There & Back Part 38

"But if the man could not believe there was any such being, how could he have heart to look for him?"

"If he believed the idea of him so good, yet did not desire such a being enough to wish that he might be, enough to feel it worth his while to cry out, in some fashion or other, after him, then I could not help suspecting something wrong in his will, or his moral nature somewhere; or, perhaps, that the words he spoke were but words, and that he did not really and truly feel that the idea of such a G.o.d was too good to be true. In any such case his maker would not have cause to be satisfied with him. And if his maker was not satisfied with what he had made, do you think the man made would have cause to be satisfied with himself?"

"But if he was made so?"

"Then no good being, not to say a faithful creator, would blame him for what he could not help. If the G.o.d had made his creature incapable of knowing him, then of course the creature would not feel that he needed to know him. He would be where we generally imagine the lower animals--unable, therefore not caring to know who made him."

"But is not that just the point? A man may say truly, 'I don't feel I want to know anything about G.o.d; I do not believe I am made to understand him; I take no interest in the thought of a G.o.d'!"

"Before I could answer you concerning such a man, I should want to know whether he had not been doing as he knew he ought not to do, living as he knew he ought not to live, and spoiling himself, so spoiling the thing that G.o.d had made that, although naturally he would like to know about G.o.d, yet now, through having by wrong-doing injured his deepest faculty of understanding, he did not care to know anything concerning him."

"What could be done for such a man?"

"G.o.d knows--G.o.d _does_ know. I think he will make his very life a terrible burden, so that for pure misery he will cry to him."

"But suppose he was a man who tried to do right, who tried to help his neighbour, who was at least so far a good man as to deny the G.o.d that most people seem to believe in--what would you say then?"

"I would say, 'Have patience.' If there be a good G.o.d, he cannot be altogether dissatisfied with such a man. Of course it is something wanting that makes him like that, and it may be he is to blame, or it may be he can't help it: I do not know when any man has arrived at the point of development at which he is capable of believing in G.o.d: the child of a savage may be capable, and a gray-haired man of science incapable. If such a man says, 'The question of a G.o.d is not interesting to me,' I believe him; but, if he be such a man as you have last described, I believe also that, as G.o.d is taking care of him who is the G.o.d of patience, the time must come when something will make him want to know whether there be a G.o.d, and whether he cannot get near him, so as to be near him.' I would say, 'He is in G.o.d's school; don't be too much troubled about him, as if G.o.d might overlook and forget him. He will see to all that concerns him. He has made him, and he loves him, and he is doing and will do his very best for him.'"

"Oh, I am so glad to hear you speak like that!" cried Barbara. "I didn't know clergymen were like that! I'm sure they don't talk like that in the pulpit!"

"Well, you know a man can't just chat with his people in the pulpit as he may when he has one alone to himself! For, you see, there are hundreds there, and they are all very different, and that must make a difference in the way he can talk to them. There are mult.i.tudes who could not understand a word of what we have been saying to each, other!

But if a clergyman says anything in the pulpit that differs in essence from what he says out of it, he is a false prophet, and has no business anywhere but in the realm of falsehood."

"Why is he in the church, then?"

"If there be any such man in the church of England, we have to ask first how he got into it. I used to think the bishop who ordained him must be to blame for letting such a man in. But I am told the bishops haven't the power to keep out any one who pa.s.ses their examination, provided he is morally decent; and if that be true, I don't know what is to be done.

What I know is, that I have enough to do with my parish, and that to mind my work is the best I can do to set the church right."

"I suppose the bishops--some of them at least--would say, 'If we do not take the men we can get, how is the work of the church to go on?'"

"I presume that even such bishops would allow that the business of the church is to teach men about G.o.d: that they cannot get men who know G.o.d, is a bad argument for employing men who do not know him to teach others about him. It is founded on utter distrust of G.o.d. I believe the only way to set the thing right is to refuse the bad that there may be room for G.o.d to send the good. By admitting the false they block the way for the true. But the poor bishops have great difficulties. I am glad I am not a bishop! My parish is nearly too much for me sometimes!"

Barbara could not help thinking how her mother alone had been almost too much for him.

Their talk the rest of the way was lighter and more general; and to her great joy Barbara discovered that the clergyman loved books the same way the bookbinder loved them. But she did not mention Richard.

The parson took leave of her at a convenient issue from the park. But before she had gone many steps he came running after her and said--

"By the way, Miss Wylder, here are some verses that may please you! We were talking about our hopes for the animals! I heard the story they are founded on the other day from my friend the dissenting minister of the village. The little daughter of Dr. Doddridge, the celebrated theologian, was overheard asking the dog if he knew who made him.

Receiving no reply, she said what you will find written there as the text of the poem."

He put a paper in her hand, and left her. She opened it, and found what follows:--

DR. DODDRIDGE'S DOG.

"What! you Dr. Doddridge's dog, and not know who made you!"

My little dog, who blessed you With such white toothy-pegs?

And who was it that dressed you In such a lot of legs!

I'm sure he never told you Not to speak when spoken to!

But it's not for me to scold you:-- Dogs bark, and p.u.s.s.ies mew!

I'll tell you, little brother, In case you do not know:-- One only, not another, Could make us two just so.

You love me?--Quiet!--I'm proving!-- It must be G.o.d above That, filled those eyes with loving!-- He was the first to love!

One day he'll stop all sadness-- Hark to the nightingale!

Oh blessed G.o.d of gladness!-- Come, doggie, wag your tail!

That's "Thank you, G.o.d!"--He gave you Of life this little taste; And with more life he'll save you, Not let you go to waste!

So we'll live on together, And share our bite and sup; Until he says, "Come hither,"-- And lifts us both high up!

Barbara was so much pleased with the verses that she thought them a great deal better than they were.

Wingfold walked home thinking how, in his dull parish, where so few seemed to care whether they were going back to be monkeys or on to be men, he had yet found two such interesting young people as Richard and Barbara.

He had come upon Richard again at his grandfather's, had had a little more talk with him, and had found him not so far from the kingdom of heaven but that he cared to deny a false G.o.d; and he had just discovered in Barbara, who so seldom went to church and who came of such strange parents, one in whom the love of G.o.d was not merely innate, but keenly alive. The heart of the one recoiled from a G.o.d that was not; the heart of the other was drawn to a G.o.d of whom she knew little: were not the two upon converging tracks? What to most clergymen would have seemed the depth of a winter of unbelief, seemed to Wingfold a springtime full of the sounds of the rising sap.

"What man," he said to himself, "knowing the care that some men have of their fellow-men, even to the spending of themselves for them, can doubt that, loving the children, they must one day love the father! Who more welcome to the heart of the eternal father, than the man who loves his brother, whom also the unchanging father loves!"

Personally, I find the whole matter of religious teaching and observance in general a very dull business--as dull as most secular teaching. If salvation is anything like what are commonly considered its _means_, it is to me a consummation devoutly to be deprecated. But no one ever found Wingfold dull. For one thing he scarcely thought about the church, and never mistook it for the kingdom of G.o.d. Its worldly affairs gave him no concern, and party-spirit was loathsome to him as the very antichrist.

He was a servant of the church universal, of all that believed or ever would believe in the Lord Christ, therefore of all men, of the whole universe--and first, of every man, woman, and child in his own parish.

But though he was the servant of the boundless church, no church was his master. He had no master but the one lord of life. Therefore the so-called prosperity of the church did not interest him. He knew that the Master works from within outward, and believed no danger possible to the church, except from such of its nominal pastors as know nothing of the life that works leavening from within. The will of G.o.d was all Wingfold cared about, and if the church was not content with that, the church was nothing to him, and might do to him as it would. He did not spend his life for the people because he was a parson, but he was a parson because the church of England gave him facilities for spending his life for the people. He gave himself altogether to the Lord, and therefore to his people. He believed in Jesus Christ as the everyday life of the world, whose presence is just us needful in bank, or shop, or house of lords, as at what so many of the clergy call the altar. When the Lord is known as the heart of every joy, as well as the refuge from every sorrow, then the altar will be known for what it is--an ecclesiastical antique. The Father permitted but never ordained sacrifice; in tenderness to his children he ordered the ways of their unbelieving belief. So at least thought and said Wingfold, and if he did not say so in the pulpit, it was not lest his fellows should regard him as a traitor, but because so few of his people would understand. He would spend no strength in trying to sh.o.r.e up the church; he sent his life-blood through its veins, and his appeal to the Living One, for whose judgment he waited.

The world would not perish if what is called the church did go to pieces; a truer church, for there might well be a truer, would arise out of her ruins. But let no one seek to destroy; let him that builds only take heed that he build with gold and silver and precious stones, not with wood and hay and stubble! If the church were so built, who could harm it! if it were not in part so built, it would be as little worth pulling down as letting stand. There is in it a far deeper and better vitality than its blatant supporters will be able to ruin by their advocacy, or the enviers of its valueless social position by their a.s.saults upon that position.

Wingfold never thought of a.s.sociating the anxiety of the heiress with the unbelief of the bookbinder. He laughed a laugh of delight when afterward he learned their relation to each other.

The next Sunday, Barbara was at church, and never afterward willingly missed going. She sought the friendship of Mrs. Wingfold, and found at last a woman to whom she could heartily look up. She found in her also a clergyman's wife who understood her husband--not because he was small-minded, but because she was large-hearted--and fell in thoroughly with his modes of teaching his people, as well as his objects in regard to them. She never sought to make one in the parish a churchman, but tried to make every one she had to do with a scholar of Christ, a child to his father in heaven.

CHAPTER x.x.xII. _THE SHOEING OF MISS BROWN_.

Two days after, on a lovely autumn evening, Barbara rode Miss Brown across the fields, avoiding the hard road even more carefully than usual. For Miss Brown, as I have said, was in want of shoes, and Barbara herself was to have a hand in putting them on.

The red-faced, white-whiskered, jolly old Simon stood at the smithy door to receive her: he had been watching for her, and had heard the gentle trot over the few yards of road that brought her in sight. With a merry greeting he helped her down from the great mare. It was but the sense that his blackness was not ingrain, that kept him from taking her in his arms like a child, and lifting her down--so small was she, and so friendly and childlike. She would have shaken hands with him, but he would not with her; it would make her glove, he said, as black as his ap.r.o.n. Barbara pulled off her glove, and gave him her dainty little hand, which the blacksmith took at once, being too much of a gentleman not to know where respect becomes rudeness. He clasped the lovely loan with the st.u.r.dy reverence of his true old heart, saying her hand should pay her footing in the trade.

"Lord, miss, ain't I proud to make a smith of you!" he said. "Only you must do nothing but shoe! I can't let you spoil your hands! You can keep Miss Brown shod without doing that!--Here comes d.i.c.k for his part! He might have left it to who taught him! Did he think the old man would be rough with missie?--I dare say, now, he's been teaching you that woman's work of his this long time!"

"Stop, stop, Mr. Armour!" cried Barbara. "When you see me shoe Miss Brown, perhaps you won't care to talk about woman's work again!"

Richard came up, took Miss Brown in, and put her in her place. The smith knew exactly what sort and size of shoes she wanted, and had them already so far finished that but a touch or so was necessary to make them an absolute fit. Barbara tucked up her skirt, and secured it with her belt. But this would not satisfy Simon. He had a little leather ap.r.o.n ready for her, and nothing would serve but she must put it on to protect her habit. Till this was done he would not allow her touch hammer or nail.