid furnishing forth of insomnia. It added
greatly to his disturbance that--exceeding the instructions of
Brighton-Pomfrey--he had now experimented ignorantly and planlessly
with one or two narcotics and sleeping mixtures that friends and
acquaintances had mentioned in his hearing. For the first time in his
life he became secretive from his wife. He knew he ought not to take
these things, he knew they were physically and morally evil, but
a tormenting craving drove him to them. Subtly and insensibly his
character was being undermined by the growing nervous trouble.
He astonished himself by the cunning and the hypocritical dignity he
could display in procuring these drugs. He arranged to have a tea-making
set in his bedroom, and secretly substituted green tea, for which he
developed a powerful craving, in the place of the delicate China tea
Lady Ella procured him.
(5)
These doctrinal and physical anxieties and distresses were at their
worst in the spring and early summer of 1914. That was a time of great
mental and moral disturbance. There was premonition in the air of those
days. It was like the uneasiness sensitive people experience before a
thunderstorm. The moral atmosphere was sullen and close. The whole
world seemed irritable and mischievous. The suffragettes became
extraordinarily malignant; the democratic movement went rotten with
sabotage and with a cant of being “rebels”; the reactionary Tories and a
crew of noisy old peeresses set themselves to create incurable confusion
again in the healing wounds of Ireland, and feuds and frantic folly
broke out at every point of the social and political edifice. And then
a bomb burst at Sarajevo that silenced all this tumult. The unstable
polity of Europe heeled over like a ship that founders.
Through the swiftest, tensest week in history Europe capsized into war.
(6)
The first effect of the war upon the mind of the bishop, as upon
most imaginative minds, was to steady and exalt it. Trivialities and
exasperations seemed swept out of existence. Men lifted up their eyes
from disputes that had seemed incurable and wrangling that promised to
be interminable, and discovered a plain and tragic issue that involved
every one in a common call for devotion. For a great number of men and
women who had been born and bred in security, the August and September
of 1914 were the supremely heroic period of their lives. Myriads
of souls were born again to ideas of service and sacrifice in those
tremendous days.
Black and evil thing as the war was, it was at any rate a great thing;
it did this much for countless minds that for the first time they
realized the epic quality of history and their own relationship to the
destinies of the race. The flimsy roof under which we had been living
our lives of comedy fell and shattered the floor under our feet; we saw
the stars above and the abyss below. We perceived that life was insecure
and adventurous, part of one vast adventure in space and time....
Presently the smoke and dust of battle hid the great distances again,
but they could not altogether destroy the memories of this revelation.
For the first two months the bishop's attention was so detached from
his immediate surroundings and employments, so absorbed by great events,
that his history if it were told in detail would differ scarcely at all
from the histories of most comparatively unemployed minds during those
first dramatic days, the days when the Germans made their great rush
upon Paris and it seemed that France was down, France and the whole
fabric of liberal civilization. He emerged from these stunning
apprehensions after the Battle of the Marne, to find himself busy upon a
score of dispersed and disconnected war jobs, and trying to get all the
new appearances and forces and urgencies of the war into relations with
himself. One thing became very vivid indeed, that he wasn't being used
in any real and effective way in the war. There was a mighty going
to and fro upon Red Cross work and various war committees, a vast
preparation for wounded men and for the succour of dislocated
families; a preparation, that proved to be needless, for catastrophic
unemployment. The war problem and the puzzle of German psychology ousted
for a time all other intellectual interests; like every one else the
bishop swam deep in Nietzsche, Bernhardi, Houston Stewart Chamberlain,
and the like; he preached several sermons upon German materialism
and the astonishing decay of the German character. He also read every
newspaper he could lay his hands on--like any secular man. He signed
an address to the Russian Orthodox church, beginning “Brethren,” and
he revised his impressions of the Filioque controversy. The idea of a
reunion of the two great state churches of Russia and England had always
attracted him. But hitherto it had been a thing quite out of scale,
visionary, utopian. Now in this strange time of altered perspectives it
seemed the most practicable of suggestions. The mayor and corporation
and a detachment of the special reserve in uniform came to a great
intercession service, and in the palace there were two conferences of
local influential people, people of the most various types, people
who had never met tolerantly before, expressing now opinions of
unprecedented breadth and liberality.
All this sort of thing was fresh and exciting at first, and then it
began to fall into a routine and became habitual, and as it became
habitual he found that old sense of detachment and futility was creeping
back again. One day he realized that indeed the whole flood and tumult
of the war would be going on almost exactly as it was going on now if
there had been neither cathedral nor bishop in Princhester. It came to
him that if archbishops were rolled into patriarchs and patriarchs into
archbishops, it would matter scarcely more in the world process that was
afoot than if two men shook hands while their house was afire. At times
all of us have inappropriate thoughts. The unfortunate thought that
struck the bishop as a bullet might strike a man in an exposed trench,
as he was hurrying through the cloisters to a special service and
address upon that doubly glorious day in our English history, the day of
St. Crispin, was of Diogenes rolling his tub.
It was a poisonous thought.
It arose perhaps out of an article in a weekly paper at which he had
glanced after lunch, an article written by one of those sceptical
spirits who find all too abundant expression in our periodical
literature. The writer boldly charged the “Christian churches” with
absolute ineffectiveness. This war, he declared, was above all other
wars a war of ideas, of material organization against rational freedom,
of violence against law; it was a war more copiously discussed than any
war had ever been before, the air was thick with apologetics. And what
was the voice of the church amidst these elemental issues? Bishops and
divines who were patriots one heard discordantly enough, but where were
the bishops and divines who spoke for the Prince of Peace? Where was the
blessing of the church, where was the veto of the church? When it
came to that one discovered only a broad preoccupied back busied in
supplementing the Army Medical Corps with Red Cross activities, good
work in its way--except that the canonicals seemed superfluous. Who
indeed looked to the church for any voice at all? And so to Diogenes.
The bishop's mind went hunting for an answer to that indictment. And
came back and came back to the image of Diogenes.
It was with that image dangling like a barbed arrow from his mind that
the bishop went into the pulpit to preach upon St. Crispin's day, and
looked down upon a thin and scattered congregation in which the elderly,
the childless, and the unoccupied predominated.
That night insomnia resumed its sway.
Of course the church ought to be controlling this great storm, the
greatest storm of war that had ever stirred mankind. It ought to be
standing fearlessly between the combatants like a figure in a wall
painting, with the cross of Christ uplifted and the restored memory of
Christendom softening the eyes of the armed nations. “Put down those
weapons and listen to me,” so the church should speak in irresistible
tones, in a voice of silver trumpets.
Instead it kept a long way from the fighting, tucked up its vestments,
and was rolling its local tubs quite briskly.
(7)
And then came the aggravation of all these distresses by an abrupt
abandonment of smoking and alcohol. Alcoholic relaxation, a necessary
mitigation of the unreality of peacetime politics, becomes a grave
danger in war, and it was with an understandable desire to forward the
interests of his realm that the King decided to set his statesmen an
example--which unhappily was not very widely followed--by abstaining
from alcohol during the continuance of the struggle. It did however
swing over the Bishop of Princhester to an immediate and complete
abandonment of both drink and tobacco. At that time he was finding
comfort for his nerves in Manila cheroots, and a particularly big and
heavy type of Egyptian cigarette with a considerable amount of opium,
and his disorganized system seized upon this sudden change as a
grievance, and set all his jangling being crying aloud for one
cigarette--just one cigarette.
The cheroots, it seemed, he could better spare, but a cigarette became
his symbol for his lost steadiness and ease.
It brought him low.
The reader has already been told the lamentable incident of the stolen
cigarette and the small boy, and how the bishop, tormented by that
shameful memory, cried aloud in the night.
The bishop rolled his tub, and is there any tub-rolling in the world
more busy and exacting than a bishop's? He rolled in it spite of
ill-health and insomnia, and all the while he was tormented by the
enormous background of the world war, by his ineffective realization
of vast national needs, by his passionate desire, for himself and his
church, not to be ineffective.
The distressful alternation between nights of lucid doubt and days of
dull acquiescence was resumed with an intensification of its contrasts.
The brief phase of hope that followed the turn of the fighting upon the
Maine, the hope that after all the war would end swiftly, dramatically,
and justly, and everything be as it had been before--but pleasanter,
gave place to a phase that bordered upon despair. The fall of Antwerp
and the doubts and uncertainties of the Flanders situation weighed
terribly upon the bishop. He was haunted for a time by nightmares of
Zeppelins presently raining fire upon London. These visions became
Apocalyptic. The Zeppelins came to England with the new year, and with
the close of the year came the struggle for Ypres that was so near
to being a collapse of the allied defensive. The events of the early
spring, the bloody failure of British generalship at Neuve Chapelle,
the naval disaster in the Dardanelles, the sinking of the Falaba,
the Russian defeat in the Masurian Lakes, all deepened the bishop's
impression of the immensity of the nation's difficulties and of his
own unhelpfulness. He was ashamed that the church should hold back its
curates from enlistment while the French priests were wearing their
uniforms in the trenches; the expedition of the Bishop of London to
hold open-air services at the front seemed merely to accentuate the
tub-rolling. It was rolling the tub just where it was most in the way.
What was wrong? What was wanting?
The Westminster Gazette, The Spectator, and several other of the most
trusted organs of public opinion were intermittently discussing the same
question. Their discussions implied at once the extreme need that
was felt for religion by all sorts of representative people, and the
universal conviction that the church was in some way muddling and
masking her revelation. “What is wrong with the Churches?” was,
for example, the general heading of The Westminster Gazette's
correspondence.
One day the bishop skimmed a brief incisive utterance by Sir Harry
Johnston that pierced to the marrow of his own shrinking convictions.
Sir Harry is one of those people who seem to write as well as speak in
a quick tenor. “Instead of propounding plainly and without the acereted
mythology of Asia Minor, Greece and Rome, the pure Gospel of Christ....
they present it overloaded with unbelievable myths (such as, among
a thousand others, that Massacre of the Innocents which never took
place).... bore their listeners by a Tibetan repetition of creeds that
have ceased to be credible.... Mutually contradictory propositions....
Prayers and litanies composed in Byzantine and mediaeval times....
the want of actuality, the curious silliness which has, ever since the
destruction of Jerusalem, hung about the exposition of Christianity....
But if the Bishops continue to fuss about the trappings of religion....
the maintenance of codes compiled by people who lived sixteen hundred
or two thousand five hundred years ago.... the increasingly educated
and practical-minded working classes will not come to church, weekday or
Sunday.”
The bishop held the paper in his hand, and with a mind that he felt to
be terribly open, asked himself how true that sharp indictment might be,
and, granting its general truth, what was the duty of the church, that
is to say of the bishops, for as Cyprian says, ecelesia est in episcopo.
We say the creeds; how far may we unsay them?
So far he had taken no open action against Chasters. Suppose now he
were to side with Chasters and let the whole diocese, the church of
Princhester, drift as far as it chose under his inaction towards an
extreme modernism, risking a conflict with, and if necessary fighting,
the archbishop.... It was but for a moment that his mind swung to this
possibility and then recoiled. The Laymen, that band of bigots, would
fight. He could not contemplate litigation and wrangling about the
teaching of the church. Besides, what were the “trappings of religion”
and what the essentials? What after all was “the pure gospel of Christ”
of which this writer wrote so glibly? He put the paper down and took a
New Testament from his desk and opened it haphazard. He felt a curious
wish that he could read it for the first time. It was over-familiar.
Everything latterly in his theology and beliefs had become
over-familiar. It had all become mechanical and dead and unmeaning to
his tired mind....
Whippham came with a reminder of more tub-rolling, and the bishop's
speculations were broken off.