Robert Elsmere
notoriously, in all the Catholic countries. We talk complacently of the
decline of Buddhism. But what have we to say of the decline of
Christianity? And yet this last is infinitely more striking and more
tragic, inasmuch as it affects a more important section of mankind. I,
at any rate, am not one of those who would seek to minimise the results
of this decline for human life, nor can I bring myself to believe that
Positivism or "evolutional morality" will ever satisfy the race.
'In the period of social struggle which undeniably lies before us, both
in the old and the new world, are we then to witness a war of classes,
unsoftened by the ideal hopes, the ideal law, of faith? It looks like
it. What does the artisan class, what does the town democracy throughout
Europe, care any longer for Christian checks or Christian sanctions as
they have been taught to understand them? Superstition, in certain parts
of rural Europe, there is in plenty, but wherever you get intelligence
and therefore movement, you get at once either indifference to, or a
passionate break with, Christianity. And consider what it means, what it
will mean, this Atheism of the great democracies which are to be our
masters! The world has never seen anything like it; such spiritual
anarchy and poverty combined with such material power and resource.
Every society--Christian and non-Christian--has always till now had its
ideal, of greater or less ethical value, its appeal to something beyond
man. Has Christianity brought us to this: that the Christian nations are
to be the first in the world's history to try the experiment of a life
without faith--that life which you and I, at any rate, are agreed in
thinking a life worthy only of the brute?
'Oh forgive me! These things must hurt you--they would have hurt me in
old days--but they burn within me, and you bid me speak out. What if it
be God Himself who is driving His painful lesson home to me, to you, to
the world? What does it mean, this gradual growth of what we call
infidelity, of criticism and science on the one hand, this gradual death
of the old traditions on the other? _Sin_, you answer, _the enmity of
the human mind against God, the momentary triumph of Satan._ And so you
acquiesce, heavy-hearted, in God's present defeat, looking for vengeance
and requital hereafter. Well, I am not so ready to believe in man's
capacity to rebel against his Maker! Where you see ruin and sin, I see
the urgent process of Divine education, God's steady ineluctable command
"to put away childish things," the pressure of His spirit on ours
towards new ways of worship and new forms of love!'
* * * * *
And after a while, it was with these 'new ways of worship and new forms
of love' that the mind began to be perpetually occupied. The break with
the old things was no sooner complete than the eager soul, incapable
then, as always, of resting in negation or opposition, pressed
passionately forward to a new synthesis, not only speculative, but
practical. Before it rose perpetually the haunting vision of another
palace of faith--another church or company of the faithful, which was to
become the shelter of human aspiration amid the desolation and anarchy
caused by the crashing of the old! How many men and women must have gone
through the same strait as itself--how many must be watching with it
through the darkness for the rising of a new City of God!
One afternoon, close upon Christmas, he found himself in Parliament
Square, on his way towards Westminster Bridge and the Embankment. The
beauty of a sunset sky behind the Abbey arrested him, and he stood
leaning over the railings beside the Peel statue to look.
The day before he had passed the same spot with a German friend. His
companion--a man of influence and mark in his own country, who had been
brought up, however, in England, and knew it well--had stopped before
the Abbey and had said to him with emphasis: 'I never find myself in
this particular spot of London without a sense of emotion and reverence.
Other people feel that in treading the Forum of Rome they are at the
centre of human things. I am more thrilled by Westminster than Rome;
your venerable Abbey is to me the symbol of a nationality to which the
modern world owes obligations it can never repay. You are rooted deep in
the past; you have also a future of infinite expansiveness stretching
before you. Among European nations at this moment you alone have freedom
in the true sense, you alone have religion. I would give a year of life
to know what you will have made of your freedom and your religion two
hundred years hence!'
As Robert recalled the words, the Abbey lay before him, wrapped in the
bluish haze of the winter afternoon. Only the towers rose out of the
mist, gray and black against the red bands of cloud. A pair of pigeons
circled round them, as careless and free in flight as though they were
alone with the towers and the sunset. Below, the streets were full of
people; the omnibuses rolled to and fro; the lamps were just lit; lines
of straggling figures, dark in the half light, were crossing the street
here and there. And to all the human rush and swirl below, the quiet of
the Abbey and the infinite red distances of sky gave a peculiar pathos
and significance.
Robert filled his eye and sense, and then walked quickly away towards
the Embankment. Carrying the poetry and grandeur of England's past with
him, he turned his face eastward to the great new-made London on the
other side of St. Paul's, the London of the democracy, of the nineteenth
century, and of the future. He was wrestling with himself, a prey to one
of those critical moments of life, when circumstance seems once more to
restore to us the power of choice, of distributing a Yes or a No among
the great solicitations which meet the human spirit on its path from
silence to silence. The thought of his friend's reverence, and of his
own personal debt towards the country to whose long travail of centuries
he owed all his own joys and faculties, was hot within him.
'Here and here did England help me--how can I help England,--say!'
Ah! that vast chaotic London south and east of the great church! He
already knew something of it. A Liberal clergyman there, settled in the
very blackest, busiest heart of it, had already made him welcome on Mr.
Grey's introduction. He had gone with this good man on several occasions
through some little fraction of that teeming world, now so hidden and
peaceful between the murky river mists and the cleaner light-filled
grays of the sky. He had heard much, and pondered a good deal, the quick
mind caught at once by the differences, some tragic, some merely curious
and stimulating, between the monotonous life of his own rural folk, and
the mad rush, the voracious hurry, the bewildering appearances and
disappearances, the sudden ingulfments, of working London.
Moreover, he had spent a Sunday or two wandering among the East End
churches. There, rather than among the streets and courts outside, as it
had seemed to him, lay the tragedy of the city. Such emptiness, such
desertion, such a hopeless breach between the great craving need outside
and the boon offered it within! Here and there, indeed, a patch of
bright coloured success, as it claimed to be, where the primitive
tendency of man towards the organised excitement of religious ritual,
visible in all nations and civilisations, had been appealed to with more
energy and more results than usual. But in general, blank failure, or
rather obvious want of success--as the devoted men now beating the void
there were themselves the first to admit, with pain and patient
submission to the inscrutable Will of God.
But is it not time we assured ourselves, he was always asking, whether
God is still in truth behind the offer man is perpetually making to his
brother man on His behalf? He was behind it once, and it had efficacy,
had power. But now--what if all these processes of so-called
destruction and decay were but the mere workings of that divine plastic
force which is for ever moulding human society? What if these beautiful
venerable things which had fallen from him, as from thousands of his
fellows, represented, in the present stage of the world's history, not
the props, but the hindrances, of man?
And if all these large things were true, as he believed, what should be
the individual's part in this transition England? Surely, at the least,
a part of plain sincerity of act and speech--a correspondence as perfect
as could be reached between the inner faith and the outer word and deed.
So much, at the least, was clearly required of him!
'Do not imagine, he said to himself, as though with a fierce dread of
possible self-delusion, 'that it is in you to play any great, any
commanding part. Shun the thought of it, if it were possible! But let me
do what is given me to do! Here, in this human wilderness, may I spend
whatever of time or energy or faculty may be mine, in the faithful
attempt to help forward the new House of Faith that is to be, though my
utmost efforts should but succeed in laying some obscure stone in still
unseen foundations! Let me try and hand on to some other human soul, or
souls, before I die, the truth which has freed, and which is now
sustaining, my own heart. Can any man do more? Is not every man who
feels any certainty in him whatever bound to do as much? What matter if
the wise folk scoff, if even at times, and in a certain sense, one seems
to one's self ridiculous--absurdly lonely and powerless! All great
changes are preceded by numbers of sporadic, and as the bystander
thinks, impotent efforts. But while the individual effort sinks, drowned
perhaps in mockery, the general movement quickens, gathers force we know
not how, and--
'While the tired wave vainly breaking,
Seems here no painful inch to gain,
Far back through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in the main!'
Darkness sank over the river; all the gray and purple distance with its
dim edge of spires and domes against the sky, all the vague intervening
blacknesses of street, or bridge, or railway station were starred and
patterned with lights. The vastness, the beauty of the city filled him
with a sense of mysterious attraction, and as he walked on with his face
uplifted to it, it was as though he took his life in his hand and flung
it afresh into the human gulf.
'What does it matter if one's work be raw and uncomely! All that lies
outside the great organised traditions of an age must always look so.
Let me bear my witness bravely, not spending life in speech, but not
undervaluing speech--above all, not being ashamed or afraid of it,
because other wise people may prefer a policy of silence. A man has but
the one puny life, the one tiny spark of faith. Better be venturesome
with both for God's sake, than over-cautious, over-thrifty. And--to his
own Master he standeth or falleth!'
Plans of work of all kinds, literary and practical, thoughts of
preaching in some bare hidden room to men and women orphaned and
stranded like himself, began to crowd upon him. The old clerical
instinct in him winced at some of them. Robert had nothing of the
sectary about him by nature; he was always too deeply and easily
affected by the great historic existences about him. But when the Oxford
man or the ex-official of one of the most venerable and decorous of
societies protested, the believer, or, if you will, the enthusiast, put
the protest by.
And so the dream gathered substance and stayed with him, till at last he
found himself at his own door. As he closed it behind him, Catherine
came out into the pretty old hall from the dining-room.
'Robert, have you walked all the way?'