The Seeker Part 29

The amiable Presbyterian, not relishing this, still amiably threw the gauntlet down to Father Riley, demanding the Catholic view of the future of unbaptised children.

The speech of the latter was a mellow joy--a south breeze of liquid consonants and lilting vowels finely articulated. Perhaps it was not a little owing to the good man's love for what he called "oiling the rusty hinges of the King's English with a wee drop of the brogue"; but, if so, the oil was so deftly spread that no one word betrayed its presence.

Rather was his whole speech pervaded by this soft delight, especially when his cherubic face, his pink cheeks glistening in certain lights with a faint silvery stubble of beard, mellowed with his gentle smile.

It was so now, even when he spoke of G.o.d's penalties for the souls of reprobate infants.

"All theologians of the Mother Church are agreed," replied the gracious father, "first, that infants dying unbaptised are excluded from the Kingdom of Heaven. Second, that they will not enjoy the beatific vision outside of heaven. Third, that they will arise with adults and be a.s.sembled for judgment on the last day. And, fourth, that after the last day there will be but two states, namely: a state of supernatural and supreme felicity and a state of what, in a wide sense, we may call d.a.m.nation."

Purlingly the good man went on to explain that d.a.m.nation is a state admitting of many degrees; and that the unbaptised infant would not suffer in that state the same punishment as the adult reprobate. While the latter would suffer positive pains of mind and body for his sins, the unfortunate infant would doubtless suffer no pain of sense whatever.

As to their being exempt from the pain of loss, grieving over their exclusion from the sight of G.o.d and the glories of His Kingdom, it is more commonly held that they do not suffer even this; that even if they know others are happier than themselves, they are perfectly resigned to G.o.d's will and suffer no pain of loss in regard to happiness not suited to their condition.

The Presbyterian called upon them to witness that his church was thus not unique in attaining this sentimentality regarding reprobate infants.

Then little Floud cited the case of still another heretic within the church, a professor in a western Methodist university, who declared that biblical infallibility is a superst.i.tious and hurtful tradition; that all the miracles are mere poetic fancies, incredible and untrue--even irreverent; and that all spiritual truth comes to man through his brain and conscience. Modern preaching, according to the book of this heretic, lacks power because so many churches cling to the tradition that the Bible is infallible. It is the golden calf of their worship; the palpable lie that gives the ring of insincerity to all their moral exhortations.

So the talk flowed on until the good men agreed that a peculiarity of the time lay in this: that large numbers of ministers within the church were publishing the most revolutionary heresies while still clinging to some shred of their tattered orthodoxy.

Also they decided that it would not be without interest to know what belief is held by the man of common education and intelligence--the man who behaves correctly but will not go to church.

Here Father Riley sweetly reminded them--"No questions are asked in the Mother Church, gentlemen, that may not be answered with authority. In your churches, without an authority superior to mere reason, destructive questions will be asked more and more frequently."

Gravely they agreed that the church was losing its hold on the people.

That but for its social and charitable activities, its state would be alarming.

"Your churches!" Father Riley corrected with suave persistence. "No church can endure without an infallible head."

Again and again during the meal Bernal had been tempted to speak. But each time he had been restrained by a sense of his aloofness. These men, too, were wheels within the machine, each revolving as he must. They would simply pity him, or be amused.

More and more acutely was he coming to feel the futility, the cra.s.s, absurd presumption of what he had come back to undertake. From the lucid quiet of his mountain haunts he had descended into a vale where antiquated cymbals clashed in wild discordance above the confusing clatter of an intricate machinery--machinery too complicated to be readjusted by a pa.s.sing dreamer. In his years of solitude he had grown to believe that the teachers of the world were no longer dominated by that ancient superst.i.tion of a superhumanly malignant G.o.d. He had been prepared to find that the world-ideal had grown more lofty in his absence, been purified by many eliminations into a G.o.d who, as he had once said to Nance, could no more spare the soul of a Hottentot than the soul of a pope. Yet here was a high type of the priest of the Mother Church, gentle, G.o.dly, learned, who gravely and as one having authority told how G.o.d would blight forever the soul of a child unbaptised, thus imputing to Deity a regard for mechanical rites that would const.i.tute even a poor human father an incredible monster.

Yet the marvel of it seemed to him to lie in this: that the priest himself lived actually a life of loving devotion and sacrifice in marked opposition to this doctrine of formal cruelty; that his church, more successfully than any other in Christendom, had met the needs of humanity, coming closer to men in their sin and sickness, ministering to them with a deeper knowledge, a more affectionate intimacy, than any other. That all these men of G.o.d should hold formally to dogmas belying the humaneness of their actual practise--here was the puzzling anomaly that might well give pause to any casual message-bringer. Struggle as he might, it was like a tangling mesh cast over him--this growing sense of his own futility.

Along with this conviction of his powerlessness there came to him a new sense of reliance upon Nancy. Unconsciously at first he turned to her for sunlight, big views and quiet power, for the very stimulus he had been wont to draw from the wide, high reaches of his far-off valley.

Later, came a conscious turning, an open-eyed bringing of all his needs, to lay them in her waiting lap. Then it was he saw that on that first night at Edom her confidence and enthusiasm had been things he leaned upon quite naturally, though unwittingly. The knowledge brought him a vague unrest. Furtive, elusive impulses, borne to him on the wings of certain old memories--memories once resolutely put away in the face of his one, big world-desire--now came to trouble him.

It seemed that one must forever go in circles. With fine courage he had made straight off to toil up the high difficult paths of the ideal.

Never had he consciously turned, nor even swerved. Yet here he was at length upon his old tracks, come again to the wondering girl.

Did it mean, then, that his soul was baffled--or did it mean that his soul would not suffer him to baffle it, try as he might? Was that girl of the old days to greet him with her wondering eyes at the end of every high path? These and many other questions he asked himself.

At the close of this day he sought her, eager for the light of her understanding eyes--for a certain waiting sympathy she never withheld.

As she looked up now with a kind of composed gladness, it seemed to him that they two alone, out of all the world, were sanely quiet. Silently he sank into a chair near her and they sat long thus, feeling no need of words. At last she spoke.

"Are you coming nearer to it, Bernal?"

He laughed.

"I'm farther away than ever, Nance. Probably there's but one creature in this city to-day as out of place as I am. He's a big, awkward, country-looking dog, and he was lost on Broadway. Did you ever see a lost dog in a city street? This fellow was actually in a panic, wholly demoralised, and yet he seemed to know that he must conceal it for his own safety. So he affected a fine air of confidence, of being very busy about an engagement for which he feared he might be late. He would trot swiftly along for half a block, then pause as if trying to recall the street number; then trot a little farther, and stop to look back as if the other party to his engagement might happen along from that direction. It was a splendid bit of acting, and it deceived them all, in that street of mutterers and hard faces. He was like one of them, busy and hurried, but apparently cool, capable, and ominously alert. Only, in his moments of indecision, his eyes shifted the least bit nervously, as if to note whether the real fear he felt were detected, and then I could read all his secret consternation.

"I'm the same lost dog, Nance. I feel as he felt every time I go into that street where the poor creatures hurry and talk to themselves from sheer nervous fatigue."

He ceased speaking, but she remained silent, fearing lest she say too little or too much.

"Nance," he said presently with a slow, whimsical glance, "I'm beginning to suspect that I'm even more of a fool than Hoover thought me--and he was rather enthusiastic about it, I a.s.sure you!"

To which she at length answered musingly:

"If G.o.d makes us fools, doubtless he likes to have us thorough. Be a great fool, Bernal. Don't be a small one."

CHAPTER XIV

THE INEFFECTIVE MESSAGE

The week had gone while he walked in the crowds, feeling his remoteness; but he knew at last that he was not of the brotherhood of the zealots; that the very sense of humour by which he saw the fallacies of one zealot prevented him from becoming another. He lacked the zealot's conviction of his unique importance, yet one must be such a zealot to give a message effectively. He began to see that the world could not be lost; that whatever might be vital in his own message would, soon or late, be delivered by another. The time mattered not. Could he not be as reposeful, as patient, as G.o.d?

In spite of which, the impulse to speak his little word would recur; and it came upon him stoutly one day on his way up town. As the elevated train slowly rounded a curve he looked into the open window of a room where a gloomy huddle of yellow-faced, sunken-cheeked, brown-bearded men bent their heads over busy sewing-machines. Nearest the window, full before it, was one that touched him--a young man with some hardy spirit of hope still enduring in his starved face, some stubborn refusal to recognise the odds against him. And fixed to his machine, where his eyes might now and then raise to it from his work, was a spray of lilac--his little spirit flaunting itself gaily even from the cross. The pathos of it was somehow intensified by the grinding of the wheels that carried him by it.

The train creaked its way around the curve--but the face dreaming happily over the lilac spray in that hopeless room stayed in his mind, coercing him.

As he entered the house, Nancy met him.

"Do go and be host to those men. It's our day for the Ministers'

Meeting," she continued, as he looked puzzled, "and just as they sat down Allan was called out to one of his people who is sick. Now run like a good boy and 'tend to them."

So it came that, while the impulse was still strong upon him, he went in among the dozen amiable, feeding gentlemen who were not indisposed to listen to whomsoever might talk--if he did not bore--which is how it befell that they had presently cause to remark him.

Not at first, for he mumbled hesitatingly, without authority of manner or point to his words, but the phrase, "the fundamental defect of the Christian religion" caused even the Unitarian to gasp over his gla.s.s of mineral water. His green eyes glittered pleasantly upon Bernal from his dark face with its scraggly beard.

"That's it, Mr. Linford--tell us that--we need to know that--do we not, gentlemen?"

"Speak for yourself, Whittaker," snapped the aggressive little Baptist, "but doubtless Mr. Linford has something to say."

Bernal remained unperturbed by this. Very earnestly he continued: "Christianity is defective, judged even by poor human standards; untrue by the plain facts of human consciousness."

"Ah! Now we shall learn!" Father Riley turned his most gracious smile upon the speaker.

"Your churches are losing their hold upon men because your religion is one of separation, here and hereafter--while the one great tendency of the age is toward brotherhood--oneness. Primitive man had individual pride--family pride, city pride, state pride, national pride followed--but we are coming now to the only permissible pride, a world pride--in which the race feels its oneness. We are nearly there; even now the spirit that denies this actual brotherhood is confined to the churches. The people outside more generally than you dream know that G.o.d does not discriminate among religions--that he has a scheme of a dignity so true that it can no more permit the loss of one black devil-worshipper than that of the most magnificent of archbishops."

He stopped, looking inquiringly--almost wistfully, at them.

Various polite exclamations a.s.sured him of their interest.

"Continue, by all means," urged Whittaker. "I feel that you will have even Father Riley edified in a moment."

"The most cynical chap--even for a Unitarian," purled that good man.