“The more I muse there inne the mistier it semeth,
And the depper I devyne the derker me it thinketh.”
WILLIAM LANGLAND.
As I look back I am amazed at the amount of talking that we all did. The
memory of the winter is a mist of “words, words, words.”
Long discussions of spiritual questions were new to me. I had come from
a world where one took God and one’s duty for granted, and endeavoured
to act. Here we wavered so long over uncertainties in belief that we had
little energy left for work, and we talked of conflicting causes until
the world was turned into a snarl of tangled theories.
In my bewilderment I found myself asking if it were worth while to try
to understand.
My pretty Janet was wasting her days in attempting to find a
satisfactory way of thinking about life; while the Altruist, who alone
among us was content with his knowledge of things seen and unseen, had
succeeded only, I sometimes thought, in thrusting between himself and
his fellow-man a theory of how to treat him, and between himself and God
the shadow of an explanation of Him.
Could one, after all, take life as simply as the Lad took it, waiving
abstract inquiry while one attended to the matter in hand? It seemed as
if he, a denier of all knowledge of God, had come very near to Him in
that ceaseless, unquestioning activity.
I began to doubt even the value of our ideas about the poor.
Their deep satisfaction in existing contrasted strongly with our
restless questioning of the uses of existence. Perhaps we, who were so
filled with pity for the victims of life, had been better for a share in
its suffering; for it might be that the wisdom denied to thought lay
written only in experience.
Thus I decided that an intellectual grasp of things in general is
impossible, then, woman-like, turned and did a little reasoning of my
own.
Were there not enough strong young souls like the Lad’s to break through
the woven spells of theory and wake the world from sleep?