Robert Elsmere
of life swept across him. The squire humanised, influenced by him--he
knew that was the image in Meyrick's mind; he remembered with a quiet
scorn its presence in his own. And never, never had he felt his own
weakness and the strength of that grim personality so much as at that
instant.
That evening Catherine noticed an unusual silence and depression in
Robert. She did her best to cheer it away, to get at the cause of it. In
vain. At last, with her usual wise tenderness, she left him alone,
conscious herself, as she closed the study door behind her, of a
momentary dreariness of soul, coming she knew not whence, and only
dispersed by the instinctive upward leap of prayer.
Robert was no sooner alone than he put down his pipe and sat brooding
over the fire. All the long debate of the afternoon began to fight
itself out again in the shrinking mind. Suddenly, in his restless pain,
a thought occurred to him. He had been much struck in the squire's
conversation by certain allusions to arguments drawn from the Book of
Daniel. It was not a subject with which Robert had any great
familiarity. He remembered his Pusey dimly, certain Divinity lectures,
an article of Westcott's.
He raised his hand quickly and took down the monograph on _The Use of
the Old Testament in the New_, which the squire had sent him in the
earliest days of their acquaintance. A secret dread and repugnance had
held him from it till now. Curiously enough it was not he but Catherine,
as we shall see, who had opened it first. Now, however, he got it down
and turned to the section on Daniel.
It was a change of conviction on the subject of the date and authorship
of this strange product of Jewish patriotism in the second century
before Christ that drove M. Renan out of the Church of Rome. 'For the
Catholic Church to confess,' he says in his _Souvenirs_, 'that Daniel is
an apocryphal book of the time of the Maccabees, would be to confess
that she had made a mistake; if she had made this mistake, she may have
made others; she is no longer divinely inspired.'
The Protestant, who is in truth more bound to the Book of Daniel than M.
Renan, has various ways of getting over the difficulties raised against
the supposed authorship of the book by modern criticism. Robert found
all these ways enumerated in the brilliant and vigorous pages of the
book before him.
In the first place, like the orthodox Saint-Sulpicien, the Protestant
meets the critic with a flat _non possumus_. 'Your arguments are useless
and irrelevant,' he says in effect. 'However plausible may be your
objections, the Book of Daniel is what it professes to be, _because_ our
Lord quoted it in such a manner as to distinctly recognise its
authority. The All-True and All-Knowing cannot have made a mistake, nor
can He have expressly led His disciples to regard as genuine and Divine,
prophecies which were in truth the inventions of an ingenious romancer.'
But the liberal Anglican--the man, that is to say, whose logical sense
is inferior to his sense of literary probabilities--proceeds quite
differently.
'Your arguments are perfectly just,' he says to the critic; 'the book is
a patriotic fraud, of no value except to the historian of literature.
But how do you know that our Lord quoted it as _true_ in the strict
sense? In fact He quoted it as _literature_, as a Greek might have
quoted Homer, as an Englishman might quote Shakespeare.'
And many a harassed Churchman takes refuge forthwith in the new
explanation. It is very difficult, no doubt, to make the passages in the
Gospels agree with it, but at the bottom of his mind there is a saving
silent scorn for the old theories of inspiration. He admits to himself
that probably Christ was not correctly reported in the matter.
Then appears the critic, having no interests to serve, no _parti pris_
to defend, and states the matter calmly, dispassionately, as it appears
to him. 'No reasonable man,' says the ablest German exponent of the Book
of Daniel, 'can doubt'--that this most interesting piece of writing
belongs to the year 169 or 170 B.C. It was written to stir up the
courage and patriotism of the Jews, weighed down by the persecutions of
Antiochus Epiphanes. It had enormous vogue. It inaugurated a new
Apocalyptic literature. And clearly the youth of Jesus of Nazareth was
vitally influenced by it. It entered into his thought, it helped to
shape his career.
But Elsmere did not trouble himself much with the critic, as at any rate
he was reported by the author of the book before him. Long before the
critical case was reached, he had flung the book heavily from him. The
mind accomplished its further task without help from outside. In the
stillness of the night there rose up weirdly before him a whole new
mental picture--effacing, pushing out, innumerable older images of
thought. It was the image of a purely human Christ--a purely human,
explicable, yet always wonderful Christianity. It broke his heart, but
the spell of it was like some dream-country wherein we see all the
familiar objects of life in new relations and perspectives. He gazed
upon it fascinated, the wailing underneath checked a while by the
strange beauty and order of the emerging spectacle. Only a little while!
Then with a groan Elsmere looked up, his eyes worn, his lips white and
set.
'I must face it--I must face it through! God help me!'
A slight sound overhead in Catherine's room sent a sudden spasm of
feeling through the young face. He threw himself down, hiding from his
own foresight of what was to be.
'My darling, my darling! But she shall know nothing of it--yet.'
CHAPTER XXV
And he did face it through.
The next three months were the bitterest months of Elsmere's life. They
were marked by anguished mental struggle, by a consciousness of painful
separation from the soul nearest to his own, and by a constantly
increasing sense of oppression, of closing avenues and narrowing
alternatives, which for weeks together seemed to hold the mind in a grip
whence there was no escape.
That struggle was not hurried and embittered by the bodily presence of
the squire. Mr. Wendover went off to Italy a few days after the
conversation we have described. But though he was not present in the
flesh the great book of his life was in Elsmere's hands, he had formally
invited Elsmere's remarks upon it; and the air of Murewell seemed still
echoing with his sentences, still astir with his thoughts. That curious
instinct of pursuit, that avid imperious wish to crush an irritating
resistance, which his last walk with Elsmere had first awakened in him
with any strength, persisted. He wrote to Robert from abroad, and the
proud fastidious scholar had never taken more pains with anything than
with those letters.
Robert might have stopped them, might have cast the whole matter from
him with one resolute effort. In other relations he had will enough and
to spare.
Was it an unexpected weakness of fibre that made it impossible?--that
had placed him in this way at the squire's disposal? Half the world
would answer yes. Might not the other half plead that in every
generation there is a minority of these mobile, impressionable,
defenceless natures, who are ultimately at the mercy of experience, at
the mercy of thought, at the mercy (shall we say?) of truth; and that,
in fact, it is from this minority that all human advance comes?
During these three miserable months it cannot be said--poor
Elsmere!--that he attempted any systematic study of Christian evidence.
His mind was too much torn, his heart too sore. He pounced feverishly on
one test point after another, on the Pentateuch, the Prophets, the
relation of the New Testament to the thoughts and beliefs of its time,
the Gospel of St. John, the evidence as to the Resurrection, the
intellectual and moral conditions surrounding the formation of the
Canon. His mind swayed hither and thither, driven from each
resting-place in turn by the pressure of some new difficulty. And--let
it be said again--all through, the only constant element in the whole
dismal process was his trained historical sense. If he had gone through
this conflict at Oxford, for instance, he would have come out of it
unscathed: for he would simply have remained throughout it ignorant of
the true problems at issue. As it was, the keen instrument he had
sharpened so laboriously on indifferent material now ploughed its
agonising way, bit by bit, into the most intimate recesses of thought
and faith.
Much of the actual struggle he was able to keep from Catherine's view,
as he had vowed to himself to keep it. For after the squire's departure
Mrs. Darcy too went joyously up to London to flutter a while through the
golden alleys of Mayfair; and Elsmere was left once more in undisturbed
possession of the Murewell library. There for a while on every day--oh,
pitiful relief!--he could hide himself from the eyes he loved.
But, after all, married love allows of nothing but the shallowest
concealments. Catherine had already had one or two alarms. Once, in
Robert's study, among a tumbled mass of books he had pulled out in
search of something missing, and which she was putting in order, she had
come across that very book on the Prophecies which at a critical moment
had so deeply affected Elsmere. It lay open, and Catherine was caught by
the heading of a section: 'The Messianic Idea.'
She began to read, mechanically at first, and read about a page. That
page so shocked a mind accustomed to a purely traditional and mystical
interpretation of the Bible that the book dropped abruptly from her
hand, and she stood a moment by her husband's table, her fine face pale
and frowning.
She noticed, with bitterness, Mr. Wendover's name on the title-page. Was
it right for Robert to have such books? Was it wise, was it prudent, for
the Christian to measure himself against such antagonism as this? She
wrestled painfully with the question. 'Oh, but I can't understand,' she
said to herself with an almost agonised energy. 'It is I who am timid,
faithless! He _must_--he _must_--know what they say; he must have gone
through the dark places if he is to carry others through them.'
So she stilled and trampled on the inward protest. She yearned to speak
of it to Robert, but something withheld her. In her passionate wifely
trust she could not bear to seem to question the use he made of his time
and thought; and a delicate moral scruple warned her she might easily
allow her dislike of the Wendover friendship to lead her into
exaggeration and injustice.
But the stab of that moment recurred--dealt now by one slight incident,
now by another. And after the squire's departure Catherine suddenly
realised that the whole atmosphere of their home-life was changed.
Robert was giving himself to his people with a more scrupulous energy
than ever. Never had she seen him so pitiful, so full of heart for every
human creature. His sermons, with their constant imaginative dwelling on
the earthly life of Jesus, affected her now with a poignancy, a pathos,
which were almost unbearable. And his tenderness to _her_ was beyond
words. But with that tenderness there was constantly mixed a note of
remorse, a painful self-depreciation which she could hardly notice in
speech, but which every now and then wrung her heart. And in his parish
work he often showed a depression, an irritability, entirely new to her.
He who had always the happiest power of forgetting to-morrow all the
rubs of to-day, seemed now quite incapable of saving himself and his
cheerfulness in the old ways, nay, had developed a capacity for sheer
worry she had never seen in him before. And meanwhile all the old
gossips of the place spoke their mind freely to Catherine on the subject
of the rector's looks, coupling their remarks with a variety of