The Case of Richard Meynell Part 65

"Three days!" She looked her remonstrance.

"You know the trial begins next week?"

Yes, she knew, but had understood that the pleadings were all ready, and that a North-Western train would take him to London in six hours.

"I have to preach at St. Hilda's, Westminster," he said, with a shrug, and a look of distaste.

Mary asked questions, and discovered that the sermon would no doubt be made the opportunity for something like a demonstration; and that he shrank from the thought of it.

She perceived, indeed, a certain general flagging of the merely combative forces in him, not without dismay. Such moments of recoil are natural to such men--half saints, half organizers. The immediate effect of her perception of it was to call out something heroic and pa.s.sionate in herself. She was very sweet, and very young; there were eighteen years between them; and yet in these very first hours of their engagement, he felt her to be not only rest, but inspiration; not only sympathy, but strength.

When they neared the little ivy-covered house, on their return home, Mary broke from him. Her step on the gravel was heard by Catharine. She came quickly to the door and stood awaiting them. Mary ran forward and threw herself into the tender arms that drew her into the shadows of the pa.s.sage.

"Oh, mother! mother!--he does love you!" she said, with a rush of tears.

If Catharine's eyes also were dim, she only answered with a tender mockery.

"Don't pretend that was all he said to you in these two hours!"

And still holding Mary, she turned, smiling, to Meynell, and let him claim from her, for the first time, a son's greeting.

For three blissful days, did Meynell pitch his tent in Long Whindale.

Though the weather broke, and the familiar rain shrouded the fells, he and Mary walked incessantly among them, exploring those first hours of love, when every tone and touch is charged, for lovers, with the whole meaning of the world. And in the evenings he sat between the two women in the little cottage room, reading aloud Catharine's favourite poets; or in the familiar talk, now gay now grave, of their new intimacy, disclosing himself ever more fully, and rooting himself ever more firmly in their hearts. His sudden alarm as to Catharine's health pa.s.sed away, and Mary's new terror with it. Scarcely a word was said of the troubles ahead. But it was understood that Mary would be in London to hear him preach at St.

Hilda's.

On the last day of Meynell's visit, Catharine, greatly to her surprise, received a letter from Hester Fox-Wilton.

It contained a breathless account of an evening spent in seeing Oedipus Rex played by Mounet Sully at the Comedie Francaise. In this half-sophisticated girl, the famous performance, traditional now through two generations of playgoers, had clearly produced an emotion whereof the expression in her letter greatly disquieted Catharine Elsmere. She felt too--a little grimly--the humour of its address to herself.

"Tell me how to answer it, please," she said, handing it to Meynell with a twitching lip. "It is a language I don't understand! And why did they take her to such a play?"

Meynell shared her disquiet. For the Greek conception of a remorseless fate, as it is forever shaped and embodied in the tale of Oedipus, had led Hester apparently to a good deal of subsequent browsing in the literature--the magazine articles at any rate--of French determinism; and she rattled through some of her discoveries in this reckless letter:

"You talked to me so nicely, dear Mrs. Elsmere, that last evening at Upcote. I know you want me--you want everybody--'to be good!'

"But 'being good' has nothing to do with us.

"How can it?--such creatures, such puppets as we are!

"Poor wretch, Oedipus! He never meant any one any harm--did he?--and yet--you see!

"'_Apollo, friends, Apollo it was, that brought all these my woes, my sore, sore woes!--to pa.s.s_.'

"Dear Mrs. Elsmere!--you can't think what a good doctrine it is after all--how it steadies one! What chance have we against these blundering G.o.ds?

"Nothing one can do makes any difference. It is, really very consoling if you come to think of it; and it's no sort of good being angry with Apollo!"

"Part nonsense, part bravado," said Catharine, raising clear eyes, with half a smile in them, to Meynell. "But it makes one anxious."

His puckered brow showed his a.s.sent.

"As soon as the trial is over--within a fortnight certainly--I shall run over to see them."

Meynell and Mary travelled to town together, and Mary was duly deposited for a few days with some Kensington cousins.

On the night of their arrival--a Sat.u.r.day--Meynell, not without some hesitation, made an appearance at the Reformers' Club, which had been recently organized as a London centre for the Movement, in Albemarle Street.

It was no sooner known that he was in the building than a flutter ran through the well-filled rooms. That very morning an article in the _Modernist_ signed R. M. had sounded a note of war, so free, lofty, and determined, that men were proud to be on Meynell's side in such a battle.

On the following Tuesday the Arches Trial was to begin. Meynell was to defend himself; and the attention of the country would be fixed upon the duel between him and the great orthodox counsel, Sir Wilfrid Marsh.

Men gathered quickly round him. Most of the six clergy who, with him, had launched the first Modernist Manifesto, were present, in expectation of the sermon on the morrow, and the trial of the following week. Chesham and Darwen, his co-defendants in the Arches suit, with whom he had been in constant correspondence throughout the winter, came to discuss a few last points and understandings; Treherne, the dear old scholar in whose house they had met to draw up the Manifesto, under the shadow of the Cathedral, pressed his hand and launched a Latin quotation; Rollin, fat, untidy and talkative as ever, could not refrain from "interviewing"

Meynell, for a weekly paper; while Derrick, the Socialist and poet, talked to him in a low voice and with eyes that blazed, of certain "brotherhoods" that had been spreading the Modernist faith, and Modernist Sacraments among the slums of a great midland town.

And in the voices that spoke to him, and the eyes that met his, Meynell could not but realize a wide and warm sympathy, an eagerness to make amends--sometimes a half confessed compunction for a pa.s.sing doubt.

He stood among them, haggard and worn, but steeped in a content and grat.i.tude that had more sources than they knew. And under the kindling of their faith and their affection, his own hesitations pa.s.sed away; his will steeled itself to the tasks before him.

The following day will be long remembered in the annals of the Movement.

The famous church, crowded in every part with an audience representing science, literature, politics, the best of English thought and English social endeavour, was but the outward and visible sign of things inward and spiritual.

"_Can these dry bones live_?"

As Meynell gave out the text, there were many who remembered the picture of Oxford hanging in Newman's study at Edgbaston, and those same words written below it.

"_Can these dry bones live_?"--So Newman had asked in despair, of his beloved University, and of English religion, in the early years after he had deserted Anglicanism for Rome. And now, more than half a century afterward, the leader of a later religious movement asked the same question on the eve of another contest which would either regenerate or destroy the English Church. The impulse given by Newman and the Tractarians had spent itself, though not without enormous and permanent results within the life of the nation; and now it was the turn of that Liberal reaction and recoil which had effaced Newman's work in Oxford, yet had been itself wandering for years without a spiritual home. During those years it had found its way through innumerable channels of the national life as a fertilizing and redeeming force. It had transformed education, law, science and history. Yet its own soul had hungered. And now, thanks to that inner necessity which governs the spiritual progress of men, the great Liberal Movement, enriched with a thousand conquests, was sweeping back into the spiritual field; demanding its just share in the National Church; and laying its treasures at the feet of a Christ, unveiled, illuminated, by its own labour, by the concentrated and pa.s.sionate effort of a century of human intelligence.

Starting from this conception--the full citizen-right within the Church of both Liberal and High Churchman--the first part of Meynell's sermon became a moving appeal for religious freedom; freedom of development and "variation," within organized Christianity itself. Simpler Creeds, modernized tests, alternative forms, a "unity of the spirit in the bond of peace,"--with these ideas the Modernist preacher built up the vision of a Reformed Church, co-extensive with the nation, resting on a democratic government, yet tenderly jealous of its ancient ceremonies, so long as each man might interpret them "as he was able," and they were no longer made a source of tyranny and exclusion.

Then, from the orthodox opponent in whose eyes the Modernist faith was a mere beggarly remnant, Meynell turned to the sceptic for whom it was only a modified superst.i.tion. An eloquent prelude, dealing with the preconceptions, the modern philosophy and psychology which lie at the root of religious thought to-day--and the rest of the sermon flowed on into what all Christian eloquence must ultimately be, the simple "preaching of Christ."

Amid the hush of the crowded church Meynell preached the Christ of our day--just as Paul of Tarsus preached the Christ of a h.e.l.lenized Judaism to the earliest converts; as St. Francis, in the Umbrian hills preached the Lord of Poverty and Love; as the Methodist preachers among the villages of the eighteenth century preached the democratic individualism of the New Testament to the English nascent democracy.

In each case the form of the preaching depended on the knowledge and the thought-world of the preacher. So with Meynell's Christ.

Not the phantom of a h.e.l.lenistic metaphysic; not the Redeemer and Judge of a misunderstood Judaism; not the mere ethical prophet of a German professorial theology; but the King of a spiritual kingdom, receiving allegiance, and asking love, from the free consciences of men; repeating forever in the ears of those in whom a Divine influence has prepared the way, the melting and constraining message: "This do in remembrance of me."

"'Of me--and of all the just, all the righteous, all the innocent, of all the ages, in me--pleading through me--symbolized in me! Are you for Man--or for the Beast that lurks in man? Are you for Chast.i.ty--or l.u.s.t? Are you for Cruelty--or Love? Are you for Foulness or Beauty?

Choose!--choose this day.'

"The Christ who thus speaks to you and me, my brethren, is no longer a man made G.o.d, a G.o.d made man. Those categories of thought, for us, are past. But neither is he merely the crucified Galilean, the Messianic prophet of the first century. For by a mysterious and unique destiny--unique at least in degree--that life and death have become Spirit and Idea. The Power behind the veil, the Spirit from whom issues the world, has made of them a lyre, enchanted and immortal, through which He breathes His music into men. The setting of the melody varies with the generations, but the melody remains. And as we listen to it to-day, expressed through the harmonies of that thought which is ourselves--blood of our blood, life of our life--we are listening now, listening always, as the disciples listened in Nazareth, to the G.o.d within us, the very G.o.d who was 'in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself.'

"Of that G.o.d, all life is in some sense, the sacramental expression. But in the course of ages some sacraments and symbols of the divine are approved and verified beyond others--immeasurably beyond others. This is what has happened--and so far as we can see by the special will and purpose of G.o.d--with the death-unto-life--with the Cross of Christ....

"The symbol of the Cross is concerned with our personal and profoundest being. But the symbol of the Kingdom is social, collective--the power of every reformer, every servant of men....