Part 8 (1/2)
”You fellows hold that a sound religious life will ensure you an eternity of bliss at the end. Very well. You fellows know that the years of a man's life are, roughly, threescore and ten. (Actually it works out far below that figure, but I make you a present of the difference.) Very well again. I take any average Christian aged forty-five, and what sort of premium do I observe him paying--I won't say on a policy of Eternal Bliss--but on any policy a business-like Insurance Company would grant for three hundred pounds? There _is_ the difference too,” added Brother Copas, ”that _he_ gets the eternal bliss, while the three hundred pounds goes to his widow.”
Brother Copas took a second pinch, his eyes on Mr. Simeon's face.
He could not guess the secret of the pang that pa.s.sed over it--that in naming three hundred pounds he had happened on the precise sum in which Mr. Simeon was insured, and that trouble enough the poor man had to find the yearly premium, due now in a fortnight's time.
But he saw that somehow he had given pain, and dexterously slid off the subject, yet without appearing to change it.
”For my part,” he went on, ”I know a method by which, if made Archbishop of Canterbury and allowed a strong hand, I would undertake to bring, within ten years, every Dissenter in England within the Church's fold.”
”What would you do?”
”I would lay, in one pastoral of a dozen sentences, the strictest orders on my clergy to desist from all politics, all fighting; to disdain any cry, any struggle; to accept from Dissent any rebuff, persecution, spoliation--while steadily ignoring it. In every parish my Church's att.i.tude should be this: 'You may deny me, hate me, persecute me, strip me: but you are a Christian of this parish and therefore my paris.h.i.+oner; and therefore I absolutely defy you to escape my forgiveness or my love. Though you flee to the uttermost parts of the earth, you shall not escape these: by these, as surely as I am the Church, you shall be mine in the end.' . . . And do you think, Mr. Simeon, any man in England could for ever resist that appeal? A few of us agnostics, perhaps. But we are human souls, after all; and no one is an agnostic for the fun of it. We should be tempted--sorely tempted--I don't say rightly.”
Mr. Simeon's eyes shone. The picture touched him.
”But it would mean that the Church must compromise,” he murmured.
”That is precisely what it would not mean. It would mean that all her adversaries must compromise; and with love there is only one compromise, which is surrender. . . . But,” continued Brother Copas, resuming his lighter tone, ”this presupposes not only a sensible Archbishop but a Church not given up to anarchy as the Church of England is. Let us therefore leave speculating and follow our noses; which with me, Mr. Simeon--and confound you for a pleasant companion!--means an instant necessity to cultivate bad temper.”
He picked up his volume from the table and walked off with it to the window-seat.
”You are learning bad temper from a book?” asked Mr. Simeon, taking off his spectacles and following Brother Copas with mild eyes of wonder.
”Certainly. . . . If ever fortune, my good sir, should bring you (which G.o.d forbid!) to end your days in our College of n.o.ble Poverty, you will understand the counsel given by the pilot to Pantagruel and his fellow-voyagers--that considering the gentleness of the breeze and the calm of the current, as also that they stood neither in hope of much good nor in fear of much harm, he advised them to let the s.h.i.+p drive, nor busy themselves with anything but making good cheer.
I have done with all worldly fear and ambition; and therefore in working up a hearty Protestant rage (to which a hasty promise commits me), I can only tackle my pa.s.sion on the intellectual side.
Those fellows down at the Club are no help to me at all. . . . My book? It is the last volume of Mr. Froude's famous _History of England_. Here's a pa.s.sage now--
”'The method of Episcopal appointments, inst.i.tuted by Henry VIII, as a temporary expedient, and abolished under Edward as an unreality, was re-established by Elizabeth, not certainly because she believed that the invocation of the Holy Ghost was required for the completeness of an election which her own choice had already determined, not because the bishops obtained any gifts or graces in their consecration which she herself respected, but because the shadowy form of an election, with a religious ceremony following it, gave them the semblance of spiritual independence, the semblance without the substance, which qualified them to be the instruments of the system which she desired to enforce. They were tempted to presume on their phantom dignity, till a sword of a second Cromwell taught them the true value of their Apostolic descent. . . .
”That's pretty well calculated to annoy, eh? Also, by the way, in its careless rapture it twice misrelates the relative p.r.o.noun; and Froude was a master of style. Or what do you say to this?--
”'But neither Elizabeth nor later politicians of Elizabeth's temperament desired the Church of England to become too genuine.
It has been more convenient to leave an element of unsoundness at the heart of an inst.i.tution which, if sincere, might be dangerously powerful. The wisest and best of its bishops have found their influence impaired, their position made equivocal, by the element of unreality which adheres to them. A feeling approaching to contempt has blended with the reverence attaching to their position, and has prevented them from carrying the weight in the councils of the nation which has been commanded by men of no greater intrinsic eminence in other professions.'
”Yet another faulty relative!
”'Pretensions which many of them would have gladly abandoned have connected their office with a smile. The nature of it has for the most part filled the Sees with men of second-rate abilities.
The latest and most singular theory about them is that of the modern English Neo-Catholic, who disregards his bishop's advice, and despises his censures; but looks on him nevertheless as some high-bred, worn-out animal, useless in himself, but infinitely valuable for some mysterious purpose of spiritual propagation.'”
Brother Copas laid the open volume face-downward on his knee--a trivial action in itself; but he had a conscience about books, and would never have done this to a book he respected.
”Has it struck you, Mr. Simeon,” he asked, ”that Froude is so diabolically effective just because in every fibre of him he is at one with the thing he attacks?”
”He had been a convert of the Tractarians in his young days, I have heard,” said Mr. Simeon.
”Yes, it accounts for much in him. Yet I was not thinking of that-- which was an experience only, though significant. The man's whole cast of mind is priestly despite himself. He has all the priesthood's alleged tricks: you can never be sure that he is not faking evidence or garbling a quotation. . . . My dear Mr. Simeon, truly it behoves us to love our enemies, since in this world they are often the nearest we have to us.”
CHAPTER VI.
GAUDY DAY.