Part 4 (2/2)

All through the spring and summer of 1888 letters poured in upon Mrs.

Ward by the score and the hundred, both from known and unknown correspondents, so that her husband and sister-in-law had almost to build a hedge around her and to insist that she should not answer them all herself. Those which the book provoked from her old friends, however, especially those of more orthodox views than her own, were often of poignant interest. The Warden of Keble wrote her six sheets of friendly argument and remonstrance. Mr. Creighton wrote her a letter full of closely reasoned criticism of Elsmere's position, to which she made the following reply:

_March 13, 1888._

MY DEAR MAX,--

I have been deeply interested by your letter, and am very grateful to you for the fairness and candour of it. Perhaps it is an affectation to say always that one likes candour!--but I certainly like it from you, and should be aggrieved if you did not give it me.

I think you only evade the whole issue raised by the book when you say that Elsmere was never a Christian. Of course in the case of every one who goes through such a change, it is easy to say this; it is extremely difficult to prove it; and all probability is against its being true in every case. What do you really fall back upon when you say that if Elsmere had been a Christian he could not have been influenced as he was? Surely on the ”inward witness.” But the ”inward witness,” or as you call it ”the supernatural life,”

belongs to every religion that exists. The Andaman islander even believes himself filled by his G.o.d, the devout Buddhist and Mahommedan certainly believe themselves under divine and supernatural direction, and have been inspired by the belief to heroic efforts and sufferings. What is, in essence and fundamentally, to distinguish your ”inner witness” from theirs? And if the critical observer maintains that this ”supernatural life” is in all cases really an intense life of the imagination, differently peopled and conditioned, what answer have you?

None, unless you appeal to the facts and _fruits_ of Christianity.

The Church has always done so. Only the Quaker or the Quietist can stand mainly on the ”inward witness.”

The fruits we are not concerned with. But it is as to the _facts_ that Elsmere and, as I conceive, our whole modern time is really troubled. An acute Scotch economist was talking to Humphry the other day about the religious change in the Scotch lowlands. ”It is so pathetic,” he said: ”when I was young religion was the main interest, the pa.s.sionate occupation of the whole people. Now when I go back there, as I constantly do, I find everything changed. The old keenness is gone, the people's minds are turning to other things; there is a restless consciousness, coming they know not whence, but invading every stratum of life, that _the evidence is not enough_.” There, on another scale, is Elsmere's experience writ large. Why is he to be called ”very ill-trained,” and his impressions ”accidental” because he undergoes it?... What convinced _me_ finally and irrevocably was two years of close and constant occupation with the materials of history in those centuries which lie near to the birth of Christianity, and were the critical centuries of its development. I then saw that to adopt the witness of those centuries to matters of fact, without translating it at every step into the historical language of our own day--a language which the long education of time has brought closer to the realities of things--would be to end by knowing nothing, actually and truly, about their life. And if one is so to translate Augustine and Jerome, nay even Suetonius and Tacitus, when they talk to you of raisings from the dead, and making blind men to see, why not St. Paul and the Synoptics?

I don't think you have ever felt this pressure, though within the limits of your own work I notice that you are always so translating the language of the past. But those who have, cannot escape it by any appeal to the ”inward witness.” They too, or many of them, still cling to a religious life of the imagination, nay perhaps they live for it, but it must be one where the expansive energies of life and reason cannot be always disturbing and tormenting, which is less vulnerable and offers less prey to the plunderer than that which depends on the orthodox Christian story.

Another old friend, Mrs. Edward Conybeare, wrote to contend that the ”mere life and death of the carpenter's son of Nazareth could never have proved the vast historical influence for good which you allow it to be,”

had that life ended in

”nothing but a Syrian grave.”

Mrs. Ward replied to her as follows:--

_May 16, 1888._

MY DEAR FRANCES,

It was very interesting to me to get your letter about _Robert Elsmere_. I wish we could have a good talk about it. Writing is very difficult to me, for the letters about it are overwhelming, and I am always as you know more or less hampered by writer's cramp.

I am thinking of ”A Conversation” for one of the summer numbers of the _Nineteenth Century_, in which some of the questions which are only suggested in the book may be carried a good deal further. For the more I think and read the more plain the great lines of that distant past become to me, the more clearly I see G.o.d at work there, through the forms of thought, the beliefs, the capacities of the first three centuries, as I see Him at work now, through the forms of thought, the beliefs and capacities of our own.

Christianity was the result of many converging lines of thought and development. The time was ripe for a moral revolution, and a great personality, and the great personality came. That a life of importance and far-reaching influence could have been lived within the sphere of religion at that moment, or for centuries afterwards, without undergoing a process of miraculous amplification, would, I think, have been impossible. The generations before and the generations after supply ill.u.s.tration after ill.u.s.tration of it.

That Jesus, our dear Master, partly shared this tendency of his time and was partly bewildered and repelled by it, is very plain to me.

As to the belief in the Resurrection, I have many things to say about it, and shall hope to say them in public when I have pondered them long enough. But I long to say them not negatively, for purposes of attack, but positively, for purposes of reconstruction. It is about the new forms of faith and the new grounds of combined action that I really care intensely. I want to challenge those who live in doubt and indecision from year's end to year's end, to think out the matter, and for their children's sake to count up what remains to them, and to join frankly for purposes of life and conduct with those who are their spiritual fellows. It is the levity or the cowardice that will not think, or the indolence and self-indulgence that is only too glad to throw off restraints, which we have to fear. But in truth for religion, or for the future, I have no fear at all. G.o.d is his own vindication in human life.

But apart from the religious argument, the characters in _Robert Elsmere_ aroused the greatest possible interest, especially perhaps that of Catherine.

”As an observer of the human ant-hill, quite impartial by this time,” wrote Prof. Huxley, ”I think your picture of one of the deeper aspects of our troubled times admirable. You are very hard on the philosophers: I do not know whether Langham or the Squire is the more unpleasant--but I have a great deal of sympathy with the latter, so I hope he is not the worse.

”If I may say so, I think the picture of Catherine is the gem of the book. She reminds me of her namesake of Siena--and would as little have failed in any duty, however gruesome. You remember Sodoma's picture?”

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