V.
Maddock went out into the balcony and stood there, leaning on the rails, reflectively smoking his cigar and looking out at the scene stretched before him like a panorama. Alcock held quiet converse with Gildea for a few moments, apologetically asking permission to go and write a letter, the importance of which he would have explained at length, had not Gildea interposed.
“By all means,” said he; and, with a word of excuse to and gesture of acknowledgment from Maddock, took Alcock off into a room opposite, a study, where he ensconced him at the desk and, having pointed out the position of all the epistolatory necessities and told him to ring the bell for Edgar who would see that the letter was posted at once, withdrew and rejoined Maddock on the balcony.
“You will excuse Alcock,” Gildea said, lighting a cigarette, “He has a letter of importance to write, which he does not care to leave till we come back.”
Maddock at once acquiesced. There was a pause, both smoking with leisure.
At last:
“Well,” said Gildea, taking his cigarette from his lips, “and how did you like the happy family? You were a very quiet member of it.”
“Yes,” said Maddock, “I refrained from mewing and sat still, purring and pleasantly watching the others. It struck me, shortly after Alcock came in, that we were a very representative happy family.”
“We only wanted a genial Theist to make the pile complete. Your good Judge is a Theist. Now if we could only....”
“Ay, ay,” said Maddock with something like a chuckle, “Judge Parker is a Theist! As your friend the Argus said, he was ‘the learned gentleman who discovered Unitarianism in the early months of 1885.’—Come now,” he proceeded with a sudden concentration of interest, “what are you going to say of the affirmative side of this man’s criticism, after your remark that there was not, in modern times, one man of real intellectual power that has believed in a personal God and not believed in a divine Christ? Are you going to turn upon me again with your precious purely intellectual view of things, and say: ‘The question that now arises is, has not Theism, after all,’ et cetera, et cetera, et cetera?”
“Certainly I am,” said Gildea laughing, “but all hope of utilizing the purely intellectual view seems lost after my unwary committal of myself.—No,” he added more seriously, “I have of course little more left to do than to try and get you to join me in abuse of the good Judge for his superstition, that is to say his Theism, and that other egregious vice of his—his ludicrously inadequate conception of what is ‘good and ennobling.’ To take the last first, I will say, as I once heard Hawkesbury say on a like occasion, that I would far sooner believe in the Orthodox Christ than in the Unitarian Jesus. Indeed I might broaden my saying, and declare to the whole Rationalistic conception of Christ and Christianity generally, what Carlyle declared to Voltaire: ‘Cease, my much respected Herr Von Voltaire, shut thy sweet voice; for the task appointed thee seems finished. Sufficiently hast thou demonstrated this proposition, considerable or otherwise: That the Mythus of the Christian Religion looks not in the eighteenth century as it did in the eighth.... Take our thanks, then, and—thyself away.’”
“Judge Parker’s view of Our Lord,” said Maddock frowning, “is,—not to say blasphemous,—simply fatuous! I do not know whether indignation at impudence or contempt at stupidity the most possesses a man, when he is told, by such an one as this, that ‘the Christian Theist, who regards Jesus as man, considers, and rightly from his point of view, that it is within his power to attain to the life of, and to follow the example of, Christ.’ Imagine Judge Parker attaining to the life of anyone but a blatantly successful lawyer in the truculent spiritual quagmires of a colonial capital!”
“Our good Judge’s discovery and investigation of the character of Jesus,” said Gildea, almost ready to laugh outright at Maddock’s concluding dythramb, “are certainly not unlike those of a man who should charter a penny steam-boat for a trip up the Nile, and proceed, on his return to England, to give a lengthy description of certain large triangular-shaped buildings which, he should say, bore considerable resemblance to the common-sense conception of pyramids! And it is possible perhaps to denominate such a description as fatuous. His conception of Jesus is, we are agreed—inadequate: ‘an exemplar ... who merits all praise, all esteem, and love, and admiration for that, being human, he led so pure, so blameless, so noble and unselfish a life.’ This, what this with our good Judge means, is an inadequate conception of Jesus. He perceives nothing of the real essence of Jesus. Anything that Arnold, whom he quotes so often, may have said of ‘the mildness and sweet reasonableness’ of Jesus, or that Renan may have said of the wonderful powers of personal attraction that are in Jesus—all this has fallen like water on the judicial back of our duck here! It is for none of these that our good Judge, our typical man of common-sense, goes to his New Testament. ‘Mildness and sweet reasonableness,’ the yearning of a consuming personal love, are not clear solid spiritual qualities which his mind can see and touch and handle. They have no place in the copy-books of the soul, nor yet in the sum-books thereof, and you shall search its ‘Little Arthur’s History’ from beginning to end and find no mention of them. Their only place is in the thoughts, words, and actions of the men and women who have moved thousands and millions of their fellows, in the radiant days of high civilizations, in the agonies of the travail or the destruction of peoples and races. ‘It is apparent,’ says he, ‘that we can collect from the Christian Bible, a purer, more beautiful, and more advanced ethical code, than is to be obtained from any other book or books.’ O good Judge, O belovèd Judge, if all that is to be got out of the Christian Bible is an ‘ethical code,’ then the sooner Martin Tupper and Mr. Harrison are deified, the sooner will the human soul have reached its apogee!”
“That is well,” said Maddock, “but, at the same time, there are few things that disgust me more than the man of the opposite sort—he who, like so many of these Socialists of yours, will sing the love of Christ with passion, and then go out and commit a hundred of the grossest sins. Christ is morality.”
“Ah no,” said Gildea, “he is something better; he is religion! It is immoral to commit adultery: it is moral to punish it: (‘Infinitely better that they should atone for it, than lose a step towards a higher life’): it is religious, not to condemn it, but to bid go and sin no more. It is immoral to take your share in your father’s substance and waste it in violent living: it is moral to punish this prodigal, to whom repentance has only come with a belly that was fain to fill itself with the husks of the swine: it is religious to kill the fatted calf for such a penitent, and rejoice and make glad. Jesus’ sole criticism on practical morality, on the realization of an ethical code in everyday life, is, that ‘it was not so from the beginning.’”
“Just so; but this is precisely the difference of the ethical code of the Old and of the New Dispensation.”
“Will you let me say, that it has nothing to do with any ethical code at all? For, surely, the essence of ethical codes is justice, and the essence of the religious code, of the code of Jesus, is love. The Amazon may be a big river, but you shall compass all time in trying to put into it the unspeakable ocean.—No, it is just here that, as Fitzgerald would say, all these good people are superstitious. They believe that the spiritual progress of humanity is synonymous with the progress of one portion of the spirit of humanity, namely the ethical portion; and this, being a belief in a thing not worthy of that belief, may justly, as it seems to me, be denominated a superstition. It is superstition without religion.”
“And what, then,” asked Maddock, “do you call the belief of men like your friend Hawkesbury?”
“Those who are immoral? men and women who, as most of these Socialists, work in the spirit of Jesus and act (as a polemist would say) in the manner of Bradlaugh?—what is their belief?”
“Yes,” said Maddock.
“Why, clearly,” answered Gildea smiling, “religion with superstition! The men of enthusiasm like Hawkesbury, and the men of morality like Judge Parker, are surely both of them right, and surely both of them wrong: right in their appreciation of the truth of one portion of the spiritual life, wrong in their ignorance of another portion. They both possess truth, and they both possess superstition.”
“And what of a man like our friend Alcock here, who is ignorant of religion and more or less lax as regards morality?”
“He too,” answered Gildea, “as Fitzgerald clearly demonstrated, is a victim of superstition. But he is not, for all that, without his belief, without his appreciation of truth. He believes in that portion of the spiritual life which we call intellect. Men like him have their enthusiasm, for which they are ready to suffer and do suffer all things; and that enthusiasm is the enthusiasm for that portion of truth which we call Science.”
“And your Fitzgerald—is he too both right and wrong?”
“Of course he is; for has he not both belief and negation? All belief is truth, not the whole truth, but a part of the truth. There is but one thing that is the whole truth.”
“God?”
“No, not God, for God does not include Nature, from which He is the outcome—not God, not Nature, but that which contains them both, Everything, the All!”
“Pooh,” said Maddock, “flat Pantheism!”
“And suppose,” cried Gildea, “it were Pot-theism, if the thing is true!” (He laughed outright.) “—That answer of Carlyle’s,” he said, “is immortal.”
“Oh, it was Carlyle said it?” said Maddock, “I had forgotten.—And so,” he proceeded, “the secret is out, and Sir Horace Gildea ‘stands confessed a Pantheist in all his charms!’”
“Two of the happy family still remain unaccounted for,” Gildea said, “although they too have not probably attained to perfect truth.”
“Oh, that is you and I. As for me, I can describe myself without your aid. I believe in morality and religion, with a touch of superstition in both.”
“Worse,” said Gildea, “worse!”
“What, then?”
“You believe in theology which is as bad a superstition as, what Judge Parker calls, ‘the calm blissful sea of pure theistic belief.’ (You notice how emphatic he is about his superstition and casual about his truth?)”
“Stop a moment now, my bright Apollo, and explain to me, what you have not yet attempted to, what the superstition of Theism is?”
“What is Theism?—‘It is a faith,’ answers our good Judge, ‘which is the faith of all others’ (that is to say the faith of Judge Parker and all the ‘celebrated unitarian ministers’), ‘to be clung to, cherished and maintained as long as man exists—belief, trust in, and love for the All-loving, All-righteous, All-wise Universal Spirit of God.’ Now observe that this faith, this unique faith of faiths, is ‘refreshing, and invigorating in its simplicity’—(as, we might add, is also its formulator, if we did not shun flippancy as we would the pest)—‘warm and glowing in its absolute unclouded devotion to, love for, and perfect trust in God alone—proclaimed by Nature!’ O wise Judge, O upright Judge, O Judge much more elder than thy looks, where, when, and how, in the name of all observers of Nature from Darwin through Haeckel to Tennyson, did you discover therein either this love or righteousness of which you make such mention? ‘The struggle for existence and survival of the fittest,’ the parent of theistic righteousness and love! ‘Proclaimed by Nature!’—and Nature in italics! O immemorial phrase that eats up all the others even as Aaron’s rod swallowed up all the rods of the magicians!—Who, after this, would care to trouble himself with all the other potent items of this faith of faiths? The idea of God, God ‘the All-loving, All-righteous, All-wise Universal Spirit’ ‘originated in instinct,’ and is not the slow and painful growth of time? Think of the love of Jehovah! the righteousness of Baal! the wisdom of Moloch!—The beauty and sympathy and warmth of the theistic form of belief,” he added, “are recognizable as a half-hearted mixture of the clap-trap of Religion and Science—Superstition, which knows that it is naked, and sews fig-leaves together, and make itself an apron!”
Maddock, however, could have no confidence in the expressed views of this man, from whose face the light of amusement, amusement at others and himself, seemed never to be absent long. There had, indeed, been moments when it required all Maddock’s intuition to prevent his perception rising in absolute revolt against what seemed Gildea’s flagrant insincerity: then his perception had said to him that this was but a youth, endowed with brilliant abilities, the mere exercise of which was a pleasure and satisfaction to him, caring too little for any one thing to owe it loyalty. Whereto his intuition had replied that this was not a youth but a man, and a man whose secret could not thus be read. And the feeling that Maddock had, once before that day, felt towards Gildea returned now with an intensity and strangeness that seemed to Maddock, when he afterwards considered it, as little short of wonderful. Maddock’s profundity was often beyond the average, and herein indeed lay his secret, herein nestled “the heart of his mystery.”
“And yet,” said Gildea, “here, as in the other case, the common-sense view of belief has, of course, its excellence. ‘To take nothing else,’ says the Judge, ‘the very idea of “space” and “distance” that astronomy has given us fills the mind with wonder and with awe, clothing nature with a sublimity, a majesty, and a beauty which, otherwise, we had never known.’ For observe that Space and Time, these two inexhaustible ideas, are not, to our average intelligent secular view of things, the mere words that they are to the orthodox: they are realities thus far, that they help us to perceive that ‘there exists throughout space,—throughout the vast limitless universe,—motion, order, beauty; that there is behind all motion, all order, all beauty, a force that produces the motion, the order, and the beauty.’ And further. They are realities thus far, that they help us to be (whatever Dr. Maddock, in a polemico-theological spirit, may declare) earnest in our life and earnest in our wish to bring home to others the truth of that life, a ‘most serious and difficult task!’ They help us to all this, and an unrecognized intuitional belief in the essence which, in other forms and other men whom we fail to appreciate, not to say understand, we condemn—our intuitional belief, I say, in the Faith, Hope, and Love, which are the great movers of the progress of Humanity both upward and onward, will not let the forms that portions of this belief may take in us make the whole grow cold, lifeless, petrified, but the beauty and melody of our acts will often be found to contradict the deformity and discord of our words.”
“I confess, Sir Horace,” said Maddock, “that you are a puzzle to me. I really should not be surprised to see you some day walking side by side with the Judge, the best friends in the world!”
“And perhaps,” said Gildea, “the Judge would not subsequently be surprised to see me doing the same with yourself! For that indeed is the only use of such poor creatures as I: we see the good in opponents and serve as links in the spiritual bridge of Humanity.”
“I should very much like,” said Maddock, “to hear how you would abuse me to him. I think I see the urbane expression with which you would delight him by shewing how, in this ecclesiastical, metaphysical, theological polemist here, habemus confitentem asinum; and then turn upon him and say: ‘The question that now arises, my dear Judge, is, has this man nothing but faults—has he no excellencies? does there remain, after the attack on him of so eminent a biblical critic as Judge Parker is, no residuum of real and vital truth? Let us see.’”
“Doctor, Doctor,” said Gildea, “to make me laugh so, is cruel!”
“You do not consider me,” said Maddock, “in the least.”
They both laughed heartily.
“And now,” said Maddock, “in order to complete the matter, tell me, what is your superstition? Here are Alcock and Parker with their respective superstitions of Atheism and Theism, of purely scientific and purely ethical progress. Here is Hawkesbury with his superstition about the unselfishness of the People and the practical neglect of Morality. Here is Fitzgerald with his superstitious belief in a Church whose splendid logical consistency will prove its ruin. Here am I, a member of a sect that more nearly approaches ideal Christianity than any other sect in existence, and is a logical absurdity—blessed with the superstition of theology and, worse, of polemical theology, with.... But I cannot express all my superstitions: they seem more in number than the hairs of my head!”
“Let us say broadly, then, that Alcock and the Judge are those who have superstition without, and Fitzgerald, you, and to a certain degree Hawkesbury, those who have superstition with, Religion.”
“And that you?”
“And that I am he who unites in my proper person the superstitions of all with the actualities of none.”
There was a pause. Then:
“Sir Horace,” said Maddock, “I take you seriously. And I will confess that I would sooner, far sooner, be any one of us than you.—Verily and indeed,” he added, solemnly, “I cannot see why you should care to live.”
“Nor yet,” said Gildea, “why I should care to die?”
Maddock was possessed by sadness. The absolute, inevitable hopelessness of this man made him again turn faint and sick at heart.
“Nor yet,” he said, “why you should care to die.”
There was a long pause. Never again could Maddock be illuded into momentary misunderstanding of this man: he had now not only seen this strange soul laid bare before him and felt the influence of that sight, but had felt as if he had, as it were, almost received it into his own, almost made it a part of himself.
At last:
“I asked you to believe,” he said with a touch of wistfulness in face and tone, “that I was your true friend. You will perhaps, forgive me if I ... if I offer you the one token of it that seems left to me to offer. Some day—I cannot tell, but so I trust—you may care to think that, each night you close your eyes in sleep, there is one whose prayers for you are rising, as he believes, to the God and Father of us all, to bless and keep you, to lift up the light of his countenance upon you, and to give you peace.”
The two men stood facing each other for a few moments in silence: then their hands met in a close, long clasp, and parted; and they turned, standing almost touching each other, looking out over the lovely scene of earth and water and sky.
At last:
“Those clouds,” said Gildea softly, “they have a peerless radiancy. One seems to understand how the men of the past days saw a spirit therein, and held converse with it with wonder and delight and awe. Those were days of a music and beauty and sweetness such as we shall never know again.”
“If not,” said Maddock as softly,
“if not the calm
of its early mountainous shore,
yet a solemn peace of its own.”
A footstep was heard behind them. It was Edgar, come to say that Mrs. and Miss Medwin had arrived and were up in the drawing-room with Mr. Alcock.
Gildea stepped out onto the lawn.
“Let us go up by the balcony,” he said to Maddock.