(1)
WITHOUT any sense of transition the bishop found himself seated in the
little North Library of the Athenaeum club and staring at the bust of
John Wilson Croker. He was sitting motionless and musing deeply. He was
questioning with a cool and steady mind whether he had seen a vision
or whether he had had a dream. If it had been a dream it had been an
extraordinarily vivid and convincing dream. He still seemed to be in the
presence of God, and it perplexed him not at all that he should also
be in the presence of Croker. The feeling of mental rottenness and
insecurity that had weakened his thought through the period of his
illness, had gone. He was secure again within himself.
It did not seem to matter fundamentally whether it was an experience of
things without or of things within him that had happened to him. It was
clear to him that much that he had seen was at most expressive, that
some was altogether symbolical. For example, there was that sudden
absurd realization of his sash and gaiters, and his perception of them
as encumbrances in his pursuit of God. But the setting and essential of
the whole thing remained in his mind neither expressive nor symbolical,
but as real and immediately perceived, and that was the presence and
kingship of God. God was still with him and about him and over him and
sustaining him. He was back again in his world and his ordinary life,
in his clothing and his body and his club, but God had been made and
remained altogether plain and manifest.
Whether an actual vision had made his conviction, or whether the
conviction of his own subconscious mind had made the dream, seemed but
a small matter beside the conviction that this was indeed the God he had
desired and the God who must rule his life.
“The stuff? The stuff had little to do with it. It just cleared my
head.... I have seen. I have seen really. I know.”
(2)
For a long time as it seemed the bishop remained wrapped in clouds of
luminous meditation. Dream or vision it did not matter; the essential
thing was that he had made up his mind about God, he had found God.
Moreover, he perceived that his theological perplexities had gone. God
was higher and simpler and nearer than any theological God, than the
God of the Three Creeds. Those creeds lay about in his mind now like
garments flung aside, no trace nor suspicion of divinity sustained them
any longer. And now--Now he would go out into the world.
The little Library of the Athenaeum has no visible door. He went to the
book-masked entrance in the corner, and felt among the bookshelves
for the hidden latch. Then he paused, held by a curious thought. What
exactly was the intention of that symbolical struggle with his sash and
gaiters, and why had they impeded his pursuit of God?
To what particularly significant action was he going out?
The Three Creeds were like garments flung aside. But he was still
wearing the uniform of a priest in the service of those three creeds.
After a long interval he walked into the big reading-room. He ordered
some tea and dry toast and butter, and sat down very thoughtfully in a
corner. He was still sitting and thinking at half-past eight.
It may seem strange to the reader that this bishop who had been doubting
and criticizing the church and his system of beliefs for four long
years had never before faced the possibility of a severance from his
ecclesiastical dignity. But he had grown up in the church, his life had
been so entirely clerical and Anglican, that the widest separation he
had hitherto been able to imagine from this past had left him still a
bishop, heretical perhaps, innovating in the broadening of beliefs and
the liberalizing of practice, defensive even as Chasters was defensive,
but still with the palace and his dignities, differing in opinion rather
than in any tangible reality from his previous self. For a bishop,
disbelief in the Church is a far profounder scepticism than mere
disbelief in God. God is unseen, and in daily things unfelt; but
the Church is with the predestined bishop always. His concept of the
extremest possible departure from orthodoxy had been something that
Chasters had phrased as “a restatement of Christ.” It was a new idea, an
idea that had come with an immense effect of severance and novelty, that
God could be other than the God of the Creed, could present himself
to the imagination as a figure totally unlike the white, gentle, and
compromising Redeemer of an Anglican's thought. That the bishop should
treat the whole teaching of the church and the church itself as wrong,
was an idea so new that it fell upon him now like a thunderbolt out of a
cloudless sky. But here, clear in his mind now, was a feeling, amounting
to conviction, that it was the purpose and gesture of the true God that
he should come right out of the church and all his professions.
And in the first glow of his vision he felt this gesture imperative. He
must step right out.... Whither? how? And when?
To begin with it seemed to him that an immediate renunciation was
demanded. But it was a momentous step. He wanted to think. And to go
on thinking. Rather than to act precipitately. Although the imperative
seemed absolute, some delaying and arresting instinct insisted that he
must “think” If he went back to Princhester, the everyday duties of
his position would confront him at once with an effect of a definite
challenge. He decided to take one of the Reform club bedrooms for two or
three days, and wire to Princhester that he was “unavoidably delayed in
town,” without further explanations. Then perhaps this inhibitory force
would give way.
It did not, however, give way. His mind sat down for two days in a blank
amazement at the course before him, and at the end of that time this
reasonless and formless institution was as strong as ever. During that
time, except for some incidental exchanges at his clubs, he talked to no
one. At first he did not want to talk to any one. He remained mentally
and practically active, with a still intensely vivid sense that God,
the true God, stood watching him and waiting for him to follow. And to
follow meant slipping right out of all the world he had ever known.
To thrust his foot right over the edge of a cliff would scarcely have
demanded more from the bishop's store of resolution. He stood on the
very verge. The chief secretion of his mind was a shadowy experiment or
so in explanation of why he did not follow.
(3)
Insensibly the extreme vividness of his sense of God's nearness
decreased. But he still retained a persuasion of the reality of an
immediate listener waiting, and of the need of satisfying him.
On the third day he found his mind still further changed. He no longer
felt that God was in Pall Mall or St. James's Park, whither he
resorted to walk and muse. He felt now that God was somewhere about the
horizon....
He felt too no longer that he thought straight into the mind of God. He
thought now of what he would presently say to God. He turned over and
rehearsed phrases. With that came a desire to try them first on some
other hearer. And from that to the attentive head of Lady Sunderbund,
prettily bent towards him, was no great leap. She would understand,
if any one could understand, the great change that had happened in his
mind.
He found her address in the telephone book. She could be quite alone
to him if he wouldn't mind “just me.” It was, he said, exactly what he
desired.
But when he got to her great airy flat overlooking Hyde Park, with its
Omega Workshop furniture and its arresting decoration, he was not so
sure whether this encounter was so exactly the thing he had desired as
he had supposed.
The world had become opaque and real again as he walked up St. James's
Street and past the Ritz. He had a feeling that he was taking an
afternoon off from God. The adventurous modernity of the room in which
he waited intensified that. One whole white wall was devoted to a small
picture by Wyndham Lewis. It was like a picture of an earthquake in a
city of aniline pink and grey and keen green cardboard, and he wished it
had never existed.
He turned his back upon it and stared out of the window over the trees
and greenery. The balcony was decorated with white and pink geraniums in
pots painted black and gold, and the railings of the balcony were black
and gold with crimson shape like squares wildly out of drawing.
Lady Sunderbund kept him waiting perhaps five minutes. Then she came
sailing in to him.
She was dressed in a way and moved across the room in a way that was
more reminiscent of Botticelli's Spring than ever--only with a kind
of superadded stiffish polonaise of lace--and he did not want to be
reminded of Botticelli's Spring or wonder why she had taken to stiff
lace polonaises. He did not enquire whether he had met Lady Sunderbund
to better advantage at Mrs. Garstein Fellows' or whether his memory had
overrated her or whether anything had happened to his standard of taste,
but his feeling now was decidedly one of disappointment, and all the
talk and self-examination he had promised himself seemed to wither and
hide away within him. For a time he talked of her view, and then
admired her room and its arrangement, which he thought really were quite
unbecomingly flippant and undignified for a room. Then came the black
tea-things on their orange tray, and he searched in his mind for small
talk to sustain their interview.
But he had already betrayed his disposition to “go on with our talk”
in his telephone enquiry, and Lady Sunderbund, perceiving his shyness,
began to make openings for him, at first just little hinting openings,
and then larger and larger ones, until at last one got him.
“I'm so glad,” she said, “to see you again. I'm so glad to go on with
our talk. I've thought about it and thought about it.”
She beamed at him happily.
“I've thought ova ev'y wo'd you said,” she went on, when she had
finished conveying her pretty bliss to him. “I've been so helped by
thinking the k'eeds are symbols. And all you said. And I've felt time
after time, you couldn't stay whe' you we'. That what you we' saying to
me, would have to be said 'ight out.”
That brought him in. He could not very well evade that opening without
incivility. After all he had asked to see her, and it was a foolish
thing to let little decorative accidentals put him off his friendly
purpose. A woman may have flower-pots painted gold with black checkers
and still be deeply understanding. He determined to tell her what was in
his mind. But he found something barred him from telling that he had
had an actual vision of God. It was as if that had been a private and
confidential meeting. It wasn't, he felt, for him either to boast a
privilege or tell others of things that God had not chosen to show them.
“Since I saw you,” he said, “I have thought a great deal--of the subject
of our conversation.”
“I have been t'ying to think,” she said in a confirmatory tone, as if
she had co-operated.
“My faith in God grows,” he said.
She glowed. Her lips fell apart. She flamed attention.
“But it grows less like the faith of the church, less and less. I was
born and trained in Anglicanism, and it is with a sort of astonishment I
find myself passing now out of every sort of Catholicism--seeing it from
the outside....”
“Just as one might see Buddhism,” she supplied.
“And yet feeling nearer, infinitely nearer to God,” he said.
“Yes,” she panted; “yes.”
“I thought if one went out, one went out just to doubt and darkness.”
“And you don't?”
“No.”
“You have gone at one step to a new 'iligion!”
He stared for a moment at the phrase.
“To religion,” he said.
“It is so wondyful,” she said, with her hands straight down upon the
couch upon which she was sitting, and leaning forward at him, so as to
seem almost as much out of drawing as a modern picture.
“It seems,” he reflected; “--as if it were a natural thing.”
She came back to earth very slowly. She turned to the tea-things with
hushed and solemn movements as though she administered a ceremony of
peculiar significance. The bishop too rose slowly out of the profundity
of his confession. “No sugar please,” he said, arresting the lump in mid
air.
It was only when they were embarked upon cups of tea and had a little
refreshed themselves, that she carried the talk further.
“Does it mean that you must leave the church?” she asked.
“It seemed so at first,” he said. “But now I do not know. I do not know
what I ought to do.”
She awaited his next thought.
“It is as if one had lived in a room all one's life and thought it the
world--and then suddenly walked out through a door and discovered the
sea and the mountains and stars. So it was with me and the Anglican
Church. It seems so extraordinary now--and it would have seemed the
most natural thing a year ago--to think that I ever believed that the
Anglican Compromise was the final truth of religion, that nothing more
until the end of the world could ever be known that Cosmo Gordon Lang
did not know, that there could be no conception of God and his quality
that Randall Davidson did not possess.”
He paused.
“I did,” he said.
“I did,” she responded with round blue eyes of wonder.
“At the utmost the Church of England is a tabernacle on a road.”
“A 'oad that goes whe'?” she rhetorized.
“Exactly,” said the bishop, and put down his cup.
“You see, my dear Lady Sunderbund,” he resumed, “I am exactly in the
same position of that man at the door.”
She quoted aptly and softly: “The wo'ld was all befo' them whe' to
choose.”
He was struck by the aptness of the words.
“I feel I have to come right out into the bare truth. What exactly then
do I become? Do I lose my priestly function because I discover how great
God is? But what am I to do?”
He opened a new layer of his thoughts to her.
“There is a saying,” he remarked, “once a priest, always a priest. I
cannot imagine myself as other than what I am.”
“But o'thodox no maw,” she said.
“Orthodox--self-satisfied, no longer. A priest who seeks, an exploring
priest.”
“In a Chu'ch of P'og'ess and B'othe'hood,” she carried him on.
“At any rate, in a progressive and learning church.”
She flashed and glowed assent.
“I have been haunted,” he said, “by those words spoken at Athens. 'Whom
therefore ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you.' That comes
to me with an effect of--guidance is an old-fashioned word--shall I
say suggestion? To stand by the altar bearing strange names and ancient
symbols, speaking plainly to all mankind of the one true God--!”
(4)
He did not get much beyond this point at the time, though he remained
talking with Lady Sunderbund for nearly an hour longer. The rest was
merely a beating out of what had already been said. But insensibly she
renewed her original charm, and as he became accustomed to her he forgot
a certain artificiality in her manner and the extreme modernity of her
costume and furniture. She was a wonderful listener; nobody else could
have helped him to expression in quite the same way, and when he left
her he felt that now he was capable of stating his case in a coherent
and acceptable form to almost any intelligent hearer. He had a point of
view now that was no longer embarrassed by the immediate golden
presence of God; he was no longer dazzled nor ecstatic; his problem had
diminished to the scale of any other great human problem, to the scale
of political problems and problems of integrity and moral principle,
problems about which there is no such urgency as there is about a house
on fire, for example.
And now the desire for expression was running strong. He wanted to
state his situation; if he did not state he would have to act; and as he
walked back to the club dinner he turned over possible interlocutors
in his thoughts. Lord Rampound sat with him at dinner, and he came near
broaching the subject with him. But Lord Rampound that evening had
that morbid running of bluish legal anecdotes which is so common an
affliction with lawyers, and theology sinks and dies in that turbid
stream.
But as he lay in bed that night he thought of his old friend and helper
Bishop Likeman, and it was borne in upon him that he should consult him.
And this he did next day.
Since the days when the bishop had been only plain Mr. Scrope, the
youngest and most helpful of Likeman's historical band of curates, their
friendship had continued. Likeman had been a second father to him; in
particular his tact and helpfulness had shone during those days of doubt
and anxiety when dear old Queen Victoria, God's representative on earth,
had obstinately refused, at the eleventh hour, to make him a bishop. She
had those pigheaded fits, and she was touchy about the bishops. She had
liked Scrope on account of the excellence of his German pronunciation,
but she had been irritated by newspaper paragraphs--nobody could ever
find out who wrote them and nobody could ever find out who showed them
to the old lady--anticipating his elevation. She had gone very red
in the face and stiffened in the Guelphic manner whenever Scrope was
mentioned, and so a rich harvest of spiritual life had remained untilled
for some months. Likeman had brought her round.
It seemed arguable that Scrope owed some explanation to Likeman before
he came to any open breach with the Establishment.
He found Likeman perceptibly older and more shrivelled on account of the
war, but still as sweet and lucid and subtle as ever. His voice sounded
more than ever like a kind old woman's.
He sat buried in his cushions--for “nowadays I must save every scrap
of vitality”--and for a time contented himself with drawing out his
visitor's story.
Of course, one does not talk to Likeman of visions or intuitions. “I am
disturbed, I find myself getting out of touch;” that was the bishop's
tone.
Occasionally Likeman nodded slowly, as a physician might do at the
recital of familiar symptoms. “Yes,” he said, “I have been through most
of this.... A little different in the inessentials.... How clear you
are!”
“You leave our stupid old Trinities--as I left them long ago,” said old
Likeman, with his lean hand feeling and clawing at the arm of his chair.
“But--!”
The old man raised his hand and dropped it. “You go away from it
all--straight as a line. I did. You take the wings of the morning and
fly to the uttermost parts of the earth. And there you find--”
He held up a lean finger, and inclined it to tick off each point.
“Fate--which is God the Father, the Power of the Heart, which is God
the Son, and that Light which comes in upon us from the inaccessible
Godhead, which is God the Holy Spirit.”
“But I know of no God the Holy Spirit, and Fate is not God at all. I
saw in my vision one sole God, uncrucified, militant--conquering and to
conquer.”
Old Likeman stared. “You saw!”
The Bishop of Princhester had not meant to go so far. But he stuck to
his words. “As if I saw with my eyes. A God of light and courage.”
“You have had visions, Scrope?”
“I seemed to see.”
“No, you have just been dreaming dreams.”
“But why should one not see?”
“See! The things of the spirit. These symbols as realities! These
metaphors as men walking!”
“You talk like an agnostic.”
“We are all agnostics. Our creeds are expressions of ourselves and our
attitude and relationship to the unknown. The triune God is just the
form of our need and disposition. I have always assumed that you took
that for granted. Who has ever really seen or heard or felt God? God
is neither of the senses nor of the mind; he is of the soul. You are
realistic, you are materialistic....”
His voice expostulated.
The Bishop of Princhester reflected. The vision of God was far off
among his memories now, and difficult to recall. But he said at last: “I
believe there is a God and that he is as real a person as you or I. And
he is not the theological God we set out before the world.”
“Personification,” said Likeman. “In the eighteenth century they used to
draw beautiful female figures as Science and Mathematics. Young men have
loved Science--and Freedom--as Pygmalion loved Galatea. Have it so
if you will. Have a visible person for your Deity. But let me keep up
my--spirituality.”
“Your spirituality seems as thin as a mist. Do you really
believe--anything?”
“Everything!” said Likeman emphatically, sitting up with a transitory
vigour. “Everything we two have ever professed together. I believe that
the creeds of my church do express all that can possibly be expressed in
the relationship of--That”--he made a comprehensive gesture with a twist
of his hand upon its wrist--“to the human soul. I believe that they
express it as well as the human mind can express it. Where they seem
to be contradictory or absurd, it is merely that the mystery is
paradoxical. I believe that the story of the Fall and of the Redemption
is a complete symbol, that to add to it or to subtract from it or to
alter it is to diminish its truth; if it seems incredible at this point
or that, then simply I admit my own mental defect. And I believe in our
Church, Scrope, as the embodied truth of religion, the divine instrument
in human affairs. I believe in the security of its tradition, in
the complete and entire soundness of its teaching, in its essential
authority and divinity.”
He paused, and put his head a little on one side and smiled sweetly.
“And now can you say I do not believe?”
“But the historical Christ, the man Jesus?”
“A life may be a metaphor. Why not? Yes, I believe it all. All.”
The Bishop of Princhester was staggered by this complete acceptance. “I
see you believe all you profess,” he said, and remained for a moment or
so rallying his forces.
“Your vision--if it was a vision--I put it to you, was just some single
aspect of divinity,” said Likeman. “We make a mistake in supposing that
Heresy has no truth in it. Most heresies are only a disproportionate
apprehension of some essential truth. Most heretics are men who have
suddenly caught a glimpse through the veil of some particular verity....
They are dazzled by that aspect. All the rest has vanished.... They are
obsessed. You are obsessed clearly by this discovery of the militancy of
God. God the Son--as Hero. And you want to go out to the simple worship
of that one aspect. You want to go out to a Dissenter's tent in the
wilderness, instead of staying in the Great Temple of the Ages.”
Was that true?
For some moments it sounded true.
The Bishop of Princhester sat frowning and looking at that. Very far
away was the vision now of that golden Captain who bade him come. Then
at a thought the bishop smiled.
“The Great Temple of the Ages,” he repeated. “But do you remember the
trouble we had when the little old Queen was so pigheaded?”
“Oh! I remember, I remember,” said Likeman, smiling with unshaken
confidence. “Why not?”
“For sixty years all we bishops in what you call the Great Temple of
the Ages, were appointed and bullied and kept in our places by that
pink irascible bit of dignity. I remember how at the time I didn't dare
betray my boiling indignation even to you--I scarcely dared admit it to
myself....”
He paused.
“It doesn't matter at all,” and old Likeman waved it aside.
“Not at all,” he confirmed, waving again.
“I spoke of the whole church of Christ on earth,” he went on.
“These things, these Victorias and Edwards and so on, are temporary
accidents--just as the severance of an Anglican from a Roman communion
and a Greek orthodox communion are temporary accidents. You will remark
that wise men in all ages have been able to surmount the difficulty of
these things. Why? Because they knew that in spite of all these splits
and irregularities and defacements--like the cracks and crannies and
lichens on a cathedral wall--the building held good, that it was shelter
and security. There is no other shelter and security. And so I come to
your problem. Suppose it is true that you have this incidental vision
of the militant aspect of God, and he isn't, as you see him now that
is,--he isn't like the Trinity, he isn't like the Creed, he doesn't seem
to be related to the Church, then comes the question, are you going out
for that? And whither do you go if you do go out? The Church remains. We
alter doctrines not by changing the words but by shifting the accent. We
can under-accentuate below the threshold of consciousness.”
“But can we?”
“We do. Where's Hell now? Eighty years ago it warmed the whole Church.
It was--as some atheist or other put it the other day--the central
heating of the soul. But never mind that point now. Consider the
essential question, the question of breaking with the church. Ask
yourself, whither would you go? To become an oddity! A Dissenter. A
Negative. Self emasculated. The spirit that denies. You would just go
out. You would just cease to serve Religion. That would be all. You
wouldn't do anything. The Church would go on; everything else would go
on. Only you would be lost in the outer wilderness.
“But then--”
Old Likeman leant forward and pointed a bony finger. “Stay in the Church
and modify it. Bring this new light of yours to the altar.”
There was a little pause.
“No man,” the bishop thought aloud, “putteth new wine into old bottles.”
Old Likeman began to speak and had a fit of coughing. “Some of these
texts--whuff, whuff--like a conjuror's hat--whuff--make 'em--fit
anything.”
A man-servant appeared and handed a silver box of lozenges into which
the old bishop dipped with a trembling hand.
“Tricks of that sort,” he said, “won't do, Scrope--among professionals.
“And besides,” he was inspired; “true religion is old wine--as old as
the soul.
“You are a bishop in the Church of Christ on Earth,” he summed it up.
“And you want to become a detached and wandering Ancient Mariner from
your shipwreck of faith with something to explain--that nobody wants to
hear. You are going out I suppose you have means?”
The old man awaited the answer to his abrupt enquiry with a handful of
lozenges.
“No,” said the Bishop of Princhester, “practically--I haven't.”
“My dear boy!” it was as if they were once more rector and curate.
“My dear brother! do you know what the value of an ex-bishop is in the
ordinary labour market?”
“I have never thought of that.”
“Evidently. You have a wife and children?”
“Five daughters.”
“And your wife married you--I remember, she married you soon after you
got that living in St. John's Wood. I suppose she took it for granted
that you were fixed in an ecclesiastical career. That was implicit in
the transaction.”
“I haven't looked very much at that side of the matter yet,” said the
Bishop of Princhester.
“It shouldn't be a decisive factor,” said Bishop Likeman, “not decisive.
But it will weigh. It should weigh....”
The old man opened out fresh aspects of the case. His argument was for
delay, for deliberation. He went on to a wider set of considerations. A
man who has held the position of a bishop for some years is, he held, no
longer a free man in matters of opinion. He has become an official part
of a great edifice which supports the faith of multitudes of simple
and dependant believers. He has no right to indulge recklessly in
intellectual and moral integrities. He may understand, but how is the
flock to understand? He may get his own soul clear, but what will happen
to them? He will just break away their supports, astonish them, puzzle
them, distress them, deprive them of confidence, convince them of
nothing.
“Intellectual egotism may be as grave a sin,” said Bishop Likeman, “as
physical selfishness.
“Assuming even that you are absolutely right,” said Bishop Likeman,
“aren't you still rather in the position of a man who insists upon
Swedish exercises and a strengthening dietary on a raft?”
“I think you have made out a case for delay,” said his hearer.
“Three months.”
The Bishop of Princhester conceded three months.
“Including every sort of service. Because, after all, even supposing
it is damnable to repeat prayers and creeds you do not believe in, and
administer sacraments you think superstition, nobody can be damned
but yourself. On the other hand if you express doubts that are not yet
perfectly digested--you experiment with the souls of others....”
(5)
The bishop found much to ponder in his old friend's counsels. They were
discursive and many-fronted, and whenever he seemed to be penetrating or
defeating the particular considerations under examination the others
in the background had a way of appearing invincible. He had a strong
persuasion that Likeman was wrong--and unanswerable. And the true God
now was no more than the memory of a very vividly realized idea. It
was clear to the bishop that he was no longer a churchman or in the
generally accepted sense of the word a Christian, and that he was bound
to come out of the church. But all sense of urgency had gone. It was a
matter demanding deliberation and very great consideration for others.
He took no more of Dale's stuff because he felt bodily sound and slept
well. And he was now a little shy of this potent fluid. He went down
to Princhester the next day, for his compromise of an interval of three
months made it seem possible to face his episcopal routine again. It
was only when he was back in his own palace that the full weight of
his domestic responsibilities in the discussion of the course he had to
take, became apparent.
Lady Ella met him with affection and solicitude.
“I was tired and mentally fagged,” he said. “A day or so in London had
an effect of change.”
She agreed that he looked much better, and remained for a moment or so
scrutinizing him with the faint anxiety of one resolved to be completely
helpful.
He regarded her with a renewed sense of her grace and dignity and
kindliness. She was wearing a grey dress of soft silky material, touched
with blue and covered with what seemed to him very rich and beautiful
lace; her hair flowed back very graciously from her broad brow, and
about her wrist and neck were delicate lines of gold. She seemed
tremendously at home and right just where she was, in that big
hospitable room, cultured but Anglican, without pretensions or
novelties, with a glow of bound books, with the grand piano that Miriam,
his third daughter, was beginning to play so well, with the tea equipage
of shining silver and fine porcelain.
He sat down contentedly in the low armchair beside her.
It wasn't a setting that one would rashly destroy....
And that evening at dinner this sense of his home as a complex of finely
adjusted things not to be rashly disturbed was still more in the mind of
the bishop. At dinner he had all his domesticities about him. It was the
family time, from eight until ten, at which latter hour he would usually
go back from the drawing-room to his study. He surveyed the table.
Eleanor was at home for a few days, looking a little thin and bright
but very keen and happy. She had taken a first in the first part of
the Moral Science Tripos, and she was working hard now for part two.
Clementina was to go back to Newnham with her next September. She
aspired to history. Miriam's bent was musical. She and Phoebe and Daphne
and Clementina were under the care of skilful Mademoiselle Lafarge,
most tactful of Protestant French-women, Protestant and yet not too
Protestant, one of those rare French Protestants in whom a touch of
Bergson and the Pasteur Monod
“scarce suspected, animates the whole.”
And also they had lessons, so high are our modern standards of
education, from Mr. Blent, a brilliant young mathematician in orders,
who sat now next to Lady Ella. Mr. Whippham, the chaplain, was at the
bishop's right hand, ready for any chance of making arrangements to
clear off the small arrears of duty the little holiday in London had
accumulated. The bishop surveyed all these bright young people between
himself and the calm beauty of his wife. He spoke first to one and then
another upon the things that interested them. It rejoiced his heart to
be able to give them education and opportunity, it pleased him to see
them in clothes that he knew were none the less expensive because of
their complete simplicity. Miriam and Mr. Blent wrangled pleasantly
about Debussy, and old Dunk waited as though in orders of some rare and
special sort that qualified him for this service.
All these people, the bishop reflected, counted upon him that this would
go on....
Eleanor was answering some question of her mother's. They were so oddly
alike and so curiously different, and both in their several ways so
fine. Eleanor was dark like his own mother. Perhaps she did a little
lack Lady Ella's fine reserves; she could express more, she could feel
more acutely, she might easily be very unhappy or very happy....
All these people counted on him. It was indeed acutely true, as Likeman
had said, that any sudden breach with his position would be a breach of
faith--so far as they were concerned.
And just then his eye fell upon the epergne, a very old and beautiful
piece of silver, that graced the dinner-table. It had been given him,
together with an episcopal ring, by his curates and choristers at the
Church of the Holy Innocents, when he became bishop of Pinner. When they
gave it him, had any one of them dreamt that some day he might be moved
to strike an ungracious blow at the mother church that had reared them
all?
It was his custom to join the family in the drawing-room after dinner.
To-night he was a little delayed by Whippham, with some trivialities
about next month's confirmations in Pringle and Princhester. When he
came in he found Miriam playing, and playing very beautifully one of
those later sonatas of Beethoven, he could never remember whether it
was Of. 109 or Of. 111, but he knew that he liked it very much; it
was solemn and sombre with phases of indescribable sweetness--while
Clementina, Daphne and Mademoiselle Lafarge went on with their war
knitting and Phoebe and Mr. Blent bent their brows over chess. Eleanor
was reading the evening paper. Lady Ella sat on a high chair by the
coffee things, and he stood in the doorway surveying the peaceful scene
for a moment or so, before he went across the room and sat down on the
couch close to her.
“You look tired,” she whispered softly.
“Worries.”
“That Chasters case?”
“Things developing out of that. I must tell you later.” It would be, he
felt, a good way of breaking the matter to her.
“Is the Chasters case coming on again, Daddy?” asked Eleanor.
He nodded.
“It's a pity,” she said.
“What?
“That he can't be left alone.”
“It's Sir Reginald Phipps. The Church would be much more tolerant if
it wasn't for the House of Laymen. But they--they feel they must do
something.”
He seized the opportunity of the music ceasing to get away from the
subject. “Miriam dear,” he asked, raising his voice; “is that 109 or
111? I can never tell.”
“That is always 111, Daddy,” said Miriam. “It's the other one is 109.”
And then evidently feeling that she had been pert: “Would you like me to
play you 109, Daddy?”
“I should love it, my dear.” And he leant back and prepared to listen in
such a thorough way that Eleanor would have no chance of discussing the
Chasters' heresies. But this was interrupted by the consummation of the
coffee, and Mr. Blent, breaking a long silence with “Mate in three, if
I'm not mistaken,” leapt to his feet to be of service. Eleanor, with the
rough seriousness of youth, would not leave the Chasters case alone.
“But need you take action against Mr. Chasters?” she asked at once.
“It's a very complicated subject, my dear,” he said.
“His arguments?”
“The practical considerations.”
“But what are practical considerations in such a case?”
“That's a post-graduate subject, Norah,” her father said with a smile
and a sigh.
“But,” began Eleanor, gathering fresh forces.
“Daddy is tired,” Lady Ella intervened, patting him on the head.
“Oh, terribly!--of that,” he said, and so escaped Eleanor for the
evening.
But he knew that before very long he would have to tell his wife of
the changes that hung over their lives; it would be shabby to let the
avalanche fall without giving the longest possible warning; and before
they parted that night he took her hands in his and said: “There is much
I have to tell you, dear. Things change, the whole world changes. The
church must not live in a dream....
“No,” she whispered. “I hope you will sleep to-night,” and held up her
grave sweet face to be kissed.
(6)
But he did not sleep perfectly that night.
He did not sleep indeed very badly, but he lay for some time thinking,
thinking not onward but as if he pressed his mind against very strong
barriers that had closed again. His vision of God which had filled the
heavens, had become now gem-like, a minute, hard, clear-cut conviction
in his mind that he had to disentangle himself from the enormous
complications of symbolism and statement and organization and
misunderstanding in the church and achieve again a simple and living
worship of a simple and living God. Likeman had puzzled and silenced
him, only upon reflection to convince him that amidst such intricacies
of explanation the spirit cannot live. Creeds may be symbolical, but
symbols must not prevaricate. A church that can symbolize everything and
anything means nothing.
It followed from this that he ought to leave the church. But there came
the other side of this perplexing situation. His feelings as he lay in
his bed were exactly like those one has in a dream when one wishes to
run or leap or shout and one can achieve no movement, no sound. He could
not conceive how he could possibly leave the church.
His wife became as it were the representative of all that held him
helpless. She and he had never kept secret from one another any plan of
action, any motive, that affected the other. It was clear to him that
any movement towards the disavowal of doctrinal Christianity and the
renunciation of his see must be first discussed with her. He must tell
her before he told the world.
And he could not imagine his telling her except as an incredibly
shattering act.
So he left things from day to day, and went about his episcopal
routines. He preached and delivered addresses in such phrases as he knew
people expected, and wondered profoundly why it was that it should be
impossible for him to discuss theological points with Lady Ella. And one
afternoon he went for a walk with Eleanor along the banks of the Prin,
and found himself, in response to certain openings of hers, talking to
her in almost exactly the same terms as Likeman had used to him.
Then suddenly the problem of this theological eclaircissement was
complicated in an unexpected fashion.
He had just been taking his Every Second Thursday Talk with Diocesan
Men Helpers. He had been trying to be plain and simple upon the needless
narrowness of enthusiastic laymen. He was still in the Bishop Andrews
cap and purple cassock he affected on these occasions; the Men Helpers
loved purple; and he was disentangling himself from two or three
resolute bores--for our loyal laymen can be at times quite superlative
bores--when Miriam came to him.
“Mummy says, 'Come to the drawing-room if you can.' There is a Lady
Sunderbund who seems particularly to want to see you.”
He hesitated for a moment, and then decided that this was a conversation
he ought to control.
He found Lady Sunderbund looking very tall and radiantly beautiful in
a sheathlike dress of bright crimson trimmed with snow-white fur and a
white fur toque. She held out a long white-gloved hand to him and
cried in a tone of comradeship and profound understanding: “I've come,
Bishop!”
“You've come to see me?” he said without any sincerity in his polite
pleasure.
“I've come to P'inchesta to stay!” she cried with a bright triumphant
rising note.
She evidently considered Lady Ella a mere conversational stop-gap, to
be dropped now that the real business could be commenced. She turned
her pretty profile to that lady, and obliged the bishop with a compact
summary of all that had preceded his arrival. “I have been telling
Lady Ella,” she said, “I've taken a house, fu'nitua and all! Hea.
In P'inchesta! I've made up my mind to sit unda you--as they say
in Clapham. I've come 'ight down he' fo' good. I've taken a little
house--oh! a sweet little house that will be all over 'oses next month.
I'm living f'om 'oom to 'oom and having the othas done up. It's in that
little quiet st'eet behind you' ga'den wall. And he' I am!”
“Is it the old doctor's house?” asked Lady Ella.
“Was it an old docta?” cried Lady Sunderbund. “How delightful! And now I
shall be a patient!”
She concentrated upon the bishop.
“Oh, I've been thinking all the time of all the things you told me. Ova
and ova. It's all so wondyful and so--so like a G'ate Daw opening. New
light. As if it was all just beginning.”
She clasped her hands.
The bishop felt that there were a great number of points to this
situation, and that it was extremely difficult to grasp them all
at once. But one that seemed of supreme importance to his whirling
intelligence was that Lady Ella should not know that he had gone to
relieve his soul by talking to Lady Sunderbund in London. It had never
occurred to him at the time that there was any shadow of disloyalty to
Lady Ella in his going to Lady Sunderbund, but now he realized that this
was a thing that would annoy Lady Ella extremely. The conversation had
in the first place to be kept away from that. And in the second place it
had to be kept away from the abrupt exploitation of the new theological
developments.
He felt that something of the general tension would be relieved if they
could all three be got to sit down.
“I've been talking for just upon two hours,” he said to Lady Ella. “It's
good to see the water boiling for tea.”
He put a chair for Lady Sunderbund to the right of Lady Ella, got her
into it by infusing an ecclesiastical insistence into his manner, and
then went and sat upon the music-stool on his wife's left, so as to
establish a screen of tea-things and cakes and so forth against her more
intimate enthusiasm. Meanwhile he began to see his way clearer and to
develop his line.
“Well, Lady Sunderbund,” he said, “I can assure you that I think you
will be no small addition to the church life of Princhester. But I warn
you this is a hard-working and exacting diocese. We shall take your
money, all we can get of it, we shall take your time, we shall work you
hard.”
“Wo'k me hard!” cried Lady Sunderbund with passion.
“We will, we will,” said the bishop in a tone that ignored her
passionate note.
“I am sure Lady Sunderbund will be a great help to us,” said Lady Ella.
“We want brightening. There's a dinginess....”
Lady Sunderbund beamed an acknowledgment. “I shall exact a 'eturn,” she
said. “I don't mind wo'king, but I shall wo'k like the poo' students in
the Middle Ages did, to get my teaching. I've got my own soul to save as
well as help saving othas. Since oua last talk--”
She found the bishop handing her bread and butter. For a time the bishop
fought a delaying action with the tea-things, while he sought eagerly
and vainly in his mind for some good practical topic in which he could
entangle and suppress Lady Sunderbund's enthusiasms. From this she broke
away by turning suddenly to Lady Ella.
“Youa husband's views,” she said, “we'e a 'eal 'evelation to me. It was
like not being blind--all at once.”
Lady Ella was always pleased to hear her husband praised. Her colour
brightened a little. “They seem very ordinary views,” she said modestly.
“You share them?” cried Lady Sunderbund.
“But of course,” said Lady Ella.
“Wondyful!” cried Lady Sunderbund.
“Tell me, Lady Sunderbund,” said the bishop, “are you going to alter the
outer appearance of the old doctor's house?” And found that at last he
had discovered the saving topic.
“Ha'dly at all,” she said. “I shall just have it pointed white and do
the doa--I'm not su' how I shall do the doa. Whetha I shall do the doa
gold or a vehy, vehy 'itch blue.”
For a time she and Lady Ella, to whom these ideas were novel, discussed
the animation of grey and sombre towns by house painting. In such matter
Lady Sunderbund had a Russian mind. “I can't bea' g'ey,” she said. “Not
in my su'oundings, not in my k'eed, nowhe'e.” She turned to the bishop.
“If I had my way I would paint you' cathed'al inside and out.”
“They used to be painted,” said the bishop. “I don't know if you have
seen Ely. There the old painting has been largely restored....”
From that to the end there was no real danger, and at last the bishop
found himself alone with his wife again.
“Remarkable person,” he said tentatively. “I never met any one whose
faults were more visible. I met her at Wimbush House.”
He glanced at his watch.
“What did she mean,” asked Lady Ella abruptly, “by talking of your new
views? And about revelations?”
“She probably misunderstood something I said at the Garstein Fellows',”
he said. “She has rather a leaping mind.”
He turned to the window, looked at his nails, and appeared to be
suddenly reminded of duties elsewhere....
It was chiefly manifest to him that the difficulties in explaining the
changes of his outlook to Lady Ella had now increased enormously.
(7)
A day or so after Lady Sunderbund's arrival in Princhester the bishop
had a letter from Likeman. The old man was manifestly in doubt about the
effect of their recent conversation.
“My dear Scrope,” it began. “I find myself thinking continually about
our interview and the difficulties you laid bare so frankly to me.
We touched upon many things in that talk, and I find myself full of
afterthoughts, and not perfectly sure either quite of what I said or
of what I failed to say. I feel that in many ways I was not perhaps so
clear and convincing as the justice of my case should have made me, and
you are one of my own particular little company, you were one of the
best workers in that band of good workers, your life and your career
are very much my concern. I know you will forgive me if I still mingle
something of the paternal with my fraternal admonitions. I watched you
closely. I have still my old diaries of the St. Matthew's days, and I
have been looking at them to remind me of what you once were. It was my
custom to note my early impressions of all the men who worked with me,
because I have a firm belief in the soundness of first impressions and
the considerable risk one runs of having them obscured by the accidents
and habituations of constant intercourse. I found that quite early in
your days at St. Matthew's I wrote against your name 'enthusiastic, but
a saving delicacy.' After all our life-long friendship I would not write
anything truer. I would say of you to-day, 'This man might have been a
revivalist, if he were not a gentleman.' There is the enthusiast,
there is the revivalist, in you. It seems to me that the stresses and
questions of this great crisis in the world's history have brought it
nearer to the surface than I had ever expected it to come.
“I quite understand and I sympathize with your impatience with
the church at the present time; we present a spectacle of pompous
insignificance hard to bear with. We are doing very little, and we are
giving ourselves preposterous airs. There seems to be an opinion abroad
that in some quasi-automatic way the country is going to collapse after
the war into the arms of the church and the High Tories; a possibility
I don't accept for a moment. Why should it? These forcible-feeble
reactionaries are much more likely to explode a revolution that
will disestablish us. And I quite understand your theological
difficulties--quite. The creeds, if their entire symbolism is for a
moment forgotten, if they are taken as opaque statements of fact, are
inconsistent, incredible. So incredible that no one believes them;
not even the most devout. The utmost they do is to avert their
minds--reverentially. Credo quia impossibile. That is offensive to a
Western mind. I can quite understand the disposition to cry out at such
things, 'This is not the Church of God!'--to run out from it--
“You have some dream, I suspect, of a dramatic dissidence.
“Now, my dear Brother and erstwhile pupil, I ask you not to do this
thing. Wait, I implore you. Give me--and some others, a little time. I
have your promise for three months, but even after that, I ask you
to wait. Let the reform come from within the church. The church is
something more than either its creeds, its clergy, or its laymen. Look
at your cathedral rising out of and dominating Princhester. It stands
not simply for Athanasius; it stands but incidentally for Athanasius; it
stands for all religion. Within that fabric--let me be as frank here
as in our private conversation--doctrine has altered again and again.
To-day two distinct religions worship there side by side; one that fades
and one that grows brighter. There is the old quasi-materialistic belief
of the barbarians, the belief in such things, for example, as that
Christ the physical Son of God descended into hell and stayed there,
seeing the sights I suppose like any tourist and being treated with
diplomatic civilities for three terrestrial days; and on the other
hand there is the truly spiritual belief that you and I share, which
is absolutely intolerant of such grotesque ideas. My argument to you
is that the new faith, the clearer vision, gains ground; that the
only thing that can prevent or delay the church from being altogether
possessed by what you call and I admit is, the true God, is that such
men as yourself, as the light breaks upon you, should be hasty and leave
the church. You see my point of view, do you not? It is not one that
has been assumed for our discussion; it is one I came to long years ago,
that I was already feeling my way to in my St. Matthew's Lenton sermons.
“A word for your private ear. I am working. I cannot tell you fully
because I am not working alone. But there are movements afoot in which
I hope very shortly to be able to ask you to share. That much at least I
may say at this stage. Obscure but very powerful influences are at
work for the liberalizing of the church, for release from many
narrow limitations, for the establishment of a modus vivendi with the
nonconformist and dissentient bodies in Britain and America, and with
the churches of the East. But of that no more now.
“And in conclusion, my dear Scrope, let me insist again upon the eternal
persistence of the essential Religious Fact:”
(Greek Letters Here)
(Rev. i. 18. “Fear not. I am the First and Last thing, the Living
thing.”)
And these promises which, even if we are not to take them as promises in
the exact sense in which, let us say, the payment of five sovereigns
is promised by a five-pound note, are yet assertions of practically
inevitable veracity:
(Greek Letters Here)
(Phil. i. 6. “He who began... will perfect.” Eph. v. 14. “He will
illuminate.”)
The old man had written his Greek tags in shakily resolute capitals. It
was his custom always to quote the Greek Testament in his letters,
never the English version. It is a practice not uncommon with the more
scholarly of our bishops. It is as if some eminent scientific man were
to insist upon writing H2O instead of “water,” and “sodium chloride”
instead of “table salt” in his private correspondence. Or upon hanging
up a stuffed crocodile in his hall to give the place tone. The Bishop
of Princhester construed these brief dicta without serious exertion, he
found them very congenial texts, but there were insuperable difficulties
in the problem why Likeman should suppose they had the slightest weight
upon his side of their discussion. The more he thought the less they
seemed to be on Likeman's side, until at last they began to take on a
complexion entirely opposed to the old man's insidious arguments, until
indeed they began to bear the extraordinary interpretation of a special
message, unwittingly delivered.
(8)
The bishop was still thinking over this communication when he was
interrupted by Lady Ella. She came with a letter in her hand to ask him
whether she might send five-and-twenty pounds to a poor cousin of his,
a teacher in a girls' school, who had been incapacitated from work by
a dislocation of the cartilage of her knee. If she could go to that
unorthodox but successful practitioner, Mr. Barker, the bone-setter, she
was convinced she could be restored to efficiency. But she had no ready
money. The bishop agreed without hesitation. His only doubt was the
certainty of the cure, but upon that point Lady Ella was convinced;
there had been a great experience in the Walshingham family.
“It is pleasant to be able to do things like this,” said Lady Ella,
standing over him when this matter was settled.
“Yes,” the bishop agreed; “it is pleasant to be in a position to do
things like this....”