The Altar Steps Part 47

I've been wondering why the Bishop of Silchester told me to come here. Did he really think that the spectacle of moderation in the moulding was good for me? Did he fancy that I was a young zealot who required putting in his place? Or did he more subtly realize from the account I gave him of Malford that I was in danger of becoming moderate, even luke-warm, even tepid, perhaps even stone-cold? Did he grasp that I must owe something to party as well as mankind, if I was to give up anything worth giving to mankind?

But perhaps in my egoism I am attributing much more to his lordship's paternal interest, a keener glance to his episcopal eye, than I have any right to attribute. Perhaps, after all, he merely saw in me a young man who had missed the advantages of Oxford, etc., and wished out of regard for my future to provide me with the best subst.i.tute.

Anyway, please don't think that I live in a constant state of criticism with a correspondingly dangerous increase of self-esteem.

I really am working hard. I sometimes wonder if the preparation of a "good" theological college is the best preparation for the priesthood. But so long as bishops demand the knowledge they do, it is obvious that this form of preparation will continue. There again though, I daresay if I imagined myself an inspired pianist I should grumble at the amount of scales I was set to practice. I'm not, once I've written down or talked out some of my folly, so very foolish at bottom.

Beyond a slight inclination to flirt with the opinions of most of the great heresiarchs in turn, but only with each one until the next comes along, I'm not having any intellectual adventures. One of the excitements I had imagined beforehand was wrestling with Doubt. But I have no wrestles. Shall I always be spared?

Your ever affectionate,

Mark.

Gradually, as the months went by, either because the students became more mellow in such surroundings or because he himself was achieving a wider tolerance, Mark lost much of his capacity for criticism and learned to recognize in his fellows a simple goodness and sincerity of purpose that almost frightened him when he thought of that great world outside, in the confusion and complexity of which they had pledged themselves to lead souls up to G.o.d. He felt how much they missed by not relying rather upon the Sacraments than upon personal holiness and the upright conduct of the individual. They were obsessed with the need of setting a good example and of being able from the pulpit to direct the wandering lamb to the Good Shepherd. Mark scarcely ever argued about his point of view, because he was sure that perception of what the Sacraments could do for human nature must be given by the grace of G.o.d, and that the most exhaustive process of inductive logic would not avail in the least to convince somebody on whom the fact had not dawned in a swift and comprehensive inspiration of his inner life. Sometimes indeed Mark would defend himself from attack, as when it was suggested that his reliance upon the Sacraments was only another aspect of Justification by Faith Alone, in which the effect of a momentary conversion was prolonged by mechanical aids to worship.

"But I should prefer my idolatry of the outward form to your idolatry of the outward form," he would maintain.

"What possible idolatry can come from the effect upon a congregation of a good sermon?" they protested.

"I don't claim that a preacher might not bring the whole of his congregation to the feet of G.o.d," Mark allowed. "But I must have less faith in human nature than you have, for I cannot believe that any preacher could exercise a permanent effect without the Sacraments. You all know the person who says that the sound of an organ gives him holy thoughts, makes him feel good, as the cant phrase goes? I've no doubt that people who sit under famous preachers get the same kind of sensation Sunday after Sunday. But sooner or later they will be worshipping the outward form--that is to say the words that issue from the preacher's mouth and produce those internal moral rumblings in the pit of the soul which other listeners get from the diapason. Have your organs, have your sermons, have your matins and evensong; but don't put them on the same level as the Blessed Sacrament. The value of that is absolute, and I refuse to consider It from the point of view of pragmatic philosophy."

All would protest that Mark was putting a wrong interpretation upon their argument; what they desired to avoid was the subst.i.tution of the Blessed Sacrament for the Person of the Divine Saviour.

"But I believe," Mark argued, "I believe profoundly with the whole of my intellectual, moral, and emotional self that the Blessed Sacrament _is_ our Divine Saviour. I maintain that only through the Blessed Sacrament can we hope to form within our own minds the slightest idea of the Person of the Divine Saviour. In the pulpit I would undertake to present fifty human characters as moving as our Lord; but when I am at the Altar I shall actually give Him to those who will take Him. I shall know that I am doing as much for the lowest savage as for the finest product of civilization. All are equal on the altar steps. Elsewhere man remains divided into cla.s.ses. You may rent the best pew from which to see and hear the preacher; but you cannot rent a stone on which to kneel at your Communion."

Mark rarely indulged in these outbursts. On him too Silchester exerted a mellowing influence, and he gained from his sojourn there much of what he might have carried away from Oxford; he recaptured the charm of that June day when in the shade of the oak-tree he had watched a College cricket match, and conversed with Hathorne the Siltonian who wished to be a priest, but who was killed in the Alps soon after Mark met him.

The bells chimed from early morning until sombre eve; ancient clocks sounded the hour with strikes rusty from long service of time; rooks and white fantail-pigeons spoke with the slow voice of creatures that are lazily content with the slumbrous present and undismayed by the sleepy morrow. In Summer the black-robed dignitaries and white choristers, themselves not more than larger rooks and fantails, pa.s.sed slowly across the green Close to their dutiful worship. In Winter they battled with the wind like the birds in the sky. In Autumn there was a sound of leaves along the alleys and in the Gothic entries. In Spring there were daisies in the Close, and daffodils nodding among the tombs, and on the grey wall of the Archdeacon's garden a flaming peac.o.c.k's tail of j.a.panese quince.

Sometimes Mark was overwhelmed by the tyranny of the past in Silchester; sometimes it seemed that nothing was worth while except at the end of living to have one's effigy in stone upon the walls of the Cathedral, and to rest there for ever with viewless eyes and cold prayerful hands, oneself in harmony at last with all that had gone before.

"Yet this peace is the peace of G.o.d," he told himself. "And I who am privileged for a little time to share in it must carry away with me enough to make a treasure of peace in my own heart, so that I can give from that treasure to those who have never known peace."

_The peace of G.o.d, which pa.s.seth all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of G.o.d, and of his Son Jesus Christ our Lord; and the blessing of G.o.d Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, be amongst you and remain with you always._

When Mark heard these words sound from the altar far away in the golden glooms of the Cathedral, it seemed to him that the building bowed like a mighty couchant beast and fell asleep in the security of G.o.d's presence.

After Mark had been a year at the Theological College he received a letter from the Bishop:

High Thorpe Castle.

Sept. 21, '04.

Dear Lidderdale,

I have heard from Canon Havelock that he considers you are ready to be ordained at Advent, having satisfactorily pa.s.sed the Cambridge Preliminary Theological Examination. If therefore you succeed in pa.s.sing my examination early in November, I am willing to ordain you on December 18. It will be necessary of course for you to obtain a t.i.tle, and I have just heard from Mr. Shuter, the Vicar of St. Luke's, Galton, that he is anxious to make arrangements for a curate. You had better make an appointment, and if I hear favourably from him I will licence you for his church. It has always been the rule in this diocese that non-graduate candidates for Holy Orders should spend at least two years over their theological studies, but I am not disposed to enforce this rule in your case.

Yours very truly,

Aylmer Silton.

This expression of fatherly interest made Mark anxious to show his appreciation of it, and whatever he had thought of St. Luke's, Galton, or of its inc.u.mbent he would have done his best to secure the t.i.tle merely to please the Bishop. Moreover, his money was coming to an end, and another year at the Theological College would have compelled him to borrow from Mr. Ogilvie, a step which he was most anxious to avoid. He found that Galton, which he remembered from the days when he had sent Cyril Pomeroy there to be met by Dorward, was a small county town of some eight or nine thousand inhabitants and that St. Luke's was a new church which had originally been a chapel of ease to the parish church, but which had acquired with the growth of a poor population on the outskirts of the town an independent parochial status of its own. The Reverend Arnold Shuter, who was the first vicar, was at first glance just a nervous bearded man, though Mark soon discovered that he possessed a great deal of spiritual force. He was a widower and lived in the care of a housekeeper who regarded religion as the curse of good cooking. Latterly he had suffered from acute neurasthenia, and three or four of his wealthier parishioners--they were only relatively wealthy--had clubbed together to guarantee the stipend of a curate. Mark was to live at the Vicarage, a detached villa, with pointed windows and a front door like a lychgate, which gave the impression of having been built with what material was left over from building the church.

"You may think that there is not much to do in Galton," said Mr. Shuter when he and Mark were sitting in his study after a round of the parish.

"I hope I didn't suggest that," Mark said quickly.

The Vicar tugged nervously at his beard and blinked at his prospective curate from pale blue eyes.

"You seem so full of life and energy," he went on, half to himself, as though he were wondering if the company of this tall, bright-eyed, hatchet-faced young man might not prove too bracing for his worn-out nerves.

"Indeed I'm glad I do strike you that way," Mark laughed. "After dreaming at Silchester I'd begun to wonder if I hadn't grown rather too much into a type of that sedate and sleepy city."

"But there is plenty of work," Mr. Shuter insisted. "We have the hop-pickers at the end of the summer, and I've tried to run a mission for them. Out in the hop-gardens, you know. And then there's Oaktown."

"Oaktown?" Mark echoed.

"Yes. A queer collection of people who have settled on a derelict farm that was bought up and sold in small plots by a land-speculator. They'll give plenty of scope for your activity. By the way, I hope you're not too extreme. We have to go very slowly here. I manage an early Eucharist every Sunday and Thursday, and of course on Saints' days; but the attendance is not good. We have vestments during the week, but not at the mid-day Celebration."

Mark had not intended to attach himself to what he considered a too indefinite Catholicism; but inasmuch as the Bishop had found him this job he made up his mind to give to it at any rate his deacon's year and his first year as a priest.

"I've been brought up in the vanguard of the Movement," he admitted.

"But you can rely on me, sir, to be loyal to your point of view, even if I disagreed with it. I can't pretend to believe much in moderation; but I should always be your curate before anything else, and I hope very much indeed that you will offer me the t.i.tle."

"You'll find me dull company," Mr. Shuter sighed. "My health has gone all to pieces this last year."

"I shall have a good deal of reading to do for my priest's examination,"

Mark reminded him. "I shall try not to bother you."

The result of Mark's visit to Galton was that amongst the various testimonials and papers he forwarded two months later to the Bishop's Registrar was the following:

To the Right Reverend Aylmer, Lord Bishop of Silchester.

I, Arnold Shuter, Vicar of St. Luke's, Galton, in the County of Southampton, and your Lordship's Diocese of Silchester, do hereby nominate Mark Lidderdale, to perform the office of a.s.sistant Curate in my Church of St. Luke aforesaid; and do promise to allow him the yearly stipend of 120 to be paid by equal quarterly instalments; And I do hereby state to your Lordship that the said Mark Lidderdale intends to reside in the said Parish in my Vicarage; and that the said Mark Lidderdale does not intend to serve any other Parish as Inc.u.mbent or Curate.

Witness my hand this fourteenth day of November; in the year of our Lord, 1904.

Arnold Shuter,

St. Luke's Vicarage,

Galton,

Hants.

I, Arnold Shuter, Inc.u.mbent of St. Luke's, Galton, in the County of Southampton, bona fide undertake to pay Mark Lidderdale, of the Rectory, Wych-on-the-Wold, in the County of Oxford, the annual sum of one hundred and twenty pounds as a stipend for his services as Curate, and I, Mark Lidderdale, bona fide intend to receive the whole of the said stipend. And each of us, Arnold Shuter and Mark Lidderdale, declare that no abatement is to be made out of the said stipend in respect of rent or consideration for the use of the Glebe House; and that I, Arnold Shuter, undertake to pay the same, and I, Mark Lidderdale, intend to receive the same, without any deduction or abatement whatsoever.

Arnold Shuter,

Mark Lidderdale.