(1)
Dr. DALE exceeded the bishop's worst apprehensions. He was a lean, lank,
dark young man with long black hair and irregular, rather prolonged
features; his chin was right over to the left; he looked constantly at
the bishop's face with a distinctly sceptical grey eye; he could not
have looked harder if he had been a photographer or a portrait painter.
And his voice was harsh, and the bishop was particularly sensitive to
voices.
He began by understanding far too much of the bishop's illness, and he
insisted on various familiarities with the bishop's heart and tongue and
eye and knee that ruffled the bishop's soul.
“Brighton-Pomfrey talked of neurasthenia?” he asked. “That was his
diagnosis,” said the bishop. “Neurasthenia,” said the young man as
though he despised the word.
The bishop went on buttoning up his coat.
“You don't of course want to break your vows about drinking and
smoking,” said the young man with the very faintest suggestion of
derision in his voice.
“Not if it can possibly be avoided,” the bishop asserted. “Without a
loss, that is, of practical efficiency,” he added. “For I have much to
do.”
“I think that it is possible to keep your vow,” said the young man,
and the bishop could have sworn at him. “I think we can manage that all
right.”
(2)
The bishop sat at the table resting his arm upon it and awaiting the
next development of this unsatisfactory interview. He was on the verge
of asking as unpleasantly as possible when Brighton-Pomfrey would
return.
The young man stood upon Brighton-Pomfrey's hearth-rug and was evidently
contemplating dissertations.
“Of course,” he said, as though he discussed a problem with himself,
“you must have some sort of comfort. You must get out of this state, one
way or another.”
The bishop nodded assent. He had faint hopes of this young man's ideas
of comfort.
Dr. Dale reflected. Then he went off away from the question of comfort
altogether. “You see, the trouble in such a case as this is peculiarly
difficult to trace to its sources because it comes just upon the
border-line of bodily and mental things. You may take a drug or alter
your regimen and it disturbs your thoughts, you may take an idea and
it disturbs your health. It is easy enough to say, as some do, that all
ideas have a physical substratum; it is almost as easy to say with the
Christian Scientist that all bodily states are amenable to our ideas.
The truth doesn't, I think, follow the border between those opposite
opinions very exactly on either side. I can't, for instance, tell you to
go home and pray against these uncertainties and despairs, because it
is just these uncertainties and despairs that rob you of the power of
efficient prayer.”
He did not seem to expect anything from the bishop.
“I don't see that because a case brings one suddenly right up against
the frontier of metaphysics, why a doctor should necessarily pull
up short at that, why one shouldn't go on into either metaphysics or
psychology if such an extension is necessary for the understanding of
the case. At any rate if you'll permit it in this consultation....”
“Go on,” said the bishop, holding on to that promise of comfort. “The
best thing is to thrash out the case in your own way. And then come to
what is practical.”
“What is really the matter here--the matter with you that is--is a
disorganization of your tests of reality. It's one of a group of states
hitherto confused. Neurasthenia, that comprehensive phrase--well, it is
one of the neurasthenias. Here, I confess, I begin to talk of work I am
doing, work still to be published, finished first and then published....
But I go off from the idea that every living being lives in a state
not differing essentially from a state of hallucination concerning the
things about it. Truth, essential truth, is hidden. Always. Of course
there must be a measure of truth in our working illusions, a working
measure of truth, or the creature would smash itself up and end itself,
but beyond that discretion of the fire and the pitfall lies a wide
margin of error about which we may be deceived for years. So long as it
doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. I don't know if I make myself clear.”
“I follow you,” said the bishop a little wearily, “I follow you.
Phenomena and noumena and so on and so on. Kant and so forth.
Pragmatism. Yes.”
With a sigh.
“And all that,” completed Dr. Dale in a voice that suggested mockery.
“But you see we grow into a way of life, we settle down among habits and
conventions, we say 'This is all right' and 'That is always so.' We
get more and more settled into our life as a whole and more and more
confident. Unless something happens to shake us out of our sphere of
illusion. That may be some violent contradictory fact, some accident,
or it may be some subtle change in one's health and nerves that makes
us feel doubtful. Or a change of habits. Or, as I believe, some subtle
quickening of the critical faculty. Then suddenly comes the feeling as
though we were lost in a strange world, as though we had never really
seen the world before.”
He paused.
The bishop was reluctantly interested. “That does describe something--of
the mental side,” he admitted. “I never believe in concealing my own
thoughts from an intelligent patient,” said Dr. Dale, with a quiet
offensiveness. “That sort of thing belongs to the dark ages of the
'pothecary's art. I will tell you exactly my guesses and suppositions
about you. At the base of it all is a slight and subtle kidney trouble,
due I suggest to your going to Princhester and drinking the local
water--”
“But it's excellent water. They boast of it.”
“By all the established tests. As a matter of fact many of our best
drinking waters have all sorts of unspecified qualities. Burton water,
for example, is radioactive by Beetham's standards up to the ninth
degree. But that is by the way. My theory about your case is that this
produced a change in your blood, that quickened your sensibilities and
your critical faculties just at a time when a good many bothers--I don't
of course know what they were, but I can, so to speak, see the marks all
over you--came into your life.”
The bishop nodded.
“You were uprooted. You moved from house to house, and failed to get
that curled up safe feeling one has in a real home in any of them.”
“If you saw the fireplaces and the general decoration of the new
palace!” admitted the bishop. “I had practically no control.”
“That confirms me,” said Dr. Dale. “Insomnia followed, and increased the
feeling of physical strangeness by increasing the bodily disturbance. I
suspect an intellectual disturbance.”
He paused.
“There was,” said the bishop.
“You were no longer at home anywhere. You were no longer at home in your
diocese, in your palace, in your body, in your convictions. And then
came the war. Quite apart from everything else the mind of the whole
world is suffering profoundly from the shock of this war--much more
than is generally admitted. One thing you did that you probably did not
observe yourself doing, you drank rather more at your meals, you smoked
a lot more. That was your natural and proper response to the shock.”
“Ah!” said the bishop, and brightened up.
“It was remarked by Tolstoy, I think, that few intellectual men would
really tolerate the world as it is if it were not for smoking and
drinking. Even novelists have their moments of lucidity. Certainly these
things soothe the restlessness in men's minds, deaden their sceptical
sensibilities. And just at the time when you were getting most
dislodged--you gave them up.”
“And the sooner I go back to them the better,” said the bishop brightly.
“I quite see that.”
“I wouldn't say that,” said Dr. Dale....
(3)
“That,” said Dr. Dale, “is just where my treatment of this case differs
from the treatment of “--he spoke the name reluctantly as if he disliked
the mere sound of it--“Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey.”
“Hitherto, of course,” said the bishop, “I've been in his hands.”
“He,” said Dr. Dale, “would certainly set about trying to restore your
old sphere of illusion, your old familiar sensations and ideas and
confidences. He would in fact turn you back. He would restore all your
habits. He would order you a rest. He would send you off to some holiday
resort, fresh in fact but familiar in character, the High lands, North
Italy, or Switzerland for example. He would forbid you newspapers and
order you to botanize and prescribe tranquillizing reading; Trollope's
novels, the Life of Gladstone, the works of Mr. A. C. Benson, memoirs
and so on. You'd go somewhere where there was a good Anglican chaplain,
and you'd take some of the services yourself. And we'd wash out the
effects of the Princhester water with Contrexeville, and afterwards
put you on Salutaris or Perrier. I don't know whether I shouldn't have
inclined to some such treatment before the war began. Only--”
He paused.
“You think--?”
Dr. Dale's face betrayed a sudden sombre passion. “It won't do now,” he
said in a voice of quiet intensity. “It won't do now.”
He remained darkly silent for so long that at last the bishop spoke.
“Then what,” he asked, “do you suggest?
“Suppose we don't try to go back,” said Dr. Dale. “Suppose we go on and
go through.”
“Where?”
“To reality.
“I know it's doubtful, I know it's dangerous,” he went on, “but I am
convinced that now we can no longer keep men's minds and souls in these
feathered nests, these spheres of illusion. Behind these veils there is
either God or the Darkness.... Why should we not go on?”
The bishop was profoundly perplexed. He heard himself speaking. “It
would be unworthy of my cloth,” he was saying.
Dr. Dale completed the sentence: “to go back.”
“Let me explain a little more,” he said, “what I mean by 'going on.' I
think that this loosening of the ties of association that bind a man to
his everyday life and his everyday self is in nine cases out of ten a
loosening of the ties that bind him to everyday sanity. One common form
of this detachment is the form you have in those cases of people who
are found wandering unaware of their names, unaware of their places
of residence, lost altogether from themselves. They have not only lost
their sense of identity with themselves, but all the circumstances of
their lives have faded out of their minds like an idle story in a book
that has been read and put aside. I have looked into hundreds of such
cases. I don't think that loss of identity is a necessary thing; it's
just another side of the general weakening of the grip upon reality, a
kind of anaemia of the brain so that interest fades and fails. There
is no reason why you should forget a story because you do not believe
it--if your brain is strong enough to hold it. But if your brain is
tired and weak, then so soon as you lose faith in your records, your
mind is glad to let them go. When you see these lost identity people
that is always your first impression, a tired brain that has let go.”
The bishop felt extremely like letting go.
“But how does this apply to my case?”
“I come to that,” said Dr. Dale, holding up a long large hand. “What
if we treat this case of yours in a new way? What if we give you not
narcotics but stimulants and tonics? What if we so touch the blood that
we increase your sense of physical detachment while at the same time
feeding up your senses to a new and more vivid apprehension of things
about you?” He looked at his patient's hesitation and added: “You'd lose
all that craving feeling, that you fancy at present is just the need
of a smoke. The world might grow a trifle--transparent, but you'd keep
real. Instead of drugging oneself back to the old contentment--”
“You'd drug me on to the new,” said the bishop.
“But just one word more!” said Dr. Dale. “Hear why I would do this! It
was easy and successful to rest and drug people back to their old states
of mind when the world wasn't changing, wasn't spinning round in the
wildest tornado of change that it has ever been in. But now--Where can
I send you for a rest? Where can I send you to get you out of sight and
hearing of the Catastrophe? Of course old Brighton-Pomfrey would go on
sending people away for rest and a nice little soothing change if the
Day of Judgment was coming in the sky and the earth was opening and the
sea was giving up its dead. He'd send 'em to the seaside. Such things as
that wouldn't shake his faith in the Channel crossing. My idea is that
it's not only right for you to go through with this, but that it's the
only thing to do. If you go right on and right through with these doubts
and intimations--”
He paused.
“You may die like a madman,” he said, “but you won't die like a tame
rabbit.”
(4)
The bishop sat reflecting. What fascinated and attracted him was the
ending of all the cravings and uneasinesses and restlessness that had
distressed his life for over four years; what deterred him was the
personality of this gaunt young man with his long grey face, his excited
manner, his shock of black hair. He wanted that tonic--with grave
misgivings. “If you think this tonic is the wiser course,” he began.
“I'd give it you if you were my father,” said Dr. Dale. “I've got
everything for it,” he added.
“You mean you can make it up--without a prescription.”
“I can't give you a prescription. The essence of it--It's a distillate I
have been trying. It isn't in the Pharmacopeia.”
Again the bishop had a twinge of misgiving.
But in the end he succumbed. He didn't want to take the stuff, but also
he did not want to go without his promised comfort.
Presently Dale had given him a little phial--and was holding up to the
window a small medicine glass into which he was pouring very carefully
twenty drops of the precious fluid. “Take it only,” he said, “when you
feel you must.”
“It is the most golden of liquids,” said the bishop, peering at it.
“When you want more I will make you more. Later of course, it will be
possible to write a prescription. Now add the water--so.
“It becomes opalescent. How beautifully the light plays in it!
“Take it.”
The bishop dismissed his last discretion and drank.
“Well?” said Dr. Dale.
“I am still here,” said the bishop, smiling, and feeling a joyous
tingling throughout his body. “It stirs me.”
(5)
The bishop stood on the pavement outside Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey's house.
The massive door had closed behind him.
It had been an act of courage, of rashness if you will, to take this
draught. He was acutely introspective, ready for anything, for the most
disagreeable or the most bizarre sensations. He was asking himself, Were
his feet steady? Was his head swimming?
His doubts glowed into assurance.
Suddenly he perceived that he was sure of God.
Not perhaps of the God of Nicaea, but what did these poor little
quibblings and definitions of the theologians matter? He had been
worrying about these definitions and quibblings for four long restless
years. Now they were just failures to express--what surely every one
knew--and no one would ever express exactly. Because here was God, and
the kingdom of God was manifestly at hand. The visible world hung before
him as a mist might hang before the rising sun. He stood proudly and
masterfully facing a universe that had heretofore bullied him into doubt
and apologetics, a universe that had hitherto been opaque and was now
betrayed translucent.
That was the first effect of the new tonic, complete reassurance,
complete courage. He turned to walk towards Mount Street and Berkeley
Square as a sultan might turn to walk among his slaves.
But the tonic was only beginning.
Before he had gone a dozen steps he was aware that he seemed more solid
and larger than the people about him. They had all a curious miniature
effect, as though he was looking at them through the wrong end of an
opera glass. The houses on either side of the street and the traffic
shared this quality in an equal measure. It was as if he was looking at
the world through apertures in a miniature cinematograph peep-show. This
surprised him and a little dashed his first glow of satisfaction.
He passed a man in khaki who, he fancied, looked at him with an odd
expression. He observed the next passers-by narrowly and suspiciously, a
couple of smartish young men, a lady with a poodle, a grocer's boy with
a basket, but none seemed to observe anything remarkable about him. Then
he caught the eye of a taxi-driver and became doubtful again.
He had a feeling that this tonic was still coming in like a tide. It
seemed to be filling him and distending him, in spite of the fact that
he was already full. After four years of flaccidity it was pleasant to
be distended again, but already he felt more filled than he had ever
been before. At present nothing was showing, but all his body seemed
braced and uplifted. He must be careful not to become inflated in his
bearing.
And yet it was difficult not to betray a little inflation. He was so
filled with assurance that things were right with him and that God was
there with him. After all it was not mere fancy; he was looking through
the peepholes of his eyes at the world of illusion and appearance. The
world that was so intent upon its immediate business, so regardless of
eternal things, that had so dominated him but a little while ago, was
after all a thing more mortal than himself.
Another man in khaki passed him.
For the first time he saw the war as something measurable, as something
with a beginning and an end, as something less than the immortal spirit
in man. He had been too much oppressed by it. He perceived all these
people in the street were too much oppressed by it. He wanted to tell
them as much, tell them that all was well with them, bid them be of good
cheer. He wanted to bless them. He found his arm floating up towards
gestures of benediction. Self-control became increasingly difficult.
All the way down Berkeley Square the bishop was in full-bodied struggle
with himself. He was trying to control himself, trying to keep within
bounds. He felt that he was stepping too high, that his feet were not
properly reaching the ground, that he was walking upon cushions of air.
The feeling of largeness increased, and the feeling of transparency in
things about him. He avoided collision with passers-by--excessively. And
he felt his attention was being drawn more and more to something that
was going on beyond the veil of visible things. He was in Piccadilly
now, but at the same time Piccadilly was very small and he was walking
in the presence of God.
He had a feeling that God was there though he could not see him. And at
the same time he was in this transitory world, with people going to and
fro, men with umbrellas tucked dangerously under their arms, men in a
hurry, policemen, young women rattling Red Cross collecting boxes, smart
people, loafers. They distracted one from God.
He set out to cross the road just opposite Prince's, and jumping
needlessly to give way to an omnibus had the narrowest escape from a
taxicab.
He paused on the pavement edge to recover himself. The shock of his near
escape had, as people say, pulled him together.
What was he to do? Manifestly this opalescent draught was overpowering
him. He ought never to have taken it. He ought to have listened to the
voice of his misgivings. It was clear that he was not in a fit state to
walk about the streets. He was--what had been Dr. Dale's term?--losing
his sense of reality. What was he to do? He was alarmed but not
dismayed. His thoughts were as full-bodied as the rest of his being,
they came throbbing and bumping into his mind. What was he to do?
Brighton-Pomfrey ought never to have left his practice in the hands of
this wild-eyed experimenter.
Strange that after a lifetime of discretion and men's respect one should
be standing on the Piccadilly pavement--intoxicated!
It came into his head that he was not so very far from the Athenaeum,
and surely there if anywhere a bishop may recover his sense of
being--ordinary.
And behind everything, behind the tall buildings and the swarming people
there was still the sense of a wide illuminated space, of a light of
wonder and a Presence. But he must not give way to that again! He had
already given way altogether too much. He repeated to himself in a
whisper, “I am in Piccadilly.”
If he kept tight hold upon himself he felt he might get to the Athenaeum
before--before anything more happened.
He murmured directions to himself. “Keep along the pavement. Turn to
the right at the Circus. Now down the hill. Easily down the hill. Don't
float! Junior Army and Navy Stores. And the bookseller.”
And presently he had a doubt of his name and began to repeat it.
“Edward Princhester. Edward Scrope, Lord Bishop of Princhester.”
And all the while voices within him were asserting, “You are in the
kingdom of Heaven. You are in the presence of God. Place and time are a
texture of illusion and dreamland. Even now, you are with God.”
(6)
The porter of the Athenaeum saw him come in, looking well--flushed
indeed--but queer in expression; his blue eyes were wide open and
unusually vague and blue.
He wandered across towards the dining-room, hesitated, went to look at
the news, seemed in doubt whether he would not go into the smoking-room,
and then went very slowly upstairs, past the golden angel up to the
great drawing-room.
In the drawing-room he found only Sir James Mounce, the man who knew
the novels of Sir Walter Scott by heart and had the minutest and most
unsparing knowledge of every detail in the life of that supreme giant of
English literature. He had even, it was said, acquired a Scotch burr in
the enthusiasm of his hero-worship. It was usually sufficient only to
turn an ear towards him for him to talk for an hour or so. He was now
studying Bradshaw.
The bishop snatched at him desperately. He felt that if he went away
there would be no hold left upon the ordinary things of life.
“Sir James,” he said, “I was wondering the other day when was the exact
date of the earliest public ascription of Waverley to Scott.”
“Eh!” said Sir James, “but I'd like to talk that over with ye. Indeed
I would. It would be depending very largely on what ye called 'public.'
But--”
He explained something about an engagement in Birmingham that night, a
train to catch. Reluctantly but relentlessly he abandoned the proffered
ear. But he promised that the next time they met in the club he would go
into the matter “exhausteevely.”
The door closed upon him. The bishop was alone. He was flooded with
the light of the world that is beyond this world. The things about him
became very small and indistinct.
He would take himself into a quiet corner in the library of this doll's
house, and sit his little body down in one of the miniature armchairs.
Then if he was going to faint or if the trancelike feeling was to become
altogether a trance--well, a bishop asleep in an armchair in the library
of the Athenaeum is nothing to startle any one.
He thought of that convenient hidden room, the North Library, in which
is the bust of Croker. There often one can be quite alone.... It was
empty, and he went across to the window that looks out upon Pall Mall
and sat down in the little uncomfortable easy chair by the desk with its
back to the Benvenuto Cellini.
And as he sat down, something snapped--like the snapping of a lute
string--in his brain.
(7)
With a sigh of deep relief the bishop realized that this world had
vanished.
He was in a golden light.
He perceived it as a place, but it was a place without buildings or
trees or any very definite features. There was a cloudy suggestion of
distant hills, and beneath his feet were little gem-like flowers, and
a feeling of divinity and infinite friendliness pervaded his being. His
impressions grew more definite. His feet seemed to be bare. He was no
longer a bishop nor clad as a bishop. That had gone with the rest of the
world. He was seated on a slab of starry rock.
This he knew quite clearly was the place of God.
He was unable to disentangle thoughts from words. He seemed to be
speaking in his mind.
“I have been very foolish and confused and perplexed. I have been like a
creature caught among thorns.”
“You served the purpose of God among those thorns.” It seemed to him at
first that the answer also was among his thoughts.
“I seemed so silly and so little. My wits were clay.”
“Clay full of desires.”
“Such desires!”
“Blind desires. That will presently come to the light.”
“Shall we come to the light?”
“But here it is, and you see it!”
(8)
It became clearer in the mind of the bishop that a figure sat beside
him, a figure of great strength and beauty, with a smiling face and
kindly eyes. A strange thought and a strange courage came to the bishop.
“Tell me,” he whispered, “are you God?”
“I am the Angel of God.”
The bishop thought over that for some moments.
“I want,” he said, “to know about God.
“I want,” he said, with a deepening passion of the soul, “to know about
God. Slowly through four long years I have been awakening to the need
of God. Body and soul I am sick for the want of God and the knowledge of
God. I did not know what was the matter with me, why my life had become
so disordered and confused that my very appetites and habits are all
astray. But I am perishing for God as a waterless man upon a raft
perishes for drink, and there is nothing but madness if I touch the seas
about me. Not only in my thoughts but in my under thoughts and in my
nerves and bones and arteries I have need of God. You see I grew up in
the delusion that I knew God, I did not know that I was unprovisioned
and unprovided against the tests and strains and hardships of life. I
thought that I was secure and safe. I was told that we men--who were
apes not a quarter of a million years ago, who still have hair upon
our arms and ape's teeth in our jaws--had come to the full and perfect
knowledge of God. It was all put into a creed. Not a word of it was to
be altered, not a sentence was to be doubted any more. They made me a
teacher of this creed. They seemed to explain it to me. And when I came
to look into it, when my need came and I turned to my creed, it was old
and shrivelled up, it was the patched-up speculations of vanished Greeks
and Egyptians, it was a mummy of ancient disputes, old and dry, that
fell to dust as I unwrapped it. And I was dressed up in the dress of old
dead times and put before an altar of forgotten sacrifices, and I went
through ceremonies as old as the first seedtime; and suddenly I knew
clearly that God was not there, God was not in my Creed, not in my
cathedral, not in my ceremonies, nowhere in my life. And at the same
time I knew, I knew as I had never known before, that certainly there
was God.”
He paused. “Tell me,” said the friend at his side; “tell me.”
“It was as if a child running beside its mother, looked up and saw that
he had never seen her face before, that she was not his mother, and that
the words he had seemed to understand were--now that he listened--words
in an unknown tongue.
“You see, I am but a common sort of man, dear God; I have neither lived
nor thought in any way greatly, I have gone from one day to the next day
without looking very much farther than the end of the day, I have gone
on as life has befallen; if no great trouble had come into my life, so
I should have lived to the end of my days. But life which began for me
easily and safely has become constantly more difficult and strange.
I could have held my services and given my benedictions, I could have
believed I believed in what I thought I believed.... But now I am lost
and astray--crying out for God....”
(9)
“Let us talk a little about your troubles,” said the Angel. “Let us talk
about God and this creed that worries you and this church of yours.”
“I feel as though I had been struggling to this talk through all the
years--since my doubts began.”
“The story your Creed is trying to tell is much the same story that
all religions try to tell. In your heart there is God, beyond the stars
there is God. Is it the same God?”
“I don't know,” said the bishop.
“Does any one know?”
“I thought I knew.”
“Your creed is full of Levantine phrases and images, full of the patched
contradictions of the human intelligence utterly puzzled. It is about
those two Gods, the God beyond the stars and the God in your heart. It
says that they are the same God, but different. It says that they have
existed together for all time, and that one is the Son of the other. It
has added a third Person--but we won't go into that.”
The bishop was reminded suddenly of the dispute at Mrs. Garstein
Fellows'. “We won't go into that,” he agreed. “No!”
“Other religions have told the story in a different way. The Cathars and
Gnostics did. They said that the God in your heart is a rebel against
the God beyond the stars, that the Christ in your heart is like
Prometheus--or Hiawatha--or any other of the sacrificial gods, a rebel.
He arises out of man. He rebels against that high God of the stars and
crystals and poisons and monsters and of the dead emptiness of space....
The Manicheans and the Persians made out our God to be fighting
eternally against that Being of silence and darkness beyond the stars.
The Buddhists made the Lord Buddha the leader of men out of the futility
and confusion of material existence to the great peace beyond. But it is
all one story really, the story of the two essential Beings, always the
same story and the same perplexity cropping up under different names,
the story of one being who stirs us, calls to us, and leads us, and
of another who is above and outside and in and beneath all things,
inaccessible and incomprehensible. All these religions are trying to
tell something they do not clearly know--of a relationship between these
two, that eludes them, that eludes the human mind, as water escapes from
the hand. It is unity and opposition they have to declare at the same
time; it is agreement and propitiation, it is infinity and effort.”
“And the truth?” said the bishop in an eager whisper. “You can tell me
the truth.”
The Angel's answer was a gross familiarity. He thrust his hand through
the bishop's hair and ruffled it affectionately, and rested for a moment
holding the bishop's cranium in his great palm.
“But can this hold it?” he said....
“Not with this little box of brains,” said the Angel. “You could as soon
make a meal of the stars and pack them into your belly. You haven't the
things to do it with inside this.”
He gave the bishop's head a little shake and relinquished it.
He began to argue as an elder brother might.
“Isn't it enough for you to know something of the God that comes down to
the human scale, who has been born on your planet and arisen out of Man,
who is Man and God, your leader? He's more than enough to fill your mind
and use up every faculty of your being. He is courage, he is adventure,
he is the King, he fights for you and with you against death....”
“And he is not infinite? He is not the Creator?” asked the bishop.
“So far as you are concerned, no,” said the Angel.
“So far as I am concerned?”
“What have you to do with creation?”
And at that question it seemed that a great hand swept carelessly across
the blackness of the farther sky, and smeared it with stars and suns and
shining nebulas as a brush might smear dry paint across a canvas.
The bishop stared in front of him. Then slowly he bowed his head, and
covered his face with his hands.
“And I have been in orders,” he murmured; “I have been teaching people
the only orthodox and perfect truth about these things for seven and
twenty years.”
And suddenly he was back in his gaiters and his apron and his shovel
hat, a little black figure exceedingly small in a very great space....
(10)
It was a very great space indeed because it was all space, and the roof
was the ebony of limitless space from which the stars swung flaming,
held by invisible ties, and the soil beneath his feet was a dust of
atoms and the little beginnings of life. And long before the bishop
bared his face again, he knew that he was to see his God.
He looked up slowly, fearing to be dazzled.
But he was not dazzled. He knew that he saw only the likeness and
bodying forth of a being inconceivable, of One who is greater than the
earth and stars and yet no greater than a man. He saw a being for ever
young, for ever beginning, for ever triumphant. The quality and texture
of this being was a warm and living light like the effulgence at
sunrise; He was hope and courage like a sunlit morning in spring. He
was adventure for ever, and His courage and adventure flowed into and
submerged and possessed the being of the man who beheld him. And this
presence of God stood over the bishop, and seemed to speak to him in a
wordless speech.
He bade him surrender himself. He bade him come out upon the Adventure
of Life, the great Adventure of the earth that will make the atoms our
bond-slaves and subdue the stars, that will build up the white fires of
ecstasy to submerge pain for ever, that will overcome death. In Him
the spirit of creation had become incarnate, had joined itself to men,
summoning men to Him, having need of them, having need of them, having
need of their service, even as great kings and generals and leaders need
and use men. For a moment, for an endless age, the bishop bowed himself
in the being and glory of God, felt the glow of the divine courage and
confidence in his marrow, felt himself one with God.
For a timeless interval....
Never had the bishop had so intense a sense of reality. It seemed that
never before had he known anything real. He knew certainly that God was
his King and master, and that his unworthy service could be acceptable
to God. His mind embraced that idea with an absolute conviction that was
also absolute happiness.
(11)
The thoughts and sensations of the bishop seemed to have lifted for
a time clean away from the condition of time, and then through a vast
orbit to be returning to that limitation.
He was aware presently that things were changing, that the light was
losing its diviner rays, that in some indescribable manner the glory and
the assurance diminished.
The onset of the new phase was by imperceptible degrees. From a glowing,
serene, and static realization of God, everything relapsed towards
change and activity. He was in time again and things were happening, it
was as if the quicksands of time poured by him, and it was as if God
was passing away from him. He fell swiftly down from the heaven
of self-forgetfulness to a grotesque, pathetic and earthly
self-consciousness.
He became acutely aware of his episcopal livery. And that God was
passing away from him.
It was as if God was passing, and as if the bishop was unable to rise up
and follow him.
Then it was as if God had passed, and as if the bishop was in headlong
pursuit of him and in a great terror lest he should be left behind. And
he was surely being left behind.
He discovered that in some unaccountable way his gaiters were loose;
most of their buttons seemed to have flown off, and his episcopal
sash had slipped down about his feet. He was sorely impeded. He kept
snatching at these things as he ran, in clumsy attempts to get them off.
At last he had to stop altogether and kneel down and fumble with the
last obstinate button.
“Oh God!” he cried, “God my captain! Wait for me! Be patient with me!”
And as he did so God turned back and reached out his hand. It was indeed
as if he stood and smiled. He stood and smiled as a kind man might do;
he dazzled and blinded his worshipper, and yet it was manifest that he
had a hand a man might clasp.
Unspeakable love and joy irradiated the whole being of the bishop as he
seized God's hand and clasped it desperately with both his own. It was
as if his nerves and arteries and all his substance were inundated with
golden light....
It was again as if he merged with God and became God....