Part 14 (2/2)
”Quite so,” Paul answered, smiling; ”I think so myself. But that is not all. I have begun to have serious doubts about the Apostle himself and the whole Church altogether. I have been three years at Oxford now; and while I was reading for Mods, I don't think I was so unsettled in my mind. But since I have begun reading philosophy for my Greats, I have had to go into all sorts of deep books--Mill, and Spencer, and Bain, and all kinds of fellows who really think about things, you know, down to the very bottom--and an awful truth begins to dawn upon me, that our Apostle is after all only a very third-rate type of a thinker. Now that, you know, is really terrible.”
”I don't see why,” Meenie answered demurely. She was beginning to get genuinely interested.
”That is because you have never had to call in question a cherished and almost ingrown faith. You have never realized any similar circ.u.mstances.
Here am I, brought up by these good, honest, earnest people, with their own hard-earned money, as a pillar of their belief. I have been taught to look upon myself as the chosen advocate of their creed, and on the Apostle as an almost divinely inspired man. My whole life has been bound up in it; I have worked and read night and day in order to pa.s.s high and do honour to the Church; and now what do I begin to find the Church really is? A petty group of poor, devoted, enthusiastic, ignorant people, led blindly by a decently instructed but narrow-minded teacher, who has mixed up his own headstrong self-conceit and self-importance with his own peculiar ideas of abstract religion.” Paul paused, half surprised at himself, for, though he had doubted before, he had never ventured till that day to formulate his doubts, even to himself, in such plain and straightforward language.
”I see,” said Meenie, gravely; ”you have come into a wider world; you have mixed with wider ideas; and the wider world has converted you, instead of your converting the world. Well, that is only natural. Others beside you have had to change their opinions.”
”Yes, yes; but for me it is harder--oh! so much harder.”
”Because you have looked forward to being an Apostle?”
”Miss Bolton, you do me injustice--not in what you say, but in the tone you say it in. No, it is not the giving up of the Apostles.h.i.+p that troubles me, though I did hope that I might help in my way to make the world a new earth; but it is the shock and downfall of their hopes to all those good earnest people, and especially--oh! especially, Miss Bolton, to my own dear father and mother.” His eyes filled with tears as he spoke.
”I can understand,” said Meenie, sympathetically, her eyes dimming a little in response. ”They have set their hearts all their lives long on your accomplis.h.i.+ng this work, and it will be to them the disappointment of a cherished romance.”
They looked at one another a few minutes in silence.
”How long have you begun to have your doubts?” Meenie asked after the pause.
”A long time, but most of all since I saw you. It has made me--it has made me hesitate more about the fundamental article of our faith. Even now, I am not sure whether it is not wrong of me to be talking so with you about such matters.”
”I see,” said Meenie, a little more archly; ”it comes perilously near----” and she broke off, for she felt she had gone a step too far.
”Perilously near falling in love,” Paul continued boldly, turning his big eyes full upon her. ”Yes, perilously near.”
Their eyes met; Meenie's fell; and they said no more. But they both felt they understood one another. Just at that moment the Professor's wife came up to interrupt the _tete-a-tete_; ”for that young Owen,” she said to herself, ”is really getting quite too confidential with dear Meenie.”
That same evening Paul paced up and down his rooms in Peckwater with all his soul strangely upheaved within him and tossed and racked by a dozen conflicting doubts and pa.s.sions. Had he gone too far? Had he yielded like Adam to the woman who beguiled him? Had he given way like Samson to the snares of Delilah? For the old Scripture phraseology and imagery, so long burned into his very nature, clung to him still in spite of all his faltering changes of opinion. Had he said more than he thought and felt about the Apostle? Even if he was going to revise his views, was it right, was it candid, was it loyal to the truth, that he should revise them under the bia.s.sing influence of Meenie's eyes? If only he could have separated the two questions--the Apostle's mission, and the something which he felt growing up within him! But he could not--and, as he suspected, for a most excellent reason, because the two were intimately bound up in the very warp and woof of his existence. Nature was a.s.serting herself against the religious asceticism of the Apostle; it could not be so wrong for him to feel those feelings that had thrilled every heart in all his ancestors for innumerable generations.
He was in love with Meenie: he knew that clearly now. And this love was after all not such a wicked and terrible feeling; on the contrary, he felt all the better and the purer for it already. But then that might merely be the horrible seductiveness of the thing. Was it not always typified by the cup of Circe, by the song of the Sirens, by all that was alluring and beautiful and hollow? He paced up and down for half an hour, and then (he had sported his oak long ago) he lit his little reading lamp and sat down in the big chair by the bay window. Running his eyes over his bookshelf, he took out, half by chance, Spencer's ”Sociology.” Then, from sheer weariness, he read on for a while, hardly heeding what he read. At last he got interested, and finished a chapter.
When he had finished it, he put the book down, and felt that the struggle was over. Strange that side by side in the same world, in the same London, there should exist two such utterly different types of man as Herbert Spencer and the Gideonite Apostle. The last seemed to belong to the sixteenth century, the first to some new and hitherto uncreated social world. In an age which produced thinkers like that, how could he ever have mistaken the poor, bigoted, narrow, half-instructed Apostle for a divinely inspired teacher! So far as Paul Owen was concerned, the Gideonite Church and all that belonged to it had melted utterly into thin air.
Three days later, after the Eights in the early evening, Paul found an opportunity of speaking again alone with Meenie. He had taken their party on to the Christchurch barge to see the race, and he was strolling with them afterwards round the meadow walk by the bank of the Cherwell.
Paul managed to get a little in front with Meenie, and entered at once upon the subject of his late embarra.s.sments.
”I have thought it all over since, Miss Bolton,” he said--he half hesitated whether he should say ”Meenie” or not, and she was half disappointed that he didn't, for they were both very young, and very young people fall in love so unaffectedly--”I have thought it all over, and I have come to the conclusion that there is no help for it: I must break openly with the Church.”
”Of course,” said Meenie, simply. ”That I understood.”
He smiled at her ingenuousness. Such a very forward young person! And yet he liked it. ”Well, the next thing is, what to do about it. You see, I have really been obtaining my education, so to speak, under false pretences. I can't continue taking these good people's money after I have ceased to believe in their doctrines. I ought to have faced the question sooner. It was wrong of me to wait until--until it was forced upon me by other considerations.”
This time it was Meenie who blushed. ”But you don't mean to leave Oxford without taking your degree?” she asked quickly.
”No, I think it will be better not. To stop here and try for a fellows.h.i.+p is my best chance of repaying these poor people the money which I have taken from them for no purpose.”
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