Part 32 (1/2)
daur na even tak an honest five per cent interest for their money. An' the baker o' Bagdad, why he was a benighted heathen, ye ken, an' deceivit by that fause prophet, Mahomet, to his eternal d.a.m.nation, or he wad never ha'
gone aboot to fancy a fisherman was his brither.”
”Faix, an' ain't we all brothers?” asked Kelly.
”Ay, and no,” said Sandy, with an expression which would have been a smile, but for its depths of bitter earnestness; ”brethren in Christ, my laddie.”
”An' ain't that all over the same?”
”Ask the preachers. Gin they meant brothers, they'd say brothers, be sure; but because they don't mean brothers at a', they say brethren--ye'll mind, brethren--to soun' antiquate, an' professional, an' perfunctory-like, for fear it should be ower real, an' practical, an' startling, an' a' that; and then jist limit it down wi' a' in Christ,' for fear o' owre wide applications, and a' that. But
”For a' that, and a' that.
It's comin' yet, for a' that, When man an' man, the warld owre, Shall brothers be, for a' that--
”An' na brithren any mair at a'!”
”An' didn't the blessed Jesus die for all?”
”What? for heretics, Micky?”
”Bedad, thin, an' I forgot that intirely!”
”Of course you did! It's strange, laddie,” said he, turning to me, ”that that Name suld be everywhere, fra the thunderers o' Exeter Ha' to this puir, f.e.c.kless Paddy, the watchword o' exclusiveness. I'm thinking ye'll no find the workmen believe in't, till somebody can fin' the plan o' making it the sign o' universal comprehension. Gin I had na seen in my youth that a brither in Christ meant less a thousand-fold than a brither out o' him, I might ha' believit the noo--we'll no say what. I've an owre great organ o'
marvellousness, an' o' veneration too, I'm afeard.”
”Ah!” said Crossthwaite, ”you should come and hear Mr. Windrush to-night, about the all-embracing benevolence of the Deity, and the abomination of limiting it by all those narrow creeds and dogmas.”
”An' wha's Meester Windrush, then?”
”Oh, he's an American; he was a Calvinist preacher originally, I believe; but, as he told us last Sunday evening, he soon cast away the worn-out vestures of an obsolete faith, which were fast becoming only crippling fetters.”
”An' ran oot sarkless on the public, eh? I'm afeard there's mony a man else that throws awa' the gude auld plaid o' Scots Puritanism, an' is unco fain to cover his nakedness wi' ony cast popinjay's feathers he can forgather wi'. Aweel, aweel--a puir priestless age it is, the noo. We'll e'en gang hear him the nicht, Alton, laddie; ye ha' na darkened the kirk door this mony a day--nor I neither, mair by token.”
It was too true. I had utterly given up the whole problem of religion as insoluble. I believed in poetry, science, and democracy--and they were enough for me then; enough, at least, to leave a mighty hunger in my heart, I knew not for what. And as for Mackaye, though brought up, as he told me, a rigid Scotch Presbyterian, he had gradually ceased to attend the church of his fathers.
”It was no the kirk o' his fathers--the auld G.o.d--trusting kirk that Clavers dragoonit down by burns and muirsides. It was a' gane dead an' dry; a piece of Auld-Bailey barristration anent soul-saving dodges. What did he want wi' proofs o' the being o' G.o.d, an' o' the doctrine o' original sin?
He could see eneugh o' them ayont the shop-door, ony tide. They made puir Rabbie Burns an anything-arian, wi' their blethers, an' he was near gaun the same gate.”
And, besides, he absolutely refused to enter any place of wors.h.i.+p where there were pews. ”He wadna follow after a mult.i.tude to do evil; he wad na gang before his Maker wi' a lee in his right hand. Nae wonder folks were so afraid o' the names o' equality an' britherhood, when they'd kicked them out e'en o' the kirk o' G.o.d. Pious folks may ca' me a sinfu' auld Atheist.
They winna gang to a harmless stage play--an' richt they--for fear o'
countenancing the sin that's dune there, an' I winna gang to the kirk, for fear o' countenancing the sin that's dune there, by putting down my hurdies on that stool o' antichrist, a haspit pew!”
I was, therefore, altogether surprised at the prompt.i.tude with which he agreed to go and hear Crossthwaite's new-found prophet. His reasons for so doing may be, I think, gathered from the conversation towards the end of this chapter.
Well, we went; and I, for my part, was charmed with Mr. Windrush's eloquence. His style, which was altogether Emersonian, quite astonished me by its alternate bursts of what I considered brilliant declamation, and of forcible epigrammatic ant.i.thesis. I do not deny that I was a little startled by some of his doctrines, and suspected that he had not seen much, either of St. Giles's cellars or tailors' workshops either, when he talked of sin as ”only a lower form of good. Nothing,” he informed us, ”was produced in nature without pain and disturbance; and what we had been taught to call sin was, in fact, nothing but the birth-throes attendant on the progress of the species.--As for the devil, Novalis, indeed, had gone so far as to suspect him to be a necessary illusion. Novalis was a mystic, and tainted by the old creeds. The illusion was not necessary--it was disappearing before the fast-approaching meridian light of philosophic religion. Like the myths of Christianity, it had grown up in an age of superst.i.tion, when men, blind to the wondrous order of the universe, believed that supernatural beings, like the Homeric G.o.ds, actually interfered in the affairs of mortals. Science had revealed the irrevocability of the laws of nature--was man alone to be exempt from them?
No. The time would come when it would be as obsolete an absurdity to talk of the temptation of a fiend, as it was now to talk of the wehrwolf, or the angel of the thunder-cloud. The metaphor might remain, doubtless, as a metaphor, in the domain of poetry, whose office was to realize, in objective symbols, the subjective ideas of the human intellect; but philosophy, and the pure sentiment of religion, which found all things, even G.o.d himself, in the recesses of its own enthusiastic heart, must abjure such a notion.”
”What!” he asked again, ”shall all nature be a harmonious whole, reflecting, in every drop of dew which gems the footsteps of the morning, the infinite love and wisdom of its Maker, and man alone be excluded from his part in that concordant choir? Yet such is the doctrine of the advocates of free-will, and of sin--its phantom-bantling. Man disobey his Maker! disarrange and break the golden wheels and springs of the infinite machine! The thought were blasphemy!--impossibility! All things fulfil their destiny; and so does man, in a higher or lower sphere of being. Shall I punish the robber? Shall I curse the profligate? As soon destroy the toad, because my partial taste may judge him ugly; or doom to h.e.l.l, for his carnivorous appet.i.te, the muscanonge of my native lakes! Toad is not horrible to toad, or thief to thief. Philanthropists or statesmen may environ him with more genial circ.u.mstances, and so enable his propensities to work more directly for the good of society; but to punish him--to punish nature for daring to be nature!--Never! I may thank the Upper Destinies that they have not made me as other men are--that they have endowed me with n.o.bler instincts, a more delicate conformation than the thief; but I have my part to play, and he has his. Why should we wish to be other than the All-wise has made us?”
”Fine doctrine that,” grumbled Sandy; ”gin ye've first made up your mind wi' the Pharisee, that ye _are_ no like ither men.”