Robert Elsmere
smile which accompanied the words,--
'But I have no wish to infringe our convention.'
'A convention was it?' replied Elsmere, flushing. 'I think I only wanted
to make my own position clear and prevent misunderstanding. But it is
impossible that I should be indifferent to the results of thirty years
such work as you can give to so great a subject.'
The squire drew himself up a little under his cloak and seemed to
consider. His tired eyes, fixed on the spring lane before them, saw in
reality only the long retrospects of the past. Then a light broke in
them, transformed them--a light of battle. He turned to the man beside
him, and his sharp look swept over him from head to foot. Well, if he
would have it, let him have it. He had been contemptuously content so
far to let the subject be. But Mr. Wendover, in spite of his philosophy,
had never been proof all his life against an anti-clerical instinct
worthy almost of a Paris municipal councillor. In spite of his fatigue
there woke in him a kind of cruel whimsical pleasure at the notion of
speaking, once for all, what he conceived to be the whole bare truth to
this clever attractive dreamer, to the young fellow who thought he could
condescend to science from the standpoint of the Christian miracles!
'Results?' he said interrogatively. 'Well, as you will understand, it is
tolerably difficult to summarise such a mass at a moment's notice. But I
can give you the lines of my last volumes, if it would interest you to
hear them.'
That walk prolonged itself far beyond Mr. Wendover's original intention.
There was something in the situation, in Elsmere's comments, or
arguments, or silences, which after a while banished the scholar's sense
of exhaustion and made him oblivious of the country distances. No man
feels another's soul quivering and struggling in his grasp without
excitement, let his nerve and his self-restraint be what they may.
As for Elsmere, that hour and a half, little as he realised it at the
time, represented the turning-point of life. He listened, he suggested,
he put in an acute remark here, an argument there, such as the squire
had often difficulty in meeting. Every now and then the inner protest of
an attacked faith would break through in words so full of poignancy, in
imagery so dramatic, that the squire's closely-knit sentences would be
for the moment wholly disarranged. On the whole, he proved himself no
mean guardian of all that was most sacred to himself and to Catherine,
and the squire's intellectual respect for him rose considerably.
All the same, by the end of their conversation that first period of
happy unclouded youth we have been considering was over for poor
Elsmere. In obedience to certain inevitable laws and instincts of the
mind, he had been for months tempting his fate, inviting catastrophe.
None the less did the first sure approaches of that catastrophe fill him
with a restless resistance which was in itself anguish.
As to the squire's talk, it was simply the outpouring of one of the
richest, most sceptical, and most highly-trained of minds on the subject
of Christian origins. At no previous period of his life would it have
greatly affected Elsmere. But now at every step the ideas, impressions,
arguments bred in him by his months of historical work and ordinary
converse with the squire rushed in, as they had done once before, to
cripple resistance, to check an emerging answer, to justify Mr.
Wendover.
We may quote a few fragmentary utterances taken almost at random from
the long wrestle of the two men, for the sake of indicating the main
lines of a bitter after-struggle.
'Testimony like every other human product has _developed_.
Man's power of apprehending and recording what he sees and
hears has grown from less to more, from weaker to stronger,
like any other of his faculties, just as the reasoning powers
of the cave-dweller have developed into the reasoning powers
of a Kant. What one wants is the ordered proof of this, and
it can be got from history and experience.'
* * * * *
'To plunge into the Christian period without having first
cleared the mind as to what is meant in history and
literature by "the critical method," which in history may be
defined as the "science of what is credible," and in
literature as "the science of what is rational," is to invite
fiasco. The theologian in such a state sees no obstacle to
accepting an arbitrary list of documents with all the strange
stuff they may contain, and declaring them to be sound
historical material, while he applies to all the strange
stuff of a similar kind surrounding them the most rigorous
principles of modern science. Or he has to make believe that
the reasoning processes exhibited in the speeches of the
Acts, in certain passages of St. Paul's Epistles, or in the
Old Testament quotations in the Gospels, have a validity for
the mind of the nineteenth century, when in truth they are
the imperfect, half-childish products of the mind of the
first century, of quite insignificant or indirect value to
the historian of fact, of enormous value to the historian of
_testimony_ and its varieties.'
* * * * *
'Suppose, for instance, before I begin to deal with the
Christian story, and the earliest Christian development, I
try to make out beforehand what are the moulds, the channels
into which the testimony of the time must run. I look for
these moulds, of course, in the dominant ideas, the
intellectual preconceptions and preoccupations existing when
the period begins.
'In the first place, I shall find present in the age which
saw the birth of Christianity, as in so many other ages, a
universal preconception in favour of miracle--that is to say,
of deviations from the common norm of experience, governing
the work of _all_ men of _all_ schools. Very well, allow for
it then. Read the testimony of the period in the light of it.
Be prepared for the inevitable differences between it and the
testimony of your own day. The witness of the time is not
true, nor, in the strict sense, false. It is merely
incompetent, half-trained, pre-scientific, but all through
perfectly natural. The wonder would have been to have had a
life of Christ without miracles. The air teems with them. The
East is full of Messiahs. Even a Tacitus is superstitious.
Even a Vespasian works miracles. Even a Nero cannot die, but
fifty years after his death is still looked for as the
inaugurator of a millennium of horror. The Resurrection is
partly invented, partly imagined, partly ideally true--in any
case wholly intelligible and natural, as a product of the
age, when once you have the key of that age.
'In the next place, look for the preconceptions that have a
definite historical origin; those, for instance, flowing from
the pre-Christian, apocalyptic literature of the Jews, taking
the Maccabean legend of Daniel as the centre of
inquiry--those flowing from Alexandrian Judaism and the
school of Philo--those flowing from the Palestinian schools
of exegesis. Examine your synoptic gospels, your Gospel of
St. John, your Apocalypse, in the light of these. You have no
other chance of understanding them. But so examined, they
fall into place, become explicable and rational; such
material as science can make full use of. The doctrine of the
Divinity of Christ, Christian eschatology, and Christian
views of prophecy will also have found _their_ place in a
sound historical scheme!'
* * * * *
'It is discreditable now for the man of intelligence to
refuse to read his Livy in the light of his Mommsen. My
object has been to help in making it discreditable to him to
refuse to read his Christian documents in the light of a
trained scientific criticism. We shall have made some
positive advance in rationality when the man who is perfectly
capable of dealing sanely with legend in one connection, and,
in another, will insist on confounding it with history
proper, cannot do so any longer without losing caste, without
falling _ipso facto_ out of court with men of education. It
is enough for a man of letters if he has helped ever so
little in the final staking out of the boundaries between
reason and unreason!'
And so on. These are mere ragged gleanings from an ample store. The
discussion in reality ranged over the whole field of history, plunged
into philosophy, and into the subtlest problems of mind. At the end of
it, after he had been conscious for many bitter moments of that same
constriction of heart which had overtaken him once before at Mr.
Wendover's hands, the religious passion in Elsmere once more rose with
sudden stubborn energy against the iron negations pressed upon it.
'I will not fight you any more, Mr. Wendover,' he said, with his moved
flashing look. 'I am perfectly conscious that my own mental experience
of the last two years has made it necessary to re-examine some of these
intellectual foundations of faith. But as to the faith itself, that is
its own witness. It does not depend, after all, upon anything external,
but upon the living voice of the Eternal in the soul of man!'
Involuntarily his pace quickened. The whole man was gathered into one
great, useless, pitiful defiance, and the outer world was forgotten. The
squire kept up with difficulty a while, a faint glimmer of sarcasm
playing now and then round the straight thin-lipped mouth. Then suddenly
he stopped.
'No, let it be. Forget me and my book, Elsmere. Everything can be got
out of in this world. By the way, we seem to have reached the ends of
the earth. Those are the new Mile End cottages, I believe. With your
leave, I'll sit down in one of them, and send to the Hall for the
carriage.'
Elsmere's repentant attention was drawn at once to his companion.
'I am a selfish idiot,' he said hotly, 'to have led you into
over-walking and over-talking like this.'
The squire made some short reply and instantly turned the matter off.
The momentary softness which had marked his meeting with Elsmere had
entirely vanished, leaving only the Mr. Wendover of every day, who was
merely made awkward and unapproachable by the slightest touch of
personal sympathy. No living being, certainly not his foolish little
sister, had any _right_ to take care of the squire. And as the signs of
age became more apparent, this one fact had often worked powerfully on
the sympathies of Elsmere's chivalrous youth, though as yet he had been
no more capable than any one else of breaking through the squire's
haughty reserve.
As they turned down the newly-worn track to the cottages, whereof the
weekly progress had been for some time the delight of Elsmere's heart,
they met old Meyrick in his pony-carriage. He stopped his shambling
steed at sight of the pair. The bleared spectacled eyes lit up, the prim
mouth broke into a smile which matched the April sun.
'Well, Squire; well, Mr. Elsmere, are you going to have a look at those
places? Never saw such palaces. I only hope I may end my days in
anything so good. Will you give me a lease, Squire?'
Mr. Wendover's deep eyes took a momentary survey, half indulgent, half
contemptuous, of the naive, awkward-looking old creature in the
pony-carriage. Then, without troubling to find an answer, he went his
way.
Robert stayed chatting a moment or two, knowing perfectly well what
Meyrick's gay garrulity meant. A sharp and bitter sense of the ironies