Robert Elsmere
As to Lestrange, against a man who was as ready to laugh as to preach,
and into whose ardent soul nature had infused a saving sense of the
whimsical in life and character, cynicism and vanity seemed to have no
case. Robert's quick temper had been wonderfully disciplined by life
since his Oxford days. He had now very little of that stiff-neckedness,
so fatal to the average reformer, which makes a man insist on all or
nothing from his followers. He took what each man had to give. Nay, he
made it almost seem as though the grudging support of Lestrange, or the
critical half-patronising approval of the young barrister from the West
who came down to listen to him, and made a favour of teaching in his
night-school, were as precious to him as was the whole-hearted, the
self-abandoning veneration, which the majority of those about him had
begun to show towards the man in whom, as Charles Richards said, they
had 'seen God.'
At last by the middle of November the whole great building, with the
exception of the top floor, was cleared and ready for use. Robert felt
the same joy in it, in its clean paint, the half-filled shelves in the
library, the pictures standing against the walls ready to be hung, the
rolls of bright-coloured matting ready to be laid down, as he had felt
in the Murewell Institute. He and Flaxman, helped by a voluntary army of
men, worked at it from morning till night. Only Catherine could ever
persuade him to remember that he was not yet physically himself.
Then came the day when the building was formally opened, when the gilt
letters over the door, 'The New Brotherhood of Christ,' shone out into
the dingy street, and when the first enrolment of names in the book of
the Brotherhood took place.
For two hours a continuous stream of human beings surrounded the little
table beside which Elsmere stood, inscribing their names, and receiving
from him the silver badge, bearing the head of Christ, which was to be
the outward and conspicuous sign of membership. Men came of all sorts:
the intelligent well-paid artisan, the pallid clerk or small accountant,
stalwart warehousemen, huge carters and draymen, the boy attached to
each by the laws of the profession often straggling lumpishly behind his
master. Women were there: wives who came because their lords came, or
because Mr. Elsmere had been 'that good' to them that anything they
could do to oblige him 'they would, and welcome'; prim pupil-teachers,
holding themselves with straight superior shoulders; children, who came
trooping in, grinned up into Robert's face and retreated again with red
cheeks, the silver badge tight clasped in hands which not even much
scrubbing could make passable.
Flaxman stood and watched it from the side. It was an extraordinary
scene: the crowd, the slight figure on the platform, the two great
inscriptions, which represented the only 'articles' of the new faith,
gleaming from the freshly coloured walls--
_'In Thee, O Eternal, have I put my trust;'_
_'This do in remembrance of Me;'_
--the recesses on either side of the hall lined with white marble, and
destined, the one to hold the names of the living members of the
Brotherhood, the other to commemorate those who had passed away (empty
this last save for the one poor name of 'Charles Richards'); the copies
of Giotto's Paduan Virtues--faith, fortitude, charity, and the
like--which broke the long wall at intervals. The cynic in the onlooker
tried to assert itself against the feeling with which the air seemed
overcharged. In vain.
'Whatever comes of it,' Flaxman said to himself with strong involuntary
conviction, 'whether he fails or no, the spirit that is moving here is
the same spirit that spread the Church, the spirit that sent out
Benedictine and Franciscan into the world, that fired the children of
Luther, or Calvin, or George Fox; the spirit of devotion, through a man,
to an idea; through one much-loved, much-trusted soul to some eternal
verity, newly caught, newly conceived, behind it. There is no
approaching the idea for the masses except through the human life;
there is no lasting power for the man except as the slave of the idea!'
A week later he wrote to his aunt as follows. He could not write to her
of Rose, he did not care to write of himself, and he knew that Elsmere's
club address had left a mark even on her restless and overcrowded mind.
Moreover, he himself was absorbed.
'We are in the full stream of religion-making. I watch it with a
fascination you at a distance cannot possibly understand, even when my
judgment demurs, and my intelligence protests that the thing cannot live
without Elsmere, and that Elsmere's life is a frail one. After the
ceremony of enrolment which I described to you yesterday the Council of
the New Brotherhood was chosen by popular election, and Elsmere gave an
address. Two-thirds of the council, I should think, are working-men, the
rest of the upper class; Elsmere, of course, president.
'Since then the first religious service under the new constitution has
been held. The service is extremely simple, and the basis of the whole
is "new bottles for the new wine." The opening prayer is recited by
everybody present standing. It is rather an act of adoration and faith
than a prayer, properly so called. It represents, in fact, the placing
of the soul in the presence of God. The mortal turns to the eternal; the
ignorant and imperfect look away from themselves to the knowledge and
perfection of the All-Holy. It is Elsmere's drawing up, I imagine--at
any rate it is essentially modern, expressing the modern spirit,
answering to modern need, as I imagine the first Christian prayers
expressed the spirit and answered to the need of an earlier day.
'Then follows some passage from the life of Christ. Elsmere reads it and
expounds it, in the first place, as a lecturer might expound a passage
of Tacitus, historically and critically. His explanation of miracle, his
efforts to make his audience realise the germs of miraculous belief
which each man carries with him in the constitution and inherited
furniture of his mind, are some of the most ingenious--perhaps the most
convincing--I have ever heard. My heart and my head have never been very
much at one, as you know, on this matter of the marvellous element in
religion.
'But then when the critic has done, the poet and the believer begins.
Whether he has got hold of the true Christ is another matter; but that
the Christ he preaches moves the human heart as much as--and in the case
of the London artisan, more than--the current orthodox presentation of
him, I begin to have ocular demonstration.
'I was present, for instance, at his children's Sunday class the other
day. He had brought them up to the story of the Crucifixion, reading
from the Revised Version, and amplifying wherever the sense required it.
Suddenly a little girl laid her head on the desk before her, and with
choking sobs implored him not to go on. The whole class seemed ready to
do the same. The pure human pity of the story--the contrast between the
innocence and the pain of the sufferer--seemed to be more than they
could bear. And there was no comforting sense of a jugglery by which the
suffering was not real after all, and the sufferer not man but God.
'He took one of them upon his knee and tried to console them. But there
is something piercingly penetrating and austere even in the consolations
of this new faith. He did but remind the children of the burden of
gratitude laid upon them. "Would you let him suffer so much in vain? His
suffering has made you and me happier and better to-day, at this moment,
than we could have been without Jesus. You will understand how, and why,
more clearly when you grow up. Let us in return keep him in our hearts
always, and obey his words! It is all you can do for his sake, just as
all you could do for a mother who died would be to follow her wishes and
sacredly keep her memory."
'That was about the gist of it. It was a strange little scene,
wonderfully suggestive and pathetic.
'But a few more words about the Sunday service. After the address came a
hymn. There are only seven hymns in the little service book, gathered
out of the finest we have. It is supposed that in a short time they will
become so familiar to the members of the Brotherhood that they will be
sung readily by heart. The singing of them in the public service
alternates with an equal number of psalms. And both psalms and hymns are
meant to be recited or sung constantly in the homes of the members, and
to become part of the everyday life of the Brotherhood. They have been
most carefully chosen, and a sort of ritual importance has been attached
to them from the beginning. Each day in the week has its particular hymn
or psalm.
'Then the whole wound up with another short prayer, also repeated
standing, a commendation of the individual, the Brotherhood, the nation,
the world, to God. The phrases of it are terse and grand. One can see at
once that it has laid hold of the popular sense, the popular memory. The
Lord's Prayer followed. Then, after a silent pause of "recollection,"
Elsmere dismissed them.
'"_Go in peace, in the love of God, and in the memory of His servant,
Jesus._"
'I looked carefully at the men as they were tramping out. Some of them
were among the Secularist speakers you and I heard at the club in April.
In my wonder, I thought of a saying of Vinet's: "_C'est pour la religion
que le peuple a le plus de talent; c'est en religion qu'il montre le
plus d'esprit._"'
In a later letter he wrote--
'I have not yet described to you what is perhaps the most
characteristic, the most binding practice of the New Brotherhood. It is
that which has raised most angry comment, cries of "profanity," "wanton
insult," and what not. I came upon it yesterday in an interesting way. I
was working with Elsmere at the arrangement of the library, which is now
becoming a most fascinating place, under the management of a librarian
chosen from the neighbourhood, when he asked me to go and take a message
to a carpenter who has been giving us voluntary help in the evenings
after his day's work. He thought that as it was the dinner hour, and the
man worked in the dock close by, I might find him at home. I went off to
the model lodging-house where I was told to look for him, mounted the
common stairs, and knocked at his door. Nobody seemed to hear me, and as
the door was ajar I pushed it open.
'Inside was a curious sight.
'The table was spread with the midday meal. Round the table stood four
children, the eldest about fourteen, and the youngest six or seven. At
one end of it stood the carpenter himself in his working apron, a brawny
Saxon, bowed a little by his trade. Before him was a plate of bread, and
his horny hands were resting on it. The street was noisy; they had not
heard my knock; and as I pushed open the door there was an old coat
hanging over the corner of it which concealed me.
'Something in the attitudes of all concerned reminded me, kept me where
I was, silent.
'The father lifted his right hand.
'"The Master said, '_This do in remembrance of Me!_'"
'The children stooped for a moment in silence, then the youngest said
slowly, in a little softened cockney voice that touched me
extraordinarily,--
'"_Jesus, we remember Thee always!_"
'It was the appointed response. As she spoke I recollected the child
perfectly at Elsmere's class. I also remembered that she had no mother;
that her mother had died of cancer in June, visited and comforted to the
end by Elsmere and his wife.
'Well, the great question of course remains--is there a sufficient
strength of _feeling_ and _conviction_ behind these things? If so, after
all, everything was new once, and Christianity was but modified
Judaism.'