In reality, ever since the evangelical tutors employed by the Duchess had succeeded in convincing Alistair that the Catholic creed was false, without convincing him that their own creed was true, he had been groping in a spiritual twilight. The religious instinct, though wounded and defaced, was not dead.
He still cherished a more kindly feeling for the Roman Church than for any other, as the one which he had found most indulgent to the sinner, or, at all events, most intelligent and tactful in dealing with himself. To his intellect the language of both creeds sounded incredible. But whereas the teachers of his mother’s confession seemed to share the darkness of their most ignorant disciples, he had found among the priests of Rome some whom he could listen to without impatience.
“Our Church,” they declared, “has never claimed that her formulas should be taken literally like mathematical propositions. The Catholic word for ‘creed’ is ‘symbol.’ We offer our dogma, not as the truth itself, but as a symbol of the truth—an allegory, if you will. It is the best statement of the relations between the Unseen and man that the human mind is capable of receiving, and we offer it as nothing more.”
This comfortable language would have gone far to satisfy Alistair if he had not observed on the part of his Catholic friends a certain reticence and subservience to authority which alarmed his liberty-loving instincts.
The answer to his demand for freedom was the answer of all priesthoods.
“Only a few minds are strong enough to stand alone. Our Church does not forbid inquiry. She does not punish freethought. What she forbids and punishes is the attempt to disturb the ignorant, to rob them of the faith which is the best for them, without giving them anything in exchange. You may persuade the peasant-woman to give up her Christian Catechism, but you will not persuade her to replace it by the Synthetical Philosophy.”
Alistair felt that this was still the old situation. He was to be silenced lest others might be shocked. He was to be bound that they might be free—to suffer that they might be strong.
While he thus found himself cut off from the communion of the orthodox, the Christian religion continued to fascinate him. His spirit felt the presence of a living truth concealed in these formulas which his mind could not accommodate, like a beautiful face hidden beneath an ugly mask.
Sir Bernard Vanbrugh’s theology was of the new scientific kind which calls itself anthropology. The analysis of myths and the genesis of beliefs had formed his favourite study, outside the range of his profession, and he found a missionary’s satisfaction in imparting his lore to Alistair Stuart.
“Christianity,” Vanbrugh proclaimed, “is a synthesis of all the ancient beliefs of the Mediterranean, some of them comparatively enlightened, others purely barbarous. We are now able to trace every one of its rites and dogmas to an origin in some older state of society. Its evolution has been as entirely natural as that of man himself.”