THE CURATE'S RESOLVE.
The next day was Sunday.
Twelve months had not yet elapsed since the small events with which
my narrative opened. The change which had passed, not merely upon
the opinions, but in the heart and mind and very being of the
curate, had not then begun to appear even to himself, although its
roots were not only deep in him but deep beyond him, even in the
source of him; and now he was in a state of mind, a state of being,
rather, of whose nature at that time he had not, and could not have
had, the faintest fore-feeling, the most shadowy conception. It had
been a season of great trouble, but the gain had been infinitely
greater; for now were the bonds of the finite broken, he had burst
the shell of the mortal, and was of those over whom the second death
hath no power. The agony of the second birth was past, and he was a
child again--only a child, he knew, but a child of the kingdom; and
the world, and all that God cared about in it, was his, as no
miser's gold could ever belong to its hoarder, while the created
universe, yea and the uncreated also whence it sprang, lay open to
him in the boundless free-giving of the original Thought. "All
things are yours, and ye are Christ's, and Christ is God's:" he
understood the words even as he who said them understood them, and
as the wise of this world never will understand them until first
they become fools that they may be wise.
At the same time a great sorrow threatened him from the no less
mysterious region of his relations to humanity; but if that region
and its most inexplicable cares were beyond the rule of the Life
that dwelt in him, then was that Life no true God, and the whole
thing was false; for he loved Helen with a love that was no
invention or creation of his own, and if not his, then whose?
Certainly not of one who, when it threatened to overwhelm him, was
unable to uphold him under it! This thing also belonged to the God
of his being. A poor God must he be for men or women who did not
care about the awful things involved in the relation between them!
Therefore even in his worst anxieties about Helen,--I do not mean in
his worst seasons of despair at the thought of never gaining her
love--he had never yet indeed consciously regarded the winning of
her as a possibility--but at those times when he most plainly saw
her the submissive disciple of George Bascombe, and the two seemed
to his fancy to be straying away together "into a wide field, full
of dark mountains;" when he saw her, so capable of the noblest,
submitting her mind to the entrance of the poorest, meanest,
shabbiest theories of life, and taking for her guide one who could
lead her to no conscious well-being, or make provision for
sustainment when the time of suffering and anxiety should come, or
the time of health and strength be over when yet she must live on;
when he saw her adopting a system of things whose influence would
shrivel up instead of developing her faculties, crush her
imagination with such a mountain-weight as was never piled above
Titan, and dwarf the whole divine woman within her to the size and
condition of an Aztec--even then was he able to reason with himself:
"She belongs to God, not to me; and God loves her better than ever I
could love her. If she should set out with her blind guide, it will
be but a first day's journey she will go--through marshy places and
dry sands, across the far breadth of which, lo! the blue mountains
that shelter the high vales of sweetness and peace." And with this
he not only tried to comfort himself, but succeeded--I do not say to
contentment, but to quiet. Contentment, which, whatever its
immediate shape, to be contentment at all, must be the will of God,
lay beyond. Alas that men cannot believe there is such a thing as
"that good and acceptable and perfect will of God!" To those that do
believe it, it is the rejoicing of a conscious deliverance.
And now this Sunday, Wingfold entered the pulpit prepared at last to
utter his resolve. Happily nothing had been done to introduce the
confusing element of another will. The bishop had heard nothing of
the matter, and if anything had reached the rector, he had not
spoken. Not one of the congregation, not even Mrs. Ramshorn, had
hinted to him that he ought to resign. It had been left altogether
with himself. And now he would tell them the decision to which the
thought he had taken had conducted him. I will give a portion of his
sermon--enough to show us how he showed the congregation the state
of his mind in reference to the grand question, and the position he
took in relation to his hearers.
"It is time, my hearers," he said, "because it is now possible, to
bring to a close that uncertainty with regard to the continuance of
our relation to each other, which I was, in the spring-time of the
year, compelled by mental circumstance to occasion. I then forced
myself, for very dread of the honesty of an all-knowing God, to
break through every convention of the church and the pulpit, and
speak to you of my most private affairs. I told you that I was sure
of not one of those things concerning which it is taken for granted
that a clergyman must be satisfied; but that I would not at once
yield my office, lest in that act I should seem to declare unbelief
of many a thing which even then I desired to find true. In leaving
me undisturbed either by complaint, expostulation, or proffered
instruction, you, my hearers, have granted me the leisure of which I
stood in need. Meantime I have endeavoured to show you the best I
saw, while yet I dared not say I was sure of anything. I have thus
kept you, those at least who cared to follow my path, acquainted
with my mental history. And now I come to tell you the practical
result at which I have arrived.
"But when I say that I will not forsake my curacy, still less my
right and duty to teach whatever I seem to know, I must not therein
convey the impression that I have attained that conviction and
assurance the discovery of the absence of which was the cause of the
whole uncertain proceeding. All I now say is, that in the story of
Jesus I have beheld such grandeur--to me apparently altogether
beyond the reach of human invention, such a radiation of divine
loveliness and truth, such hope for man, soaring miles above every
possible pitfall of Fate; and have at the same time, from the
endeavour to obey the word recorded as his, experienced such a
conscious enlargement of mental faculty, such a deepening of moral
strength, such an enhancement of ideal, such an increase of faith,
hope, and charity towards all men, that I now declare with the
consent of my whole man--I cast in my lot with the servants of the
Crucified; I am content even to share their delusion, if delusion it
be, for it is the truth of the God of men to me; I will stand or
fall with the story of my Lord; I will take my chance--I speak not
in irreverence but in honesty--my chance of failure or success in
regard to whatever may follow in this life or the life to come, if
there be a life to come--on the words and will of the Lord Jesus
Christ, whom if, impressed as I am with the truth of his nature, the
absolute devotion of his life, and the essential might of his being,
I yet obey not, I shall not only deserve to perish, but in that very
refusal draw ruin upon my head. Before God I say it--I would rather
be crucified with that man, so it might be as a disciple and not as
a thief that creeps, intrudes, or climbs into the fold, than I would
reign with him over such a kingdom of grandeur as would have
satisfied the imagination and love-ambition of his mother. On such
grounds as these I hope I am justified in declaring myself a
disciple of the Son of Man, and in devoting my life and the renewed
energy and enlarged, yea infinite hope which he has given me, to his
brothers and sisters of my race, that if possible I may gain some to
be partakers of the blessedness of my hope. Henceforth I am, not IN
HOLY ORDERS, I reject the phrase, but UNDER holy orders, even the
orders of Christ Jesus, which is the law of liberty, the law whose
obedience alone can set a man free from in-burrowing slavery.
"And if any man yet say that, because of my lack of absolute
assurance, I have no right to the sacred post,--Let him, I answer,
who has been assailed by such doubts as mine, and from the citadel
of his faith sees no more one lingering shadow of a foe--let him
cast at me the first stone! Vain challenge! for such a one will
never cast a stone at man or woman. But let not him whose belief is
but the absence of doubt, who has never loved enough that which he
thinks he believes to have felt a single fear lest it should not be
true--let not that man, I say, cast at me pebble from the brook, or
cloven rock from the mount of the law, for either will fall hurtless
at my feet. Friends, I have for the last time spoken of myself in
this place. Ye have borne with me in my trials, and I thank you.
Those who have not only borne but suffered, and do now rejoice with
me, I thank tenfold. I have done--
"Save for one word to the Christians of this congregation:
"The waves of infidelity are coming in with a strong wind and a
flowing tide. Who is to blame? God it cannot be, and for
unbelievers, they are as they were. It is the Christians who are to
blame. I do not mean those who are called Christians, but those who
call and count themselves Christians. I tell you, and I speak to
each one of whom it is true, that you hold and present such a
withered, starved, miserable, death's-head idea of Christianity;
that you are yourselves such poverty-stricken believers, if
believers you are at all; that the notion you present to the world
as your ideal, is so commonplace, so false to the grand, gracious,
mighty-hearted Jesus--that YOU are the cause why the truth hangs its
head in patience, and rides not forth on the white horse, conquering
and to conquer. You dull its lustre in the eyes of men; you deform
its fair proportions; you represent not that which it is, but that
which it is not, yet call yourselves by its name; you are not the
salt of the earth, but a salt that has lost its savour, for ye seek
all things else first, and to that seeking the kingdom of God and
his righteousness shall never be added. Until you repent and believe
afresh, believe in a nobler Christ, namely the Christ revealed by
himself, and not the muffled form of something vaguely human and
certainly not all divine, which the false interpretations of men
have substituted for him, you will be, as, I repeat, you are, the
main reason why faith is so scanty in the earth, and the enemy comes
in like a flood. For the sake of the progress of the truth, and that
into nobler minds than yours, it were better you joined the ranks of
the enemy, and declared what I fear with many of you is the fact,
that you believe not at all. But whether in some sense you believe
or not, the fact remains, that, while you are not of those
Christians who obey the word of the master, DOING the things he says
to them, you are of those Christians, if you WILL be called by the
name, to whom he will say, I never knew you: go forth into the outer
darkness. Then at least will the church be rid of you, and the
honest doubter will have room to breathe the divine air of the
presence of Jesus.
"But oh what unspeakable bliss of heart and soul and mind and sense
remains for him who like St. Paul is crucified with Christ, who
lives no more from his own self, but is inspired and informed and
possessed with the same faith towards the Father in which Jesus
lived and wrought the will of the Father! If the words attributed to
Jesus are indeed the words of him whom Jesus declared himself, then
truly is the fate of mankind a glorious one,--and that, first and
last, because men have a God supremely grand, all-perfect in
God-head; for that is, and that alone can be, the absolute bliss of
the created."