Robert Elsmere
all that purifies the heart--that he has still for you and me, as he
had it for the men and women of his own time.'
Then he came to the last scenes. His voice sank a little; his notes
dropped from his hand; and the silence grew oppressive. The dramatic
force, the tender passionate insight, the fearless modernness with which
the story was told, made it almost unbearable. Those listening saw the
trial, the streets of Jerusalem, that desolate place outside the
northern gate; they were spectators of the torture, they heard the last
cry. No one present had ever so seen, so heard before. Rose had hidden
her face. Flaxman for the first time forgot to watch the audience; the
men had forgotten each other; and for the first time that night, in many
a cold embittered heart, there was born that love of the Son of Man
which Nathaniel felt, and John, and Mary of Bethany, and which has in it
now, as then, the promise of the future.
'"_He laid him in a tomb which had been hewn out of a rock, and he
rolled a stone against the door of the tomb._" The ashes of Jesus of
Nazareth mingled with the earth of Palestine--
'"Far hence he lies
In the lorn Syrian town,
And on his grave, with shining eyes,
The Syrian stars look down."'
He stopped. The melancholy cadence of the verse died away. Then a gleam
broke over the pale exhausted face--a gleam of extraordinary sweetness.
'And in the days and weeks that followed the devout and passionate fancy
of a few mourning Galileans begat the exquisite fable of the
Resurrection. How natural--and amid all its falseness--how true, is that
naive and contradictory story! The rapidity with which it spread is a
measure of many things. It is, above all, a measure of the greatness of
Jesus, of the force with which he had drawn to himself the hearts and
imaginations of men....
'And now, my friends, what of all this? If these things I have been
saying to you are true, what is the upshot of them for you and me?
Simply this, as I conceive it--that instead of wasting your time, and
degrading your souls, by indulgence in such grime as this'--and he
pointed to the newspapers--'it is your urgent business and mine--at this
moment--to do our very _utmost_ to bring this life of Jesus, our
precious invaluable possession as a people, back into some real and
cogent relation with our modern lives and beliefs and hopes. Do not
answer me that such an effort is a mere dream and futility, conceived in
the vague, apart from reality--that men must have something to worship,
and that if they cannot worship Jesus they will not trouble to love him.
Is the world desolate with God still in it, and does it rest merely with
us to love or not to love? Love and revere _something_ we must, if we
are to be men and not beasts. At all times and in all nations, as I
have tried to show you, man has helped himself by the constant and
passionate memory of those great ones of his race who have spoken to him
most audibly of God and of eternal hope. And for us Europeans and
Englishmen, as I have also tried to show you, history and inheritance
have decided. If we turn away from the true Jesus of Nazareth because he
has been disfigured and misrepresented by the Churches, we turn away
from that in which our weak wills and desponding souls are meant to find
their most obvious and natural help and inspiration--from that symbol of
the Divine, which, of necessity, means most to _us_. No! give him back
your hearts--be ashamed that you have ever forgotten your debt to him!
Let combination and brotherhood do for the newer and simpler faith what
they did once for the old--let them give it a practical shape, a
practical grip on human life.... Then we too shall have our Easter!--we
too shall have the right to say, _He is not here, he is risen._ Not
here--in legend, in miracle, in the beautiful outworn forms and
crystallisations of older thought. _He is risen_--in a wiser reverence
and a more reasonable love; risen in new forms of social help inspired
by his memory, called afresh by his name! Risen--if you and your
children will it--in a church or company of the faithful, over the gates
of which two sayings of man's past, into which man's present has
breathed new meanings, shall be written:--
'_In Thee, O Eternal, have I put my trust:_'
and--
'_This do in remembrance of Me._'
The rest was soon over. The audience woke from the trance in which it
had been held with a sudden burst of talk and movement. In the midst of
it, and as the majority of the audience were filing out into the
adjoining rooms, the gasfitter's tall companion Andrews mounted the
platform, while the gasfitter himself, with an impatient shrug, pushed
his way into the outgoing crowd. Andrews went slowly and deliberately to
work, dealing out his long cantankerous sentences with a nasal _sang
froid_ which seemed to change in a moment the whole aspect and
temperature of things. He remarked that Mr. Elsmere had talked of what
great scholars had done to clear up this matter of Christ and
Christianity. Well, he was free to maintain that old Tom Paine was as
good a scholar as any of 'em, and most of them in that hall knew what
_he_ thought about it. Tom Paine hadn't anything to say against Jesus
Christ, and he hadn't. He was a workman and a fine sort of man, and if
he'd been alive now he'd have been a Socialist, 'as most of us are,' and
he'd have made it hot for the rich loafers, and the sweaters, and the
middlemen, 'as we'd like to make it hot for 'em.' But as for those
people who got up the Church--Mythologists Tom Paine called 'em--and the
miracles, and made an uncommonly good thing out of it, pecuniarily
speaking, he didn't see what they'd got to do with keeping up, or
mending, or preserving _their_ precious bit of work. The world had found
'em out, and serve 'em right.
And he wound up with a fierce denunciation of priests, not without a
harsh savour and eloquence, which was much clapped by the small knot of
workmen amongst whom he had been standing.
Then there followed a Socialist--an eager, ugly, black-bearded little
fellow, who preached the absolute necessity of doing without 'any cultus
whatsoever,' threw scorn on both the Christians and the Positivists for
refusing so to deny themselves, and appealed earnestly to his group of
hearers 'to help in bringing religion back from heaven to earth, where
it belongs.' Mr. Elsmere's new church, if he ever got it, would only be
a fresh instrument in the hands of the _bourgeoisie_. And when the
people had got their rights and brought down the capitalists, they were
not going to be such fools as put their necks under the heel of what
were called 'the educated classes.' The people who wrote the newspapers
Mr. Elsmere objected to, knew quite enough for the working-man--and
people should not be too smooth-spoken; what the working class wanted
beyond everything just now was _grit_.
A few other short speeches followed, mostly of the common Secularist
type, in defence of the newspapers attacked. But the defence, on the
whole, was shuffling and curiously half-hearted. Robert, sitting by with
his head on his hand, felt that there, at any rate, his onslaught had
told.
He said a few words in reply, in a low husky voice, without a trace of
his former passion, and the meeting broke up. The room had quickly
filled when it was known that he was up again; and as he descended the
steps of the platform, after shaking hands with the chairman, the
hundreds present broke into a sudden burst of cheering. Lady Charlotte
pressed forward to him through the crowd, offering to take him home.
'Come with us, Mr. Elsmere: you look like a ghost.' But he shook his
head, smiling. 'No, thank you, Lady Charlotte--I must have some air,'
and he took her out on his arm, while Flaxman followed with Rose.
It once occurred to Flaxman to look round for the priest he had seen
come in. But there were no signs of him. 'I had an idea he would have
spoken,' he thought. 'Just as well, perhaps. We should have had a row.'
Lady Charlotte threw herself back in the carriage as they drove off,
with a long breath, and the inward reflection, 'So his wife wouldn't
come and hear him! Must be a woman with a character that--a Strafford in
petticoats!'
* * * * *
Robert turned up the street to the City, the tall slight figure seeming
to shrink together as he walked. After his passionate effort,
indescribable depression had overtaken him.
'Words--words!' he said to himself, striking out his hands in a kind of
feverish protest, as he strode along, against his own powerlessness,
against that weight of the present and the actual which seems to the
enthusiast alternately light as air, or heavy as the mass of AEtna on the
breast of Enceladus.
Suddenly, at the corner of a street, a man's figure in a long black robe
stopped him and laid a hand on his arm.
'Newcome!' cried Robert, standing still.
'I was there,' said the other, bending forward and looking close into
his eyes. 'I heard almost all. I went to confront, to denounce you!'
By the light of a lamp not far off Robert caught the attenuated
whiteness and sharpness of the well-known face, to which weeks of
fasting and mystical excitement had given a kind of unearthly
remoteness. He gathered himself together with an inward groan. He felt
as though there were no force in him at that moment wherewith to meet
reproaches, to beat down fanaticism. The pressure on nerve and strength
seemed unbearable.
Newcome, watching him with eagle eye, saw the sudden shrinking and
hesitation. He had often in old days felt the same sense of power over
the man who yet, in what seemed his weakness, had always escaped him in
the end.
'I went to denounce,' he continued, in a strange tense voice, 'and the
Lord refused it to me. He kept me watching for you here. These words are
not mine I speak. I waited patiently in that room till the Lord should
deliver His enemy into my hand. My wrath was hot against the deserter
that could not even desert in silence--hot against his dupes. Then
suddenly words came to me--they have come to me before, they burn up the
very heart and marrow in me--"_Who is he that saith, and it cometh to
pass, and the Lord commandeth it not?_" There they were in my ears,
written on the walls--the air----'
The hand dropped from Robert's arm. A dull look of defeat, of regret,
darkened the gleaming eyes. They were standing in a quiet deserted
street, but through a side opening the lights, the noise, the turbulence
of the open-air market came drifting to them through the rainy
atmosphere which blurred and magnified everything.
'Ay, after days and nights in His most blessed sanctuary,' Newcome
resumed slowly, 'I came by His commission, as I thought, to fight His
battle with a traitor! And at the last moment His strength, which was in
me, went from me. I sat there dumb; His hand was heavy upon me. His will
be done!'
The voice sank; the priest drew his thin shaking hand across his eyes,
as though the awe of a mysterious struggle were still upon him. Then he
turned again to Elsmere, his face softening, radiating.
'Elsmere, take the sign, the message! I thought it was given to me to
declare the Lord's wrath. Instead, He sends you once more by me, even
now--even fresh from this new defiance of His mercy, the tender offer of
His grace! He lies at rest to-night, my brother'--what sweetness in the
low vibrating tones!--'after all the anguish. Let me draw you down on
your knees beside Him. It is you, you, who have helped to drive in the
nails, to embitter the agony! It is you who in His loneliness have been
robbing Him of the souls that should be His! It is you who have been
doing your utmost to make His Cross and Passion of no effect. Oh, let it