Robert Elsmere
upon you, to claim all your friendship can give me.'
He stopped. Mr. Grey was silent--his expression changing instantly, the
bright eyes profoundly, anxiously attentive.
'I have just come to the conclusion,' said Robert, after a moment, with
quick abruptness, 'that I ought now--at this moment--to leave the
Church, and give up my living, for reasons which I will describe to you.
But before I act on the conclusion, I wanted the light of your mind upon
it, seeing that--that--other persons than myself are concerned.'
'Give up your living!' echoed Mr. Grey in a low voice of astonishment.
He sat looking at the face and figure of the man before him with a
half-frowning expression. How often Robert had seen some rash exuberant
youth quelled by that momentary frown! Essentially conservative as was
the inmost nature of the man, for all his radicalism there were few
things for which Henry Grey felt more instinctive distaste than for
unsteadiness of will and purpose, however glorified by fine names.
Robert knew it, and, strangely enough, felt for a moment in the presence
of the heretical tutor as a culprit before a judge.
'It is, of course, a matter of opinions,' he said, with an effort. 'Do
you remember, before I took orders, asking whether I had ever had
difficulties, and I told you that I had probably never gone deep enough.
It was profoundly true, though I didn't really mean it. But this
year---- No, no, I have not been merely vain and hasty! I may be a
shallow creature, but it has been natural growth, not wantonness.'
And at last his eyes met Mr. Grey's firmly, almost with solemnity. It
was as if in the last few moments he had been instinctively testing the
quality of his own conduct and motives by the touchstone of the rare
personality beside him; and they had stood the trial. There was such
pain, such sincerity, above all such freedom from littleness of soul
implied in words and look, that Mr. Grey quickly held out his hand.
Robert grasped it, and felt that the way was clear before him.
'Will you give me an account of it?' said Mr. Grey, and his tone was
grave sympathy itself. 'Or would you rather confine yourself to
generalities and accomplished facts?'
'I will try and give you an account of it,' said Robert; and sitting
there with his elbows on his knees, his gaze fixed on the yellowing
afternoon sky, and the intricacies of the garden-walls between them and
the new Museum, he went through the history of the last two years. He
described the beginnings of his historical work, the gradual enlargement
of the mind's horizons, and the intrusion within them of question after
question, and subject after subject. Then he mentioned the squire's
name.
'Ah!' exclaimed Mr. Grey, 'I had forgotten you were that man's
neighbour. I wonder he didn't set you against the whole business,
inhuman old cynic!'
He spoke with the strong dislike of the idealist, devoted in practice to
an everyday ministry to human need, for the intellectual egotist. Robert
caught and relished the old pugnacious flash in the eye, the Midland
strength of accent.
'Cynic he is, not altogether inhuman, I think. I fought him about his
drains and his cottages, however,'--and he smiled sadly--'before I began
to read his books. But the man's genius is incontestable, his learning
enormous. He found me in a susceptible state, and I recognise that his
influence immensely accelerated a process already begun.'
Mr. Grey was struck with the simplicity and fulness of the avowal. A
lesser man would hardly have made it in the same way. Rising to pace up
and down the room--the familiar action recalling vividly to Robert the
Sunday afternoons of bygone years--he began to put questions with a
clearness and decision that made them so many guides to the man
answering, through the tangle of his own recollections.
'I see,' said the tutor at last, his hands in the pockets of his short
gray coat, his brow bent and thoughtful. 'Well, the process in you has
been the typical process of the present day. Abstract thought has had
little or nothing to say to it. It has been all a question of literary
and historical evidence. _I_ am old-fashioned enough'--and he
smiled--'to stick to the _a priori_ impossibility of miracles, but then
I am a philosopher! _You_ have come to see how miracle is manufactured,
to recognise in it merely a natural inevitable outgrowth of human
testimony, in its pre-scientific stages. It has been all experimental,
inductive. I imagine'--he looked up--'you didn't get much help out of
the orthodox apologists?'
Robert shrugged his shoulders.
'It often seemed to me,' he said drearily, 'I might have got through,
but for the men whose books I used to read and respect most in old days.
The point of view is generally so extraordinarily limited. Westcott,
for instance, who means so much nowadays to the English religious world,
first isolates Christianity from all the other religious phenomena of
the world, and then argues upon its details. You might as well isolate
English jurisprudence, and discuss its details without any reference to
Teutonic custom or Roman law! You may be as logical or as learned as you
like within the limits chosen, but the whole result is false! You treat
Christian witness and Biblical literature as you would treat no other
witness, and no other literature in the world. And you cannot show cause
enough. For your reasons depend on the very witness under dispute. And
so you go on arguing in a circle, _ad infinitum_.'
But his voice dropped. The momentary eagerness died away as quickly as
it had risen, leaving nothing but depression behind it.
Mr. Grey meditated. At last he said, with a delicate change of tone,--
'And now--if I may ask it, Elsmere--how far has this destructive process
gone?'
'I can't tell you,' said Robert, turning away almost with a groan; 'I
only know that the things I loved once I love still, and that--that--if
I had the heart to think at all, I should see more of God in the world
than I ever saw before!'
The tutor's eye flashed. Robert had gone back to the window, and was
miserably looking out. After all, he had told only half his story.
'And so you feel you must give up your living?'
'What else is there for me to do?' cried Robert, turning upon him,
startled by the slow deliberate tone.
'Well, of course, you know that there are many men, men with whom both
you and I are acquainted, who hold very much what I imagine your
opinions now are, or will settle into, who are still in the Church of
England, doing admirable work there!'
'I know,' said Elsmere quickly--'I know; I cannot conceive it, nor could
you. Imagine standing up Sunday after Sunday to say the things you do
_not_ believe,--using words as a convention which those who hear you
receive as literal truth,--and trusting the maintenance of your position
either to your neighbour's forbearance or to your own powers of evasion!
With the ideas at present in my head, nothing would induce me to preach
another Easter Day sermon to a congregation that have both a moral and a
legal right to demand from me an implicit belief in the material
miracle!'
'Yes,' said the other gravely--'yes, I believe you are right. It can't
be said the Broad Church movement has helped us much! How greatly it
promised!--how little it has performed! For the private person, the
worshipper, it is different--or I think so. No man pries into our
prayers; and to cut ourselves off from common worship is to lose that
fellowship which is in itself a witness and vehicle of God.'
But his tone had grown hesitating, and touched with melancholy.
There was a moment's silence. Then Robert walked up to him again.
'At the same time,' he said falteringly, standing before the elder man,
as he might have stood as an undergraduate, 'let me not be rash! If you
think this change has been too rapid to last--if you, knowing me better
than at this moment I can know myself--if you bid me wait a while,
before I take any overt step, I will wait--oh, God knows I will
wait!--my wife----' and his husky voice failed him utterly.
'Your wife!' cried Mr. Grey, startled. 'Mrs. Elsmere does not know?'
'My wife knows nothing, or almost nothing--and it will break her heart!'
He moved hastily away again, and stood with his back to his friend, his
tall narrow form outlined against the window. Mr. Grey was left in
dismay, rapidly turning over the impressions of Catherine left on him by
his last year's sight of her. That pale distinguished woman with her
look of strength and character,--he remembered Langham's analysis of
her, and of the silent religious intensity she had brought with her from
her training among the northern hills.
Was there a bitterly human tragedy preparing under all this
thought-drama he had been listening to?
Deeply moved, he went up to Robert, and laid his rugged hand almost
timidly upon him.
'Elsmere, it won't break her heart! You are a good man. She is a good
woman.' What an infinity of meaning there was in the simple words! 'Take
courage. Tell her at once--tell her everything--and let _her_ decide
whether there shall be any waiting. I cannot help you there; she can;
she will probably understand you better than you understand yourself.'
He tightened his grasp, and gently pushed his guest into a chair beside
him. Robert was deadly pale, his face quivering painfully. The long
physical strain of the past months had weakened for the moment all the
controlling forces of the will. Mr. Grey stood over him--the whole man
dilating, expanding, under a tyrannous stress of feeling.
'It is hard, it is bitter,' he said slowly, with a wonderful manly
tenderness. 'I know it, I have gone through it. So has many and many a
poor soul that you and I have known! But there need be no sting in the
wound unless we ourselves envenom it. I know--oh! I know very well--the
man of the world scoffs, but to him who has once been a Christian of the
old sort, the parting with the Christian mythology is the rending
asunder of bones and marrow. It means parting with half the confidence,
half the joy, of life! But take heart,' and the tone grew still more
solemn, still more penetrating. 'It is the education of God! Do not
imagine it will put you farther from Him! He is in criticism, in
science, in doubt, so long as the doubt is a pure and honest doubt, as
yours is. He is in all life, in all thought. The thought of man, as it
has shaped itself in institutions, in philosophies, in science, in
patient critical work, or in the life of charity, is the one continuous
revelation of God! Look for Him in it all; see how, little by little,
the Divine indwelling force, using as its tools--but _merely_ as its
tools!--man's physical appetites and conditions, has built up conscience
and the moral life; think how every faculty of the mind has been trained
in turn to take its part in the great work of faith upon the visible
world! Love and imagination built up religion,--shall reason destroy it!
No!--reason is God's like the rest! Trust it,--trust him. The leading
strings of the past are dropping from you; they are dropping from the
world, not wantonly, or by chance, but in the providence of God. Learn
the lesson of your own pain,--learn to seek God, not in any single event
of past history, _but in your own soul_,--in the constant verifications
of experience, in the life of Christian love. Spiritually you have gone
through the last wrench; I promise it you! You being what you are,
nothing can cut this ground from under your feet. Whatever may have been
the forms of human belief, _faith_, the faith which saves, has always
been rooted here! All things change,--creeds and philosophies and
outward systems,--but God remains!
'"Life, that in me has rest,
As I, undying Life, have power in Thee!"'