Part 92 (2/2)

In regard to such, man has a duty alone--that, namely, of making it possible for every man to live. And where the dread of death is not sufficient to deter, what can the threat of punishment do? Or what great thing is gained if it should succeed? What agonies a man must have gone through in whom neither the horror of falling into such a river, nor of the knife in the flesh instinct with life, can extinguish the vague longing to wrap up his weariness in an endless sleep!'

'But,' I remarked, 'you would, I fear, encourage the trade in suicide.

Your kindness would be terribly abused. What would you do with the pretended suicides?'

'Whip them, for trifling with and trading upon the feelings of their kind.'

'Then you would drive them to suicide in earnest.'

'Then they might be worth something, which they were not before.'

'We are a great deal too humane for that now-a-days, I fear. We don't like hurting people.'

'No. We are infested with a philanthropy which is the offspring of our mammon-wors.h.i.+p. But surely our tender mercies are cruel. We don't like to hang people, however unfit they may be to live amongst their fellows.

A weakling pity will pet.i.tion for the life of the worst murderer--but for what? To keep him alive in a confinement as like their notion of h.e.l.l as they dare to make it--namely, a place whence all the sweet visitings of the grace of G.o.d are withdrawn, and the man has not a chance, so to speak, of growing better. In this h.e.l.l of theirs they will even pamper his beastly body.'

'They have the chaplain to visit them.'

'I pity the chaplain, cut off in his labours from all the aids which G.o.d's world alone can give for the teaching of these men. Human beings have not the right to inflict such cruel punishment upon their fellow-man. It springs from a cowardly shrinking from responsibility, and from mistrust of the mercy of G.o.d;--perhaps first of all from an over-valuing of the mere life of the body. Hanging is tenderness itself to such a punishment.'

'I think you are hardly fair, though, Falconer. It is the fear of sending them to h.e.l.l that prevents them from hanging them.'

'Yes. You are right, I dare say. They are not of David's mind, who would rather fall into the hands of G.o.d than of men. They think their h.e.l.l is not so hard as his, and may be better for them. But I must not, as you say, forget that they do believe their everlasting fate hangs upon their hands, for if G.o.d once gets his hold of them by death, they are lost for ever.'

'But the chaplain may awake them to a sense of their sins.'

'I do not think it is likely that talk will do what the discipline of life has not done. It seems to me, on the contrary, that the clergyman has no commission to rouse people to a sense of their sins. That is not his work. He is far more likely to harden them by any attempt in that direction. Every man does feel his sins, though he often does not know it. To turn his attention away from what he does feel by trying to rouse in him feelings which are impossible to him in his present condition, is to do him a great wrong. The clergyman has the message of salvation, not of sin, to give. Whatever oppression is on a man, whatever trouble, whatever conscious something that comes between him and the blessedness of life, is his sin; for whatever is not of faith is sin; and from all this He came to save us. Salvation alone can rouse in us a sense of our sinfulness. One must have got on a good way before he can be sorry for his sins. There is no condition of sorrow laid down as necessary to forgiveness. Repentance does not mean sorrow: it means turning away from the sins. Every man can do that, more or less. And that every man must do. The sorrow will come afterwards, all in good time. Jesus offers to take us out of our own hands into his, if we will only obey him.'

The eyes of the old man were fixed on his son as he spoke. He did seem to be thinking. I could almost fancy that a glimmer of something like hope shone in his eyes.

It was time to go home, and we were nearly silent all the way.

The next morning was so wet that we could not go out, and had to amuse ourselves as we best might in-doors. But Falconer's resources never failed. He gave us this day story after story about the poor people he had known. I could see that his object was often to get some truth into his father's mind without exposing it to rejection by addressing it directly to himself; and few subjects could be more fitted for affording such opportunity than his experiences among the poor.

The afternoon was still rainy and misty. In the evening I sought to lead the conversation towards the gospel-story; and then Falconer talked as I never heard him talk before. No little circ.u.mstance in the narratives appeared to have escaped him. He had thought about everything, as it seemed to me. He had looked under the surface everywhere, and found truth--mines of it--under all the upper soil of the story. The deeper he dug the richer seemed the ore. This was combined with the most pictorial apprehension of every outward event, which he treated as if it had been described to him by the lips of an eye-witness. The whole thing lived in his words and thoughts.

'When anything looks strange, you must look the deeper,' he would say.

At the close of one of our fits of talk, he rose and went to the window.

'Come here,' he said, after looking for a moment.

All day a dropping cloud had filled the s.p.a.ce below, so that the hills on the opposite side of the valley were hidden, and the whole of the sea, near as it was. But when we went to the window we found that a great change had silently taken place. The mist continued to veil the sky, and it clung to the tops of the hills; but, like the rising curtain of a stage, it had rolled half-way up from their bases, revealing a great part of the sea and sh.o.r.e, and half of a cliff on the opposite side of the valley: this, in itself of a deep red, was now smitten by the rays of the setting sun, and glowed over the waters a splendour of carmine. As we gazed, the vaporous curtain sank upon the sh.o.r.e, and the sun sank under the waves, and the sad gray evening closed in the weeping night, and clouds and darkness swathed the weary earth. For doubtless the earth needs its night as well as the creatures that live thereon.

In the morning the rain had ceased, but the clouds remained. But they were high in the heavens now, and, like a departing sorrow, revealed the outline and form which had appeared before as an enveloping vapour of universal and shapeless evil. The mist was now far enough off to be seen and thought about. It was clouds now--no longer mist and rain. And I thought how at length the evils of the world would float away, and we should see what it was that made it so hard for us to believe and be at peace.

In the afternoon the sky had partially cleared, but clouds hid the sun as he sank towards the west. We walked out. A cold autumnal wind blew, not only from the twilight of the dying day, but from the twilight of the dying season. A sorrowful hopeless wind it seemed, full of the odours of dead leaves--those memories of green woods, and of damp earth--the bare graves of the flowers. Would the summer ever come again?

We were pacing in silence along a terraced walk which overhung the sh.o.r.e far below. More here than from the hilltop we seemed to look immediately into s.p.a.ce, not even a parapet intervening betwixt us and the ocean.

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