Part 31 (1/2)

Mr. Drake was silent. Hateful is the professional, contemptible is the love of display, but in his case they floated only as vapors in the air of a genuine soul. He was a true man, and as he could not say _yes_, neither would he hide his _no_ in a mult.i.tude of words--at least to his own daughter: he was not so sure of G.o.d as he was of that daughter, with those eyes looking straight into his! Could it be that he never had believed in G.o.d at all? The thought went through him with a great pang.

It was as if the moon grew dark above him, and the earth withered under his feet. He stood before his child like one whose hypocrisy had been proclaimed from the housetop.

”Are you vexed with me, father?” said Dorothy sadly.

”No, my child,” answered the minister, in a voice of unnatural composure. ”But you stand before me there like, the very thought started out of my soul, alive and visible, to question its own origin.”

”Ah, father!” cried Dorothy, ”let us question our origin.”

The minister never even heard the words.

”That very doubt, embodied there in my child, has, I now know, been haunting me, d.o.g.g.i.ng me behind, ever since I began to teach others,” he said, as if talking in his sleep. ”Now it looks me in the face. Am I myself to be a castaway?--Dorothy, I am _not_ sure of G.o.d--not as I am sure of you, my darling.”

He stood silent. His ear expected a low-voiced, sorrowful reply. He started at the tone of gladness in which Dorothy cried--

”Then, father, there is henceforth no cloud between us, for we are in the same cloud together! It does not divide us, it only brings us closer to each other. Help me, father: I am trying hard to find G.o.d. At the same time, I confess I would rather not find Him, than find Him such as I have sometimes heard you represent Him.”

”It may well be,” returned her father--the _ex-cathedral_, the professional tone had vanished utterly for the time, and he spoke with the voice of an humble, true man--”it may well be that I have done Him wrong; for since now at my age I am compelled to allow that I am not sure of Him, what more likely than that I may have been cheris.h.i.+ng wrong ideas concerning Him, and so not looking in the right direction for finding Him?”

”Where did you get your notions of G.o.d, father--those, I mean, that you took with you to the pulpit?”

A year ago even, if he had been asked the same question, he would at once have answered, ”From the Word of G.o.d;” but now he hesitated, and minutes pa.s.sed before he began a reply. For he saw now that it was not from the Bible _he_ had gathered them, whence soever they had come at first. He pondered and searched--and found that the real answer eluded him, hiding itself in a time beyond his earliest memory. It seemed plain, therefore, that the source whence first he began to draw those notions, right or wrong, must be the talk and behavior of the house in which he was born, the words and carriage of his father and mother and their friends. Next source to that came the sermons he heard on Sundays, and the books given him to read. The Bible was one of those books, but from the first he read it through the notions with which his mind was already vaguely filled, and with the comments of his superiors around him. Then followed the books recommended at college, this author and that, and the lectures he heard there upon the attributes of G.o.d and the plan of salvation. The spirit of commerce in the midst of which he had been bred, did not occur to him as one of the sources.

But he had perceived enough. He opened his mouth and bravely answered her question as well as he could, not giving the Bible as the source from which he had taken any one of the notions of G.o.d he had been in the habit of presenting.

”But mind,” he added, ”I do not allow that therefore my ideas must be incorrect. If they be second-hand, they may yet be true. I do admit that where they have continued only second-hand, they can have been of little value to me.”

”What you allow, then, father,” said Dorothy, ”is that you have yourself taken none of your ideas direct from the fountain-head?”

”I am afraid I must confess it, my child--with this modification, that I have thought many of them over a good deal, and altered some of them not a little to make them fit the molds of truth in my mind.”

”I am so glad, father!” said Dorothy. ”I was positively certain, from what I knew of you--which is more than any one else in this world, I do believe--that some of the things you said concerning G.o.d never could have risen in your own mind.”

”They might be in the Bible for all that,” said the minister, very anxious to be and speak the right thing. ”A man's heart is not to be trusted for correct notions of G.o.d.”

”Nor yet for correct interpretation of the Bible, I should think,” said Dorothy.

”True, my child,” answered her father with a sigh, ”--except as it be already a G.o.dlike heart. The Lord says a bramble-bush can not bring forth grapes.”

”The notions you gathered of G.o.d from other people, must have come out of their hearts, father?”

”Out of somebody's heart?”

”Just so,” answered Dorothy.

”Go on, my child,” said her father. ”Let me understand clearly your drift.”

”I have heard Mr. Wingfold say,” returned Dorothy, ”that however men may have been driven to form their ideas of G.o.d before Christ came, no man can, with thorough honesty, take the name of a Christian, whose ideas of the Father of men are gathered from any other field than the life, thought, words, deeds, of the only Son of that Father. He says it is not from the Bible as a book that we are to draw our ideas of G.o.d, but from the living Man into whose presence that book brings us, Who is alive now, and gives His spirit that they who read about Him may understand what kind of being He is, and why He did as He did, and know Him, in some possible measure, as He knows Himself.--I can only repeat the lesson like a child.”

”I suspect,” returned the minister, ”that I have been greatly astray.