Mrs. Cardew met Catharine two or three times accidentally within the next
fortnight. There were Dorcas meetings and meetings of all kinds at which
the young women at the Limes were expected to assist. One afternoon,
after tea, the room being hot, two or three of the company had gone out
into the garden to work. Catharine and Mrs. Cardew sat by themselves at
one corner, where the ground rose a little, and a seat had been placed
under a large ash tree. From that point St. Mary's spire was visible,
about half a mile away in the west, rising boldly, confidently, one might
say, into the sky, as if it dared to claim that it too, although on earth
and finite, could match itself against the infinite heaven above. On
this particular evening the spire was specially obvious and attractive,
for it divided the sunset clouds, standing out black against the long,
narrow interspaces of tender green which lay between. It was one of
those evenings which invite confidence, when people cannot help drawing
nearer than usual to one another.
"Is it not beautiful, Miss Furze?"
"Beautiful; the spire makes it so lovely."
"I wonder why."
"I am sure I do not know; but it is so."
"Catharine--you will not mind my calling you by your Christian name--you
can explain it if you like."
Catharine smiled. "It is very kind of you, Mrs. Cardew, to call me
Catharine, but I have no explanation. I could not give one to save my
life, unless it is the contrast."
"You cannot think how I wish I had the power of saying what I think and
feel. I cannot express myself properly--so my husband says."
"I sympathise with you. I am so foolish at times. Mr. Cardew, I should
think, never felt the difficulty."
"No, and he makes so much of it. He says I do not properly enjoy a thing
if I cannot in some measure describe my enjoyment--articulate it, to use
his own words."
He had inwardly taunted her, even when she was suffering, and had said to
himself that her trouble must be insignificant, for there was no colour
nor vivacity in her description of it. She did not properly even
understand his own shortcomings. He could pardon her criticism, so he
imagined, if she could be pungent. Mistaken mortal! it was her patient
heroism which made her dumb to him about her sorrows and his faults. A
very limited vocabulary is all that is necessary on such topics.
"I am just the same."
"Oh, no, you are not; Mr. Cardew says you are not."
"Mr. Cardew?--he has not noticed anything in me, I am certain, and if he
has, why nobody could be less able to talk to him than I am."
Catharine knew nothing of what had passed between husband and wife--one
scene amongst many--and consequently could not understand the peculiar
earnestness, somewhat unusual with her, with which Mrs. Cardew dwelt upon
this subject. We lead our lives apart in close company, with private
hopes and fears unknown to anybody but ourselves, and when we go abroad
we often appear inexplicable and absurd, simply because our friends have
not the proper key.
"Do you think, Catharine--you know that, though I am older than you and
married, I feel we are friends." Here Mrs. Cardew took Catharine's hand
in hers. "Do you think I could learn how to talk? What I mean is, could
I be taught how to say what is appropriate? I _do_ feel something when
Mr. Cardew reads Milton to me. It is only the words I want--words such
as you have."
"Oh, Mrs. Cardew!"--Catharine came closer to her, and Mrs. Cardew's arm
crept round her waist--"I tell you again I have not so many words as you
suppose. I believe, though, that if people take pains they can find
them."
"Couldn't you help me?"
"I? Oh, no! Mr. Cardew could. I never heard anybody express himself as
he does."
"Mr. Cardew is a minister, and perhaps I should find it easier with you.
Suppose I bring the 'Paradise Lost' out into the garden when we next
meet, and I will read, and you shall help me to comment on it."
Catharine's heart went out towards her, and it was agreed that "Paradise
Lost" should be brought, and that Mrs. Cardew would endeavour to make
herself "articulate" thereon. The party broke up, and Catharine's
reflections were not of the simplest order. Rather let us say her
emotions, for her heart was busier than her head. Mrs. Cardew had deeply
touched her. She never could stand unmoved the eyes of her dog when the
poor beast came and laid her nose on her lap and looked up at her, and
nobody could have persuaded her of the truth of Mr. Cardew's doctrine
that the reason why a dog can only bark is that his thoughts are nothing
but barks. Mrs. Cardew's appeal, therefore, was of a kind to stir her
sympathy; but--had she not heard that Mr. Cardew had observed and praised
her? It was nothing--ridiculously nothing; it was his duty to praise and
blame the pupils at the Limes; he had complimented Miss Toogood on her
Bible history the other day, and on her satisfactory account of the
scheme of redemption. He had done it publicly, and he had pointed out
the failings of the other pupils, she, Catharine herself, being included.
He had reminded her that she had not taken into account the one vital
point, that as we are the Almighty Maker's creatures, His absolutely, we
have no ground of complaint against Him in whatever way He may be pleased
to make us. Nevertheless, just those two or three words Mrs. Cardew
reported were like yeast, and her whole brain was in a ferment.
The Milton was produced next week. Since Catharine had been at the Limes
she had read some of it, incited by Mr. Cardew, for he was an enthusiast
for Milton. Mrs. Cardew was a bad reader; she had no emphasis, no light
and shade, and she missed altogether the rhythm of the verse. To
Catharine, on the other hand, knowing nothing of metre, the proper
cadence came easily. They finished the first six hundred lines of the
first book.
"You have not said anything, Catharine."
"No; but what have you to say?"
"It is very fine; but there I stick; I cannot say any more; I want to say
more; that is where I always am. I can _not_ understand why I cannot go
on as some people do; I just stop there with 'very fine.'"
"Cannot you pick out some passage which particularly struck you?"
"That is very true, is it not, that the mind can make a heaven of hell
and a hell of heaven?"
"Most true; but did you not notice the description of the music?"
Catharine was fond of music, but only as an expression of her own
feelings. For music as music--for a melody of Mozart, for example--that
is to say, for pure art, which is simply beauty, superior to our
personality, she did not care. She liked Handel, and there was a choral
society in Eastthorpe which occasionally performed the "Messiah."
"Don't you remember what Mr. Cardew said about it--it was remarkable that
Milton should have given to music the power to chase doubt from the mind,
doubt generally, and yet music is not argument?"
"Oh, yes, I recollect, but I do not quite comprehend him, and I told him
I did not see how music could make me sure of a thing if there was not a
reason for it."
"What did he say then?"
"Nothing."
Mr. Cardew called that evening to take his wife home. He was told that
she was in the garden with Miss Furze, and thither he at once went.
"Milton!" he exclaimed. "What are you doing with Milton here?"
"Miss Furze and I were reading the first book of the 'Paradise Lost'
together."
Mrs. Cardew looked at her husband inquiringly, and with a timid smile,
hoping he would show himself pleased. His brow, however, slightly
wrinkled itself with displeasure. He had told her to read Milton, had
said, "Fancy an Englishwoman with any pretensions to education not
knowing Milton!" and now, when she was doing exactly what she was
directed to do, he was vexed. He was annoyed to find he was precisely
obeyed, and perhaps would have been in a better temper if he had been
contradicted and resisted. Mrs. Cardew turned her head away. What was
she to do with him? Every one of her efforts to find the door had
failed.
"What has struck you particularly in that book, Miss Furze?"
Catharine was about to say something, but she caught sight of Mrs.
Cardew, and was arrested. At last she spoke, but what she said was not
what she at first had intended to say.
"Mrs. Cardew and I were discussing the lines about doubt and music, and
we cannot see what Milton means. We cannot see how music can make us
sure of a thing if there is not good reason for it."
Catharine used the first person plural with the best intention, but her
object was defeated. The rector recognised the words at once.
"Yes, yes," he replied, impatiently; "but, Miss Furze, you know better
than that. Milton does not mean doubt whether an arithmetical
proposition is true. I question if he means theological doubt. Doubt in
that passage is nearer despondency. It is despondency taking an
intellectual form and clothing itself with doubts which no reasoning will
overcome, which re-shape themselves the moment they are refuted." He
stopped for a moment. "Don't you think so, Miss Furze?"
She forgot Mrs. Cardew, and looked straight into Mr. Cardew's face bent
earnestly upon her.
"I understand."
Mrs. Cardew had lifted her eyes from the ground, on which they had been
fixed. "I think," said she, "we had better be going."
"We can go out by the door at the end of the garden, if you will go and
bid the Misses Ponsonby good-bye."
Mrs. Cardew lingered a moment.
"I have bidden them good-bye," said her husband.
She went, and Miss Ponsonby detained her for a few minutes to arrange the
details of an important quarterly meeting of the Dorcas Society for next
week.
"What do you think of the subject of the 'Paradise Lost.' Miss Furze?"
"I hardly know; it seems so far away."
"Ah! that is just the point. I thought so once, but not now. Milton
could not content himself with a common theme; nothing less than God and
the man--mortal feud between Him and Satan would suffice. Milton is
representative to me of what I may call the heroic attitude towards
existence. Mark, too, the importance of man in the book. Men and women
are not mere bubbles--here for a moment and then gone--but they are
actually important, all-important, I may even say, to the Maker of the
universe and his great enemy. In this Milton follows Christianity, but
what stress he lays on the point! Our temptation, notwithstanding our
religion, so often is to doubt our own value. All appearances tend to
make us doubt it. Don't you think so?"
Catharine looked earnestly at the excited preacher, but said nothing.
"I do not mean our own personal worth. The temptation is to doubt
whether it is of the smallest consequence whether we are or are not, and
whether our being here is not an accident. Oh, Miss Furze, to think that
your existence and mine are part of the Divine eternal plan, and that
without us it would be wrecked! Then there is Satan. Milton has gone
beyond the Bible, beyond what is authorised, in giving such a distinct,
powerful, and prominent individuality to Satan. You will remember that
in the great celestial battle--
"'Long time in even scale
The battle hung.'
But what a wonderful conception that is of the great antagonist of God!
It comes out even more strongly in the 'Paradise Regained.' Is it not a
relief to think that the evil thought in you or me is not altogether
yours and mine, but is foreign; that it is an incident in the war of
wars, an attack on one of the soldiers of the Most High?"
Mr. Cardew paused.
"Have you never written anything which I could read?"
"Scarcely anything. I wrote some time ago a little story of a few pages,
but it was never published. I will lend you the manuscript, but you will
please remember that it is anonymous, and that I do not wish the
authorship revealed. I believe most people would not think any the
better of me, certainly as a clergyman, if they knew it was mine."
"That is very kind of you."
Catharine felt the distinction, the confidence. The sweetest homage
which can be offered us is to be entrusted with something which others
would misinterpret.
"I should like, Miss Furze, to have some further talk with you about
Milton, but I do not quite see" (musingly) "how it is to be managed."
"Could you not tell us something about him when you and Mrs. Cardew next
have tea with us at the Limes?"
"I do not think so. I meant with you, yourself. It is not easy for me
to express myself clearly in company--at any rate, I should not hear your
difficulties. You seem to possess a sympathy which is unusual, and I
should be glad to know more of your mind."
"When Mrs. Cardew comes here, could you not fetch her, and could we not
sit out here together?"
He hesitated. They were walking slowly over the grass towards the gate,
and were just beginning to turn off to the right by the side path between
the laurels. At that point, the lawn being levelled and raised, there
were two stone steps. In descending them Catharine slipped, and he
caught her arm. She did not fall, but he did not altogether release her
for at least some seconds.
"Mrs. Cardew has no liking for poetry."
Catharine was silent.
"It is quite a new thing to me, Miss Furze, to find anybody in Abchurch
who cares anything for that which is most interesting to me."
"But, Mr. Cardew, I am sure I have not shown any particular capacity, and
I am very ignorant, for I have read very little."
"It does not need much to reveal what is in a person. It would be a
great help to me if we could read a book together. This
self-imprisonment day after day and self-imposed reticence is very
unwholesome. I would give much to have a pupil or a friend whose world
is my world."
To Catharine it seemed as if she was being sucked in by a whirlpool and
carried she knew not whither. They had reached the gate, and he had
taken her hand in his to bid her good-bye. She felt a distinct and
convulsive increase of pressure, and she felt also that she returned it.
Suddenly something passed through her brain swift as the flash of the
swiftest blazing meteor: she dropped his hand, and, turning instantly,
went back to the house, retreating behind the thick bank of evergreens.
"Where is Miss Furze?" said Mrs. Cardew, who came down the path a minute
or two afterwards.
"I do not know: I suppose she is indoors."
"A canting, hypocritical parson, type not uncommon, described over and
over again in novels, and thoroughly familiar to theatre-goers." Such,
no doubt, will be the summary verdict passed upon Mr. Cardew. The truth
is, however, that he did not cant, and was not a hypocrite. One or two
observations here may perhaps be pertinent. The accusation of hypocrisy,
if we mean lofty assertion, and occasional and even conspicuous moral
failure, may be brought against some of the greatest figures in history.
But because David sinned with Bathsheba, and even murdered her husband,
we need not discredit the sincerity of the Psalms. The man was
inconsistent, it is true, inconsistent exactly because there was so much
in him that was great, for which let us be thankful. Let us take notice
too, of what lies side by sidle quietly in our own souls. God help us if
all that is good in us is to be invalidated by the presence of the most
contradictory evil.
Secondly it is a fact that vitality means passion. It does not mean
avarice or any of the poor, miserable vices. If David had been a wealthy
and most pious Jerusalem shopkeeper, who subscribed largely to missionary
societies to the Philistines, but who paid the poor girls in his employ
only two shekels a week, refusing them ass-hire when they had to take
their work three parts of the way to Bethlehem, and turning them loose at
a minute's warning, he certainly would not have been selected to be part
author of the Bible, even supposing his courtship and married life to
have been most exemplary and orthodox. We will, however, postpone any
further remarks upon Mr. Cardew: a little later we shall hear something
about his early history, which may perhaps explain and partly exculpate
him. As to Catharine, she escaped. It is vexatious that a complicated
process in her should be represented by a single act which was transacted
in a second. It would have been much more intelligible if it could have
written itself in a dramatic conversation extending over two or three
pages, but, as the event happened, so it must be recorded. The
antagonistic and fiercely combatant forces did _so_ issue in that deed,
and the present historian has no intention to attempt an analysis. One
thing is clear to him, that the quick stride up the garden path was urged
not by any single, easily predominating impulse which had been enabled to
annihilate all others. Do not those of us, who have been mercifully
prevented from damming ourselves before the whole world, who have
succeeded and triumphed--do we not know, know as we know hardly anything
else, that our success and our triumph were due to superiority in
strength by just a grain, no more, of our better self over the raging
rebellion beneath it? It was just a tremble of the tongue of the
balance: it might have gone this way, or it might have gone the other,
but by God's grace it was this way settled--God's grace, as surely, in
some form of words, everybody must acknowledge it to have been. When she
reached her bedroom she sat down with her head on her hands, rose, walked
about, looked out of window in the hope that she might see him, thought
of Mrs. Cardew; forgot her; dwelt on what she had passed through till she
almost actually felt the pressure of his hand; cursed herself that she
had turned away from him; prayed for strength to resist temptation, and
longed for one more chance of yielding to it.
The next morning a little parcel was left for Miss Furze. It contained
the promised story, which is here presented to my readers:--
"Did he Believe?
"Charmides was born in Greece, but about the year 300 A.D. was living in
Rome. He had come there, like many of his countrymen, to pursue his
calling as sculptor in the imperial city, and he cherished a great love
for his art. He knew too well that it was not the art of the earlier
days of Athens, and that he could never catch the spirit of that golden
time, but he loved it none the less. He was also a philosopher in his
way. He had read not only the literature of Greece, but that of his
adopted land, and he was especially familiar with Lucretius and his pupil
Virgil. His intellectual existence, however, was not particularly happy.
Rome was a pleasant city; his occupation was one in which he delighted;
the thrill of a newly noticed Lucretian idea or of a tender touch in
Virgil were better to him than any sensual pleasure, but his dealings
with his favourite authors ended in his own personal emotion, and it was
sad to think that the Hermes on which he had spent himself to such a
degree should become a mere decoration to a Roman nobleman's villa,
valued only because it cost so much, and that nobody who looked at it
would ever really care for it. Once, however, he was rewarded. He had
finished a Pallas Athene just as the sun went down. He was excited, and
after a light sleep he rose very early and went into the studio with the
dawn. There stood the statue, severe, grand in the morning twilight, and
if there was one thing in the world clear to him, it was that what he saw
was no inanimate mineral mass, but something more. It was no mere
mineral mass with an outline added. Part of the mind which formed the
world was in it, actually in it, and it came to Charmides that intellect,
thought, had their own rights, that they were as much a fact as the
stone, and that what he had done was simply to realise a Divine idea
which was immortal, no matter what might become of its embodiment. The
weight of the material world lifted, an avenue of escape seemed to open
itself to him from so much that oppressed and deadened him, and he felt
like a man in an amphitheatre of overhanging mountains, who should espy
in a far-off corner some scarcely perceptible track, and on nearer
inspection a break in the walled precipices, a promise, or at least a
hint, of a passage from imprisonment to the open plain. It was nothing
more than he had learned in his Plato, but the truth was made real to
him, and he clung to it.
"Rome at the end of the third century was one of the most licentious of
cities. It was invaded by all the vices of Greece, and the counterpoise
of the Greek virtues was absent. The reasoning powers assisted rather
than prevented the degradation of morals, for they dissected and
represented as nothing all the motives which had hitherto kept men
upright. The healthy and uncorrupted instinct left to itself would have
been a sufficient restraint, but sophistry argued and said, _What is
there in it_?--and so the very strength and prerogative of man hired
itself out to perform the office of making him worse than a beast.
Charmides was unmarried, and it is not to be denied that though his life
as a whole was pure, he had yielded to temptation, not without loathing
himself afterwards. He did not feel conscious of any transgression of a
moral law, for no such law was recognised, but he detested himself
because he had been drawn into close contact with a miserable wretch
simply in order to satisfy a passion, and in the touch of mercenary
obscenity there was something horrible to him. It was bitter to him to
reflect that, notwithstanding his aversion from it, notwithstanding his
philosophy and art, he had been equally powerless with the uttermost fool
of a young aristocrat to resist the attraction of the commonest of
snares. What were his books and fine pretensions worth if they could not
protect him in such ordinary danger? Thus it came to pass that after a
fall, when he went back to his work, it was so unreal to him, such a
mockery, that days often elapsed before he could do anything. It was a
mere toy, a dilettante dissipation, the embroidery of corruption. Oh,
for a lawgiver, for a time of restraint, for the time of Regulus and the
republic! Then, said Charmides to himself, my work would have some
value, for heroic obedience would he behind it. He was right, for the
love of the beautiful cannot long exist where there is moral pollution.
The love of the beautiful itself is moral--that is to say, what we love
in it is virtue. A perfect form or a delicate colour are the expression
of something which is destroyed in us by subjugation to the baser desires
or meanness, and he who has been unjust to man or woman misses the true
interpretation of a cloud or falling wave.
"One night Charmides was walking through the lowest part of the city, and
he heard from a mere hovel the sound of a hymn. He knew what it was--that
it was the secret celebration of a religious rite by the despised sect of
the Jews and their wretched proselytes. The Jews were especially hateful
to him and to all cultured people in Rome. They were typical of all the
qualities which culture abhorred. No Jew had ever produced anything
lovely in any department whatever--no picture, statue, melody, nor poem.
Their literature was also barbaric: there was no consecutiveness in it,
no reasoning, no recognition in fact of the reason. It was a mere mass
of legends without the exquisite charm and spiritual intention of those
of Greece, of bloody stories and obscure disconnected prophecies by
shepherds and peasants. Their god was a horror, a boor upon a mountain,
wielding thunder and lightning. Aphrodite was perhaps not all that could
be wished, but she was divine compared with the savage Jehovah. It was
true that a recent Jewish sect professed better things and recognised as
their teacher a young malefactor who was executed when Tiberius was
emperor. So far, however, as could be made out he was a poor
crack-brained demagogue, who dreamed of restoring a native kingdom in
Palestine. What made the Jews especially contemptible to culture was
that they were retrograde. They strove to put back the clock. There is
only one path, so culture affirmed, and that is the path opened by
Aristotle, the path of rational logical progress from what we already
know to something not now known, but which can be known. If our present
state is imperfect, it is because we do not know enough. Every other
road, excepting this, the king's highway, heads into a bog. These Jews
actually believed in miracles; they had no science, and thought they
could regenerate the world by hocus-pocus. They ought to be suppressed
by law, and, if necessary, put to death, for they bred discontent.
"Nevertheless, Charmides decided to enter the hovel. He was in idle
mood, and he was curious to see for himself what the Jews were like. He
pushed open the door, and when he went in he found himself in a low, mean
room very dimly lighted and crowded with an odd medley of Greeks, Romans,
tolerably well-dressed persons, and slaves. The poor and the shaves were
by far the most numerous. The atmosphere was stifling, and Charmides sat
as near the door as possible. Next to him was a slave-girl, not
beautiful, but with a peculiar expression on her face very rare in Rome
at that time. The Roman women were, many of them, lovely, but their
loveliness was cold--the loveliness of indifference. The somewhat common
features of this slave, on the contrary, were lighted up with eagerness:
to her there was evidently something in life of consequence--nay, of
immense importance. There were few of her betters in Rome to whom
anything was of importance. A hymn at that moment was being sung, the
words of which Charmides could not catch, and when it was finished an
elderly man rose and read what seemed the strangest jargon about
justification and sin. The very terms used were in fact unintelligible.
The extracts were from a letter addressed to the sect in Rome by one
Paul, a disciple of that Jesus who was crucified. After the reading was
over came an address, very wild in tone and gesture, and equally
unintelligible, and then a prayer or invocation, partly to their god, but
also, as it seemed, to this Jesus, who evidently ranked as a daemon, or
perhaps as Divine, Charmides was quite unaffected. The whole thing
appeared perfect nonsense, not worth investigation, but he could not help
wondering what there was in it which could so excite that girl, whom he
could hardly conclude to be a fool, and whose earnestness was a surprise
to him. He thought no more about the affair until some days afterwards
when he happened to visit a friend. Just as he was departing he met this
very slave in the porch. He involuntarily stopped, and she whispered to
him.
"'You will not betray us?'
"'I? Certainly not.'
"'I will lend you this. Read it and return it to me.' So saying, she
vanished.
"Charmides, when he reached home, took out the manuscript. He recognised
it as a copy of the letter which he had partly heard at the meeting. He
was somewhat astonished to find that it was written by a man of learning,
who was evidently familiar with classic authors, but surely never was
scholarship pressed into such a service! The confusion of metaphor, the
suddenness of transition, the illogical muddles were bad enough, but the
chief obstacle to comprehension was that the author's whole scope and
purpose, the whole circle of his ideas, were outside Charmides
altogether. He was not attracted any more than he was at the meeting,
but he was a little piqued because Paul had certainly been well educated,
and he determined to attend the meeting again. This time he was late,
and did not arrive till it was nearly at an end. His friend was there,
and again he sat down next to her. When they went out it was dark, and
he walked by her side.
"'Have you read the letter?'
"'Yes, but I do not understand it, and I have brought it back.'
"'May Christ the Lord open your eyes!'
"'Who is this Christ whom you worship?'
"'The Son of God, He who was crucified; the man Jesus; He who took upon
Himself flesh to redeem us from our sins; in whom by faith we are
justified and have eternal life.'
"It was all pure Hebrew to him, save the phrase 'Son of God,' which
sounded intelligible.
"'You are Greek,' he said, for he recognised her accent although she
spoke Latin.
"'Yes, from Corinth: my name is Demariste;' and she explained to him
that, although she was a slave, she was partly employed in teaching Greek
to the children of her mistress.
"'If you are Greek and well brought up, you must know that I cannot
comprehend a word of what you have spoken. It is Judaism.'
"'To me, too,' she replied, speaking Greek to him, 'it was
incomprehensible, but God by the light which lighteth every man hath
brought me into His marvellous light, and now this that I have told you
is exceedingly clear--nay, clearer than anything which men say they see.'
"'Tell me how it happened.'
"'When I first came to Rome I had a master who desired to make me his
concubine, and I hated him; but what strength had I?--and I was tempted
to yield. My parents were dead; I had no friends who cared for me--what
did it matter! I had read in my books of the dignity of the soul, but
that was a poor weapon with which to fight, and, moreover, sin was not
exceeding sinful to me. By God's grace I was brought amongst these
Christians, and I was convinced of sin. I saw that it was not only
transgression against myself, but against the eternal decrees of the Most
High, against those decrees which, as one of our own poets still dear to
me has said--
"'[Greek text].' {1}
"'I saw that all art, all learning, everything which men value, were as
straw compared with God's commandments, and that it would be well to
destroy all our temples, and statues, and all that we have which is
beautiful, if we could thereby establish the kingdom of God within us,
and so become heirs of the life everlasting. Oh, my friend, my friend in
Christ, I hope, believe me, Rome will perish, and we shall all perish,
not because we are ignorant, but because we have not obeyed His word. But
how was I to obey it? Then I heard told the life of Christ the Lord: how
God the Father in His infinite pity sent His Son into the world; how He
lived amongst his and died a shameful death upon the cross that we might
not die: and all His strength passed into me and became mine through
faith, and I was saved; saved for this life; saved eternally; justified
through Him; worthy to wait for Him and meet Him at His coming, for He
shall come, and I shall be for ever with the Lord.'
"Demariste stood straight upright as she spoke, and the light in her
transfigured her countenance as the sun penetrating a grey mass of vapour
informs it with such an intensity of brightness that the eye can scarcely
endure it. It was a totally new experience to Charmides, an entire
novelty in Rome. He did not venture to look in her face directly, for he
felt that there was nothing in him equal to its sublime, solemn pleading.
"'I do not know anything of your Jesus,' he said at last, timidly; 'upon
what do you rest His claims?'
"'Read His life. I will lend it to you; you will want no other evidence
for Him. And was He not raised from the dead to reign for ever at His
Father's right hand? No, keep the letter for a little while, and perhaps
you will understand it better when you know upon what it is based.'
"A day or two afterwards the manuscript was sent to him secretly with
many precautions. He was not smitten suddenly by it. The Palestinian
tale, although he confessed it was much more to his mind than Paul, was
still _rude_. It was once more the rudeness which was repellent, and
which almost outweighed the pathos of many of the episodes and the
undeniable grandeur of the trial and death. Moreover, it was full of
superstition and supernaturalism, which he could not abide. He was in
his studio after his first perusal, and he turned to an Apollo which he
was carving. The god looked at him with such overpowering, balanced
sanity, such a contrast to Christian incoherence and the rhapsodies of
the letter to the Romans, that he was half ashamed of himself for
meddling with it. He opened his Lucretius. Here was order and sequence;
he knew where he was; he was at home. Was all this nought, were the
accumulated labour and thought of centuries to be set aside and trampled
on by the crude, frantic inspiration of clowns? The girl's face,
however, recurred to him; he could not get rid of it, and he opened the
biography again. He stumbled upon what now stand as our twenty-third and
twenty-fourth chapters of Matthew, containing the denunciation of the
Pharisees, and the prophecy of the coming of the Son of Man. He was
amazed at the new turn which was given to life, at the reasons assigned
for the curses which were dealt to these Jewish doctors. They were
damned for their lack of mercy, judgment, faith, for their extortion,
excess, and because they were full of hypocrisy and iniquity. They were
fools and blind, but not through defects which would have condemned them
in Greece and Rome at that day, but through failings of which Greece and
Rome took small account. Charmides pondered and pondered, and saw that
this Jew had given a new centre, a new pivot to society. This, then, was
the meaning of the world as nearly as it could be said to have a single
meaning. Read by the light of the twenty-third chapter, the
twenty-fourth chapter was magnificent. 'For as the lightning cometh out
of the east, and shineth even unto the west, so shall the coming of the
Son of Man be.' Was it not intelligible that He to whom right and wrong
were so diverse, to whom their diversity was the one fact for man, should
believe that Heaven would proclaim and enforce it? He read more and
more, until at last the key was given to him to unlock even that strange
mystery, that being justified by faith we have peace with God through our
Lord Jesus Christ. Still it was idle for him to suppose that he could
ever call himself a Christian in the sense in which those poor creatures
whom he had seen were Christians. Their fantastic delusions, their
expectation that any day the sky might open and their Saviour appear in
the body, were impossible to him; nor could he share their confidence
that once for all their religion alone was capable of regenerating the
world. He could not, it is true, avoid the reflection that the point was
not whether the Christians were absurd, nor was it even the point whether
Christianity was not partly absurd. The real point was whether there was
not more certainty in it than was to be found in anything at that time
current in the world. Here, in what Paul called faith, was a new spring
of action, a new reason for the blessed life, and, what was of more
consequence, a new force by which men might be enabled to persist in it.
He could not, we say, avoid this reflection; he could not help feeling
that he was bound not to wait for that which was in complete conformity
with an ideal, but to enlist under the flag which was carried by those
who in the main fought for the right, and that it was treason to cavil
and stand aloof because the great issue was not presented in perfect
purity. Nevertheless, he was not decided, and could not quite decide. If
he could have connected Christianity with his own philosophy; if it had
been the outcome, the fulfilment of Plato, his duty would have been so
much simpler; it was the complete rupture--so it seemed to him--which was
the difficulty. His heart at times leaped up to join this band of
determined, unhesitating soldiers; to be one in an army; to have a cause;
to have a banner waving over his head; to have done with isolation,
aloofness, speculation ending in nothing, and dreams which profited
nobody: but even in those moments when he was nearest to a confession of
discipleship he was restrained by faintness and doubt. If he were to
enrol himself as a convert his conversion would be due not to an
irresistible impulse, but to a theory, to a calculation, one might almost
say, that such and such was the proper course to take.
"He went again to the meeting, and he went again and again. One night,
as he came home, he walked as he had walked before, with Demariste. She
was going as far as his door for the manuscript which he had now copied
for his own use. As they went along a man met them who raised a lantern,
and directed it full in their faces.
"'The light of death,' said Demariste.
"'Who is he?'
"'I know him well; he is a spy. I have often seen him at the door of our
assembly.'
"'Do you fear death?'
"'I? Has not Christ died?'
"Charmides hath fallen in love with this slave, but it was love so
different from any love which he had felt before for a woman, that it
ought to have had some other name. It was a love of the soul, of that
which was immortal, of God in her; it was a love too, of no mere
temporary phenomenon, but of reality outlasting death into eternity.
There was thus a significance, there was a grandeur in it wanting to any
earthly love. It was the new love with which men were henceforth to love
women--the love of Dante for Beatrice.
"She waited at the door while he went inside to fetch in the parchment.
He brought it out and gave it to her, and as he stood opposite to her he
looked in her face, and her eyes were not averted. He caught her hand,
but she drew back.
"''Tis but for a day or two,' she said; 'a week will see the end.'
"'A week!' he cried! 'Oh, my Demariste, rather a week with thee than an
age with anything less than thee!'
"'You will have to die too. Dare you die? The spirit may be willing,
but the flesh may be weak.'
"'Death? Yes, death, if only I am yours!'
"'Nay, nay, my beloved, not for me, but for the Lord Jesus!'
"He bent nearer to her; his head was on her neck, and his arms were round
her body. Oh, son and daughter of Time! oh, son and daughter of
Eternity!
"He had hardly returned to his house, when he was interrupted by his
friend Callippus, just a little the worse for wine.
"'What new thing is this?' said Callippus. 'I hear you have consorted
with the Jews, and have been seen at their assembly.'
"'True, my friend.'
"True! By Jupiter! what is the meaning of it? You do not mean to say
that you are bitten by the mad dog?'
"'I believe.'
"'Oh, by God, that it should have come to this! Are you not ashamed to
look him in the face?' pointing to the Apollo statue. 'Ah! the old
prophecy is once more verified!--
"'Tutemet a nobis iam quovis tempore vatum
terriloquis victus dictis desciscere quaeres.' {2}
But I must be prudent. I saw somebody watching your house on the other
side of the street. If I am caught they will think I belong to the
accursed sect too. Farewell."
"The morning came, and about an hour after Charmides had risen two
soldiers presented themselves. He was hurried away, brought before the
judges, and examined. Some little pity was felt for him by two or three
members of the court, as he was well known in Rome, and one of them
condescended to argue with him and to ask him how he could become
ensnared by a brutal superstition which affirmed, so it was said, the
existence of devil-possessed pigs, and offered sacrifices to them.
"'You,' said he, 'an artist and philosopher--if it be true that you are a
pervert, you deserve a heavier punishment than the scum whom we have
hitherto convicted.'
"'For Christ and His Cross!' cried Charmides.
"'Take him away!'
"The next day Charmides and Demariste met outside the prison gates. They
were chained together in mockery, the seducer, Demariste, and the
seduced, Charmides. They were marched through the streets of Rome, the
crowd jeering them and thronging after them to enjoy the sport of their
torments and death. Charmides saw the eyes of Demariste raised
heavenward and her lips moving in prayer.
"'He has heard me,' she said, 'and you will endure.'
"He pressed her hand, and replied, with unshaken voice, 'Fear not.'
"They came to the place of execution, but before the final stroke they
were cruelly tortured. Charmides bore his sufferings in silence, but in
her extremest agony the face of Demariste was lighted with rapture.
"'Look, look, my beloved, there, there!' trying to lift her mangled arm,
'Christ the Lord! One moment more and we are for ever with Him.'
"Charmides could just raise his head, and saw nothing but Demariste. He
was able to turn himself towards her and move her hand to his lips, the
second, only the second and the last kiss.
"So they died. Charmides was never considered a martyr by the Church.
The circumstances were doubtful, and it was not altogether clear that he
deserved the celestial crown."