The History of David Grieve Part 99

'"No," he said, "no. I am not competent. It has not been my line in life. I have found more than enough to tax my strength in the practical administration of the goods of Christ. All such questions I leave, and must leave, to experts, such experts as"--and he mentioned the names of some of the leading scholars of the English Church--"or as my friend here", and he laid his hand affectionately on Canon Aylwin's knee.

'Strange! He leaves to experts such questions as those of the independence, authenticity, and trustworthiness of the Gospel records; of the culture and idiosyncrasies of the first two centuries as tending to throw light on those records; of the earliest growth of dogma, as, thanks mainly to German labour, it may now be exhibited within the New Testament itself. In a Church of private judgment, he takes all this at second hand, after having vowed at his ordination "to be diligent in such studies as help to the knowledge of the Scriptures"!

'Yet a better, a more G.o.d-fearing, a more sincere, and, within certain lines, a more acute man than Dean Manley it would certainly be difficult to find at the present time within the English Church.

It is an ill.u.s.tration of the dualism in which so many minds tend to live, divided between two worlds, two standards, two wholly different modes of thought--the one applied to religion even in its intellectual aspect, the other applied to all the rest of existence. Yet--is truth divided?

'To return to Canon Aylwin. I could only meet his reproach, which he had a special right to make, for he has taken the kindliest interest in some of the earlier series of our "Workmen's Tracts,"

by going back to some extent to first principles. I endeavoured to argue the matter on ground more or less common to us both. If both knowledge and morality have only become possible for man by the perpetual action of a Divine spirit on his since the dawn of conscious life; if this action has taken effect in human history, as, broadly speaking, the Canon would admit, through a free and constant struggle of opposites, whether in the realm of interest or the realm of opinion; and if this struggle, perpetually reconciled, perpetually renewed, is the divinely ordered condition, nay, if you will, the sacred task of human life,--how can the Christian, who clings, above all men, to the victory of the Divine in the human, who, moreover, in the course of his history has affronted and resisted all possible "authorities" but that of conscience--how can he lawfully resent the fullest and largest freedom of speech, employed disinterestedly and in good faith, on the part of his brother man? The truth must win; and it is only through the free life of the spirit that she has. .h.i.therto prevailed. So much, at least, the English Churchman must hold.

It comes to this: must there be no movement of thought because the individual who lives by custom and convention may at least temporarily suffer? Yet the risks of the individual throughout nature--so far we were agreed--are the correlative of his freedom and responsibility.

'"Ah, well," said the dear old man at last, with a change of expression which went to my heart, so wistful and spiritual it was, "perhaps I have been faithless; perhaps the Christian minister would do better to trust the Lord with His own. But before we leave the subject, let me say, once for all, that I have read all your tracts, and weighed most carefully all that they contain. The matter of them bears on what for me has been the study of many years, and all I can say is that I regard your methods of reasoning as unsound, and your conclusions as wholly false. I have been a literary man from my youth as well as a theologian, and I completely dissent from your literary judgments. I believe that if you had not been already possessed by a hostile philosophy--which will allow no s.p.a.ce for miracle and revelation--you would not have arrived at them. I am old and you are young. Let me bear my testimony while there is time. I have taken a great interest in you and your work."

'He spoke with the most exquisite courtesy and simplicity, his look was dignified and heavenly. I felt like kneeling to ask his blessing, even though he could only give it in the shape of a prayer for my enlightenment.

'But now, alone with conscience, alone with G.o.d, how does the matter stand? The challenge of such a life and conviction as Canon Aylwin's is a searching one. It bids one look deep into one's self, it calls one to truth and soberness. What I seem to see is that he and I both approach Christianity with a prepossession, with, as he says, "a philosophy." His is a prepossession in favour of a system of interference from without, by Divine or maleficent powers, for their own ends, with the ordinary sequences of nature--which once covered, one may say, the whole field of human thought and shaped the whole horizon of humanity. From the beginning of history this prepossession--which may be regarded in all its phases as an expression of man's natural impatience to form a working hypothesis of things--has struggled with the "impulse to know." And slowly, irrevocably, from age to age--the impulse to know has beaten back the impulse to imagine, has confined the prepossession of faith within narrower and narrower limits, till at last it is even preparing to deny it the guidance of religion, which it has so long claimed. For the impulse of science, justified by the long wrestle of centuries, is becoming itself religious,--and there is a new awe rising on the brow of Knowledge.

'_My_ prepossession--but let the personal p.r.o.noun be merely understood as attaching me to that band of thinkers, "of all countries, nations, and languages," whose pupil and creature I am--is simply that of science, of the organised knowledge of the race. It is drawn from the whole of experience, it governs without dispute every department of thought, and without it, in fact, neither Canon Aylwin nor I could think at all.

'Moreover, I humbly believe that I desire the same spiritual goods as he: holiness, the knowledge of G.o.d, the hope of immortality. But while for him these things are bound up with the maintenance of the older prepossession, for me there is no such connection at all.

'And again, I seem to see that when this intellect of his, so keen, so richly stored, approaches the special ground of Christian thought, it changes in quality. It becomes wholly subordinate to the affections, to the influences of education and habitual surroundings. Talk to him of Dante, of the influence of the barbarian invasions on the culture and development of Europe, of the Oxford movement, you will find in him an historical sense, a delicate accuracy of perception, a luminous variety of statement, which carry you with him into the very heart of the truth. But discuss with him the critical habits and capacity of those earliest Christian writers, on whose testimony so much of the Christian canon depends--ask him to separate the strata of material in the New Testament, according to their relative historical and ethical value, under the laws which he would himself apply to any other literature in the world--invite him to exclude this as legendary and that as accretion, to distinguish between the original kernel and that which the fancy or the theology of the earliest hearers inevitably added--and you will feel that a complete change has come over the mind. However subtle and precise his arguments may outwardly look, they are at bottom the arguments of affection, of the special pleader. He has fenced off the first century from the rest of knowledge; has invented for all its products alike special _criteria_ and a special perspective. He cannot handle the New Testament in the spirit of science, for he approaches it on his knees. The imaginative habit of a lifetime has decided for him; and you ask of him what is impossible.

'"An end must come to scepticism somewhere!" he once said in the course of our talk. "Faith must take her leap--you know as well as I!--if there is to be faith at all."

'Yes, but _where_--at what point? Is the clergyman who talks with sincere distress about infidel views of Scripture and preaches against them, while at the same time he could not possibly give an intelligible account of the problem of the Synoptic Gospels as it now presents itself to the best knowledge, or an outline of the case pressed by science for more than half a century with increasing force and success against the historical character of St. John's Gospel--is he justified in making his ignorance the leaping-point?

'Yet the upshot of all our talk is that I am restless and oppressed.

'... I sit and think of these nine years since Berkeley and sorrow first laid hold of me. Berkeley rooted in me the conception of mind as the independent antecedent of all experience, and none of the scientific materialism, which so troubles Ancrum that he will ultimately take refuge from it in Catholicism, affects me. But the ethical inadequacy of Berkeley became very soon plain to me. I remember I was going one day through one of the worst slums of Ancoats, when a pa.s.sage in his examination of the origin of evil occurred to me:

'"But we should further consider that the very blemishes and defects of nature are not without their use, in that _they make an agreeable sort of variety_, and augment the beauty of the rest of creation, as shades in a picture serve to set off the brighter and more enlightened parts."

'I had just done my best to save a little timit scarecrow of a child, aged about six, from the blows of its brutal father, who had already given it a black eye--my heart blazed within me,--and from that moment Berkeley had no spell for me.

'Then came that moment when, after my marriage, haunted as I was by the perpetual oppression of Manchester's pain and poverty, the Christian mythology, the Christian theory with all its varied and beautiful flowerings in human life, had for a time an attraction for me so strong that Dora naturally hoped everything, and I felt myself becoming day by day more of an orthodox Christian. What checked the tendency I can hardly now remember in detail. It was a converging influence of books and life--no doubt largely helped, with regard to the details of Christian belief, by the pressure of the German historical movement, as I became more and more fully acquainted with it.

'At any rate, St. Damian's gradually came to mean nothing to me, though I kept, and keep still, a close working friendship with most of the people there. But I am thankful for that Christian phase. It enabled me to realise as nothing else could the strength of the Christian case.

'And since then it has been a long and weary journey through many paths of knowledge and philosophy, till of late years the new English phase of Kantian and Hegelian thought, which has been spreading in our universities, and which is the outlet of men who can neither hand themselves over to authority, like Newman, nor to a mere patient nescience in the sphere of metaphysics, like Herbert Spencer, has come to me with an ever-increasing power of healing and edification.

'That the spiritual principle in nature and man exists and governs; that mind cannot be explained out of anything but itself; that the human consciousness derives from a universal consciousness, and is thereby capable both of knowledge and of goodness; that the phenomena and history of conscience are the highest revelation of G.o.d; that we are called to co-operation in a divine work, and in spite of pain and sin may find ground for an infinite trust, covering the riddle of the individual lot, in the history and character of that work in man, so far as it has gone--these things are deeper and deeper realities to me. They govern my life; they give me peace; they breathe me hope.

'But the last glow, the certainties, the _vision_, of faith!

Ah! me, I believe that He is there, yet my heart gropes in darkness. All that is personality, holiness, compa.s.sion in us, must be in Him intensified beyond all thought. Yet I have no familiarity of prayer. I cannot use the religious language which should be mine without a sense of unreality. My heart is athirst.

'And can religion possibly _depend_ upon a long process of thought? How few can think their way to Him--perhaps none, indeed, by the logical intellect alone. He reveals himself to the simple.

_Speak to me, to me also, O my Father!_'

Sunday morning broke fresh and golden after a wet night. Lucy lay still in the early dawn, thinking of the day that had to be faced, feeling more cheerful, however, with the refreshment of sleep, and inclined to hope that she might have got over the worst, and that better things might be in store for her.

So that when David said to her, 'You poor little person, did they eat you up last night--Lady Driffield and her set?' she only answered evasively that Mrs. Wellesdon had been nice, but that Lady Driffield had very bad manners, and she was sure everybody thought so.

To which David heartily a.s.sented. Then Lucy put her question:

'Did you think, when you looked at me last night at dinner, that I--that I looked nice?' she said, flushing, yet driven on by an inward smart.

'Of course I did!' David declared. 'Perhaps you should hold yourself up a little more. The women here are so astonishingly straight and tall, like young poplars.'

'Mrs. Wellesdon especially,' Lucy reflected, with a pang.

'But you thought I--had done my hair nicely?' she said desperately.

'Very! And it was the prettiest hair there!' he said, smoothing back the golden brown curls from her temple.

His compliment so delighted her that she dressed and prepared to descend to breakfast with a light heart. She was not often now so happily susceptible to a word of praise from him; she was more exacting than she had once been, but since her acquaintance with Lady Driffield she had been brought low!

And her evil fortune returned upon her, alas, at breakfast, and throughout the day. Breakfast, indeed, seemed to her a more formidable meal than any. For people straggled in, and the ultimate arrangement of the table seemed entirely to depend upon the personal attractiveness of individuals, upon whether they annexed or repelled new-comers. Lucy found herself at one time alone and shivering in the close neighbourhood of Lady Driffield, who was intrenched behind the tea-urn, and after giving her guest a finger, had, Lucy believed, spoken once to her, expressing a desire for scones. The meal itself, with its elaborate cakes and meats and fruits, intimidated Lucy even more than the dinner had done. The breach between it and any small housekeeping was more complete. She felt that she was eating like a schoolgirl; she devoured her toast dry, out of sheer inability to ask for b.u.t.ter; and, sitting for the most part isolated in the unpopular--that is to say, the Lady Driffield--quarter of the table, went generally half-starved.

As for David, he, with Lord Driffield, Mrs. Wellesdon, Lady Alice, Reggie, and Mrs. Shepton for company at the other end, had on the whole an excellent time. There was, however, one uncomfortable moment of friction between him and Colonel Danby, who had strolled in last of all, with the vicious look of a man who has not had the good night to which he considered himself ent.i.tled, and must somehow wreak it on the world.

Just before he entered, Lady Driffield, looking round to see that the servants had departed, had languidly started the question: 'Does one talk to one's maid? Do you, Marcia, talk to your maid?

How can anyone ever find anything to say to one's maid?'

The topic proved unexpectedly interesting. Both Marcia Wellesdon and Lady Alice declared that their maids were their bosom friends.

Lady Driffield shrugged her shoulders, then looked at Mrs. Grieve, who had sat silent, opened her mouth to speak, recollected herself, and said nothing. At that moment Colonel Danby entered.

'I say, Danby!' called the young attache, Marcia's brother, 'do you talk to your valet?'

'Talk to my valet!' said the Colonel, putting up his eyegla.s.s to look at the dishes on the side table--he spoke with suavity, but there was an ominous pucker in the brow--'what should I do that for? I don't pay the fellow for his conversation, I presume, but to b.u.t.ton my boots, and precious badly he does it too. I don't even know what his elegant surname is. "Thomas," or "James," or "William"

is enough peg for me to hang my orders on. I generally christen them fresh when they come to me.'

Little Lady Alice looked indignant. Lucy caught her husband's face, and saw it suddenly pale, as it easily did under a quick emotion.

He was thinking of the valet he had seen at the station standing by the Danbys' luggage--a dark, anxious-looking man, whose likeness to one of the compositors in his own office--a young fellow for whom he had a particular friendship--had attracted his notice.

'Why do you suppose he puts up with you--your servant?' he said, bending across to Colonel Danby. He smiled a little, but his eyes betrayed him.

'Puts up with me!' Colonel Danby lifted his brows, regarding David with an indescribable air of insolent surprise. 'Because I make it worth his while in pounds, shillings, and pence; that's all.'

And he put down his pheasant _salmi_ with a clatter, while his wife handed him bread and other propitiations.

'Probably because he has a mother or sister,' said David, slowly.'

We trust a good deal to the patience of our "masters."'

The Colonel stopped his wife's attentions with an angry hand. But just as he was about to launch a reply more congruous with his gout and his contempt for 'Driffield's low-life friends' than with the amenities of ordinary society, and while Lady Venetia was slowly and severely studying David through her eyegla.s.s, Lord Driffield threw himself into the breach with a nervous story of some favourite 'man' of his own, and the storm blew over.

Lady Driffield, indeed, who herself disliked Colonel Danby, as one overbearing person dislikes another, and only invited him because Lady Venetia was her cousin and an old friend, was rather pleased with David's outbreak. After breakfast she graciously asked him if she should show him the picture gallery.