Part 28 (2/2)
”Well, you have had your turn, and now we are having ours--you of the legends, we of the facts.”
”No,” said Wingfold, ”we have not had our turn, and you have been having yours for a far longer time than we. But if, as you profess, you are _doing_ the truth you see, it belongs to my belief that you will come to see the truth you do not see. Christianity is not a failure; for to it mainly is the fact owing that here is a cla.s.s of men which, believing in no G.o.d, yet believes in duty toward men. Look here: if Christianity be the outcome of human aspiration, the natural growth of the human soil, is it not strange it should be such an utter failure as it seems to you? and as such a natural growth, it must be a failure, for if it were a success, must not you be the very one to see it? If it is false, it is worthless, or an evil: where then is your law of development, if the highest result of that development is an evil to the nature and the race?”
”I do not grant it the highest result,” said Faber. ”It is a failure--a false blossom, with a truer to follow.”
”To produce a superior architecture, poetry, music?”
”Perhaps not. But a better science.”
”Are the architecture and poetry and music parts of the failure?”
”Yes--but they are not altogether a failure, for they lay some truth at the root of them all. Now we shall see what will come of turning away from every thing we do not _know_.”
”That is not exactly what you mean, for that would be never to know any thing more. But the highest you have in view is immeasurably below what Christianity has always demanded of its followers.”
”But has never got from them, and never will. Look at the wars, the hatreds, to which your _gospel_ has given rise! Look at Calvin and poor Servetus! Look at the strifes and divisions of our own day! Look at the religious newspapers!”
”All granted. It is a chaos, the motions of whose organization must be strife. The spirit of life is at war with the spasmatical body of death.
If Christianity be not still in the process of development, it is the saddest of all failures.”
”The fact is, Wingfold, your prophet would have been King of the race if He had not believed in a G.o.d.”
”I dare not speak the answer that rises to my lips,” said Wingfold. ”But there is more truth in what you say than you think, and more of essential lie also. My answer is, that the faith of Jesus in His G.o.d and Father is, even now, saving me, setting me free from my one horror, selfishness; making my life an unspeakable boon to me, letting me know its roots in the eternal and perfect; giving me such love to my fellow, that I trust at last to love him as Christ has loved me. But I do not expect you to understand me. He in whom I believe said that a man must be born again to enter into the kingdom of Heaven.”
The doctor laughed.
”You then _are_ one of the double-born, Wingfold?” he said.
”I believe, I think, I hope so,” replied the curate, very gravely.
”And you, Mr. Bevis?”
”I don't know. I wish. I doubt,” answered the rector, with equal solemnity.
”Oh, never fear!” said Faber, with a quiet smile, and rising, left the clergymen together.
But what a morning it was that came up after the storm! All night the lightning had been flas.h.i.+ng itself into peace, and gliding further and further away. Bellowing and growling the thunder had crept with it; but long after it could no more be heard, the lightning kept gleaming up, as if from a sea of flame behind the horizon. The sun brought a glorious day, and looked larger and mightier than before. To Helen, as she gazed eastward from her window, he seemed ascending his lofty pulpit to preach the story of the day named after him--the story of the Sun-day; the rising again in splendor of the darkened and buried Sun of the universe, with whom all the worlds and all their hearts and suns arose. A light steam was floating up from the gra.s.s, and the raindrops were sparkling everywhere. The day had arisen from the bosom of the night; peace and graciousness from the bosom of the storm; she herself from the grave of her sleep, over which had lain the turf of the darkness; and all was fresh life and new hope. And through it all, reviving afresh with every sign of Nature's universal law of birth, was the consciousness that her life, her own self, was rising from the dead, was being new-born also.
She had not far to look back to the time when all was dull and dead in her being: when the earthquake came, and the storm, and the fire; and after them the still small voice, breathing rebuke, and hope, and strength. Her whole world was now radiant with expectation. It was through her husband the change had come to her, but he was not the rock on which she built. For his sake she could go to h.e.l.l--yea, cease to exist; but there was One whom she loved more than him--the one One whose love was the self-willed cause of all love, who from that love had sent forth her husband and herself to love one another; whose heart was the nest of their birth, the cradle of their growth, the rest of their being. Yea, more than her husband she loved Him, her elder Brother, by whom the Father had done it all, the Man who lived and died and rose again so many hundred years ago. In Him, the perfect One, she hoped for a perfect love to her husband, a perfect nature in herself. She knew how Faber would have mocked at such a love, the very existence of whose object she could not prove, how mocked at the notion that His life even now was influencing hers. She knew how he would say it was merely love and marriage that had wrought the change; but while she recognized them as forces altogether divine, she knew that not only was the Son of Man behind them, but that it was her obedience to Him and her confidence in Him that had wrought the red heart of the change in her. She knew that she would rather break with her husband altogether, than to do one action contrary to the known mind and will of that Man. Faber would call her faith a mighty, perhaps a lovely illusion: her life was an active waiting for the revelation of its object in splendor before the universe. The world seemed to her a grand march of resurrections--out of every sorrow springing the joy at its heart, without which it could not have been a sorrow; out of the troubles, and evils, and sufferings, and cruelties that clouded its history, ever arising the human race, the sons of G.o.d, redeemed in Him who had been made subject to death that He might conquer Death for them and for his Father--a succession of mighty facts, whose meanings only G.o.d can evolve, only the obedient heart behold.
On such a morning, so full of resurrection, Helen was only a little troubled not to be one of her husband's congregation: she would take her New Testament, and spend the sunny day in the open air. In the evening he was coming, and would preach in the little chapel. If only Juliet might hear him too! But she would not ask her to go.
Juliet was better, for fatigue had compelled sleep. The morning had brought her little hope, however, no sense of resurrection. A certain dead thing had begun to move in its coffin; she was utterly alone with it, and it made the world feel a tomb around her. Not all resurrections are the resurrection of life, though in the end they will be found, even to the lowest birth of the power of the enemy, to have contributed thereto. She did not get up to breakfast; Helen persuaded her to rest, and herself carried it to her. But she rose soon after, and declared herself quite well.
The rector drove to Glaston in his dog-cart to read prayers. Helen went out into the park with her New Testament and George Herbert. Poor Juliet was left with Mrs. Bevis, who happily could not be duller than usual, although it was Sunday. By the time the rector returned, bringing his curate with him, she was bored almost beyond endurance. She had not yet such a love of wisdom as to be able to bear with folly. The foolish and weak are the most easily disgusted with folly and weakness which is not of their own sort, and are the last to make allowances for them. To spend also the evening with the softly smiling old woman, who would not go across the gra.s.s after such a rain the night before, was a thing not to be contemplated. Juliet borrowed a pair of galoshes, and insisted on going to the chapel. In vain the rector and his wife dissuaded her.
Neither Helen nor her husband said a word.
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