“Who rowing hard against the stream
Saw distant gates of Eden gleam,
And did not dream it was a dream.”
ALFRED TENNYSON.
“The child is really ill,” said Katherine, “I don’t think there is any
doubt of it, what with the heat, the fainting fit you mention, and a
wetting afterwards, it is not to be wondered at.”
“Oh! I must keep her! I must look after her!” cried Daphne. “Aunt
Emma——” she stopped abruptly.
“You can leave her out,” said Katherine, “she is out so often.” The
child lay shivering and burning on Daphne’s bed. The two girls talked in
low tones by the window.
“I cannot face Uncle Wilfred,” said Daphne, “it is my carelessness!”
“Whatever it is,” said Katherine, “the child is ill—we must have a
doctor.” She looked at Daphne. “There is one in the house,” she added.
“Don’t—don’t let him see her!” cried Daphne.
“Why not?” asked Katherine sharply.
“She has seen him already,” whispered Daphne, “I meant to have told
you——”
“Oh, no! you didn’t!” interrupted Katherine.
“He frightened her—in the wood—send for some one else! Go and ask
Bert,” Daphne pleaded, “don’t tell anyone!” Katherine hesitated, feeling
unaccountably shy. Then she grew angry with herself and hurried out of
the room.
Bert Russell was in the drawing-room giving the twins their tea. They
were explaining to him, with little bursts of laughter, how sandwiches
were made.
“I want to speak to you,” said Katherine bluntly. There was a shocked
pause. Lady Cheston raised her eyebrows at Vera—who shrugged her
shoulders as an equivalent answer, and a shifting of responsibility.
“Why, that’s good,” said Bert Russell, springing to his feet. “But I
only receive lectures in private, and I can tell by your tone it’s going
to be a lecture, Miss Linton. Take me away where the rest won’t hear.”
Katherine answered nothing. She led the way into the conservatory. The
rain and the wind had blown her hair about (it was generally too tidy)
and her embarrassment was making the colour in her cheeks a delight to
the eyes. Bert Russell took it all in appreciatively. Then his light
manner completely forsook him—he saw that she was upset at the
consequence of her abruptness in the drawing-room, and that she did not
quite know what to say.
“I guess you want me?” he said with a genial alertness.
“Dora is ill,” said Katherine, “fever and a cough—and some nervous
shock, I think—— She ought to see a doctor,” she added in a gentle
tone, “and Mr. Fordington ought not to come here till then.”
“I’ll just drop round and see him on the way from the doctor’s,” Bert
Russell said.
“How do you know where the doctor lives?” Katherine asked.
“Well, I guess I could have found out even if I hadn’t happened to pass
his house this morning,” smiled Bert. “Have you any other things you
want me to tell you, Miss Linton?”
Katherine turned on her heel. “No!” she said, “I’m telling you this for
Daphne.”
“That’s real good in you,” said Bert Russell. Katherine went out of the
conservatory. It is a pity, but she certainly did—bang the door after
her. The American whistled and put his hands in his pockets. When he
stopped whistling he began to smile, but he got very quickly to the
doctor’s.
He apologized for calling at The Vicarage unintroduced, but he explained
to Mr. Fordington that, as an American, and he was afraid, of no fixed
denomination, he was very much interested in the English Church, and
very curious about it.
The Vicar gave him a warm welcome, he was preparing to go for Dora, but
he re-seated himself in his study. “What is it you want to know about
the Church?” he said.
The American smiled at his adroit evasion of the adjective. “Well!” he
said, “if we had cathedrals, I guess they wouldn’t be quite such lonely
buildings. Your Church doesn’t seem much of a social success either, it
doesn’t bring people together, and even your parsons fight each other
half the time, and their flock the rest. It doesn’t seem to me, you
teach the same things. Here, I’m told that if I don’t make my
confession, I shall get cast off, and right in the next parish, the
parson says, Auricular Confession is a kind of Devil’s Diary. It doesn’t
seem to hang together. Then look at what you pay your ministers! An
office boy would want to get more in our country or he’d chuck his job!
Either they’re worthy of their hire and oughtn’t to be given
pocket-money or they should be kicked out altogether. That’s the way we
seem to think it is, but I want to know your view of it from the inside.
When I say things to what you call the laity, I’m told, ‘Oh, that’s
broad church!’ or ‘They don’t do those things in our parish,’ and I
can’t seem to pin them down.”
Mr. Fordington listened with grave attention. “Do you know what are the
two hardest things to find in the world?” he asked, offering the
American a pipe and lighting his own. Bert Russell shook his head. “A
consistent Christian,” said the Vicar, “and an unprejudiced observer.
Keep that in your mind as the key-note to what I shall try to tell you.
The Church,” the Vicar went on, “is in some ways influenced by the
English character. You know perhaps from your stay in the country, that
the owners of the oldest and most famous of our great country seats live
much of the year in town, and have shown an inclination to let their
houses to rich Americans. I do not say this explains the cathedrals,
only when you know that centuries ago they were there—and that coming
centuries will still find them—you become less momentarily anxious to
fill them, and yet you would never find them unoccupied even if they are
rarely filled. I must confess that we lack a social system in connection
with our Church, though I believe that more and more the spirit of unity
is creeping in among us. We have far more social gatherings with the
classes mixed, than in the old days would have seemed possible. You must
remember that the Church is not the only power that finds class
prejudice difficult to cope with, but I believe I am right in thinking
that it is the only power that will be enabled to ultimately cope with
it. I think that you are in great danger in your country of forgetting
that the Church is primarily spiritual. She should never compromise with
the world, nor seek to make her doctrines popular. What is truly
Christian can never be popular.”
“But why not, sir?” questioned the young man. “Surely you wouldn’t shut
the world out?”
“It is the world that shuts itself out,” said the Vicar sadly. “‘The
natural man receiveth not the things of the spirit of God.’ Let him give
up the world to find the Church. It is not the place of the Church to
give up anything to attract the world. Her Master and Guide said indeed
to His Disciples, ‘Ye are the salt of the earth,’ but he warned them at
the same time not to lose their savour, and a bid for popularity is the
destruction of the spiritual essence. ‘Ye _cannot_ serve God and
Mammon,’ and still less can we serve God by making religion easy to
Mammon. The curse of modern times is, to my mind, the making things
easy. We shudder too much at acquaintance with grief, and we would
rather not hear about a man of sorrows. We will gladly cry Hosanna after
a miracle, and when we have the crowd with us, but if He turns commerce
out of our temples and strips from us the external and the material, the
barriers we have put up of comfort, and of custom, and calls upon us to
deny our _selves_, to take up a cross, and to follow—quite a poor
person, it becomes almost a necessity to cry crucify Him! Or perhaps in
more modern language, ‘Ignore Him! give us back the law! The
satisfaction in being as other men are! Let the external do our religion
for us! The Christ asks too much!’ Alas!” said the Vicar, gazing sadly
out of his study window, “we are willing to give so little! We have not
‘resisted unto death,’ we have not even perhaps resisted unto
inconvenience. And when anybody wakes up to the claims of the Cross—we
say, ‘he goes too far.’”
Bert Russell became conscious that he was talking to a really good man.
A thing that had rarely happened to him. “But the Church?” he said
gently, “and its inconsistencies, surely if it showed a more Christ-like
spirit to the world——” he hesitated. The pain in the Vicar’s face made
him pause. “If we were better Christians there would be _more_
Christians?” he questioned.
“Yes—yes, that is our great Rebuke, yet you must not blame the Church
for the frailties of her members. She is inviolate! If we but obeyed her
precepts we should have ‘shown forth Christ—and Him crucified.’” The
Vicar’s head was bowed for a moment as if the reproach had overwhelmed
him with a personal shame, and Bert Russell watching him, wondered why
the innocent should always know Remorse, so much more heavily, and with
so much greater intensity than those who had caused the evil.
The Vicar raised his head. “It is our life that is at fault,” he said
almost with passion, “never our Faith! The Apostles’ creed is so very
simple, so clear, and so, I venture to believe, truly primitive, that I
may not be wrong in holding it up as our mirror of truth, our home of
dogma, and our real consistency! I take it that all who use these words
in their most obvious meaning, belong to the Church of God, and I hold
that all who cannot honestly believe and take these words as their
Standard of Christian Faith have no room in the Church. Beyond the
simple creed, there are many deep and important questions on which great
and good men will always differ, but I trust that these differences,
grave as they seem, will not exclude the believers in them from the same
Heaven. I venture to think that in another life they will understand
each other a great deal better, and when we understand people, it is but
a short step towards understanding their views and assimilating the
portion of Truth that is almost always enfolded in them. The Church and
Truth are alike in this—in one question you can challenge either—but
it would take many answers to barely outline the spirit of each, and the
answers would seem self-contradictory and inconsistent, for you cannot
see all around either of them. In the long run you will realize that the
Church is large enough to be inclusive even of extremes and strong
enough to be tolerant of them.”
“Thank you,” said the American.
Mr. Fordington smiled. “I fear I have wearied you,” he said, “and I have
given you but an inadequate answer. The longer you live the more
difficult you will find it to put things into Black and White, the
prevailing shade is grey. We are mixed, you know, very mixed!”
“Why, yes!” said Bert, “we can’t even be angry without laughing up our
sleeve, and when we love people, we would rather deprive them of their
other loves.”
“Perhaps you will walk back with me?” said Mr. Fordington. “I must fetch
my little girl.”
“Miss Daphne asked me to tell you, sir,” said the American, taking out
an old volume from the Vicar’s shelf, “that as your daughter was a
little tired with her walk, she would keep her over night and bring her
back to-morrow herself.”
“That was thoughtful of Daphne,” said the Vicar, “very thoughtful, and
most kind of Lady Middleton to keep her.” He looked rather anxious. “She
is so easily tired!” he explained.
“Oh! she’ll out-grow it,” said the American. “I guess she thinks too
much.”
The Vicar nodded. “I am afraid,” he said, “only children so often do,
and there is nothing that is so tiring physically.”
“Why, no!” said the American, “one can’t keep up one’s strength when one
has got to follow one’s mind. It goes too far.” They shook hands and
Bert Russell borrowed the book. The Vicar saw by his handling of it that
it was safe. He told his wife about Dora.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Fordington, “I shall try cod-liver oil.”
The American walked back slowly. “He didn’t argue about the pay of the
clergy,” he said to himself smiling a little. “I guess he thought it
didn’t matter. ‘Poor and unpopular’—it might have come out of the New
Testament, but it won’t go down with the world. Somehow one isn’t
surprised that Prophets get stoned.”