The Silent Isle

by Arthur Christopher Benson

The preacher seemed to feel the difficulty dimly, for he fell back upon the thought that the agony was caused by Christ's bearing the load of the world's sin. But here again I felt that, after all, sin must have been in a sense permitted by God. If God is omnipotent and all-embracing, no amount of freewill in man could enable him to choose what was not there already in the Mind of God.

And then, too, the lesson of science is that man is slowly struggling upwards out of his bestial inheritance into purity and light; and thus if a man can inherit evil from evil progenitors by the law of God, he is not a free agent in the matter; and it thus becomes a piece of sad impiety, or worse, to say that it was inconceivable agony to God to bear the sins which his own awful law perpetuated.

And to go deeper, what did the sacrifice effect? It effected no instant change in the disposition of man; it appears to me to be a dark profanity to believe that the human death of Christ effected any change in the purpose and Love of God to the world. That God should come himself on earth to die, in order that he might thereafter regard the human race more mercifully, seems to me, if it were true, to be a helpless piece of metaphysical jugglery. If that were true of God, there is nothing that I could not believe of him.

And so the words of the preacher, a man, as I knew, of faithful energy and unbroken prosperity of virtue, brought me no more hint of the truth than did the voice of a hidden dove which cooed contentedly in the stillness in some sun-warmed window of the clerestory. Dove and preacher alike had lived secure and contented lives under the shadow of the great Church, and equally, no doubt, if unconsciously, approved of the system which made such tranquil lives possible.

Once, it seemed to me, the human accent broke urgently through, when the preacher spoke of dark hours of spiritual dryness, when the soul seemed shut out from God—"When we know," he said in heart-felt tones, "that the Love of God is all about us, but we cannot enter into it; it seems to be outside of us." Had he indeed suffered thus, this courteous, kindly priest? I felt that he had, and that he was one of the sorrowful fellowship.

One word he said that dwells with me, that "Faith overleaps all visible horizons." That was a golden thought; so that as I walked back in the cool of the afternoon, and saw the prodigious plain stretch on all hands, and thought how strangely my own tiny life was limited and bound, I felt that the message of Christ was a mysterious trust, an undefined hope; not a mechanical process of forgiveness and atonement, but an assurance that there is something in the world which calls lovingly to the soul, and that while we stretch out yearning hands and desirous hearts to that, we are indeed very near to the unknown Mind of God.

X

I have often wondered how it has come about that Job has become proverbial for patience. I suppose that it has arisen out of the verse in the Epistle of St. James about the patience of Job; but, like the passage in the Book of Numbers which attributes an extreme meekness to Moses, it seems to me to be either a very infelicitous description, or else a case where both adjectives have shifted their meaning. Moses is notable for an almost fiery vehemence of character, and the punishment that was laid upon him was the outcome of a display of intemperate wrath. Just as we associate meekness with the worm that never turns, so the typically patient animal is the ass who is too phlegmatic to resent the most unjust chastisement, and ready to accommodate itself to the most overtaxing burdens. But Job is the very opposite of this; he endures, because there is no way out; but he never for a moment acquiesces in the justice of his affliction, and his complaints are both specific and protracted. He does not even display any very conspicuous fortitude under his afflictions. He is not indomitable so much as persistent. He is rather stubbornly self-righteous. It could not, of course, be otherwise, for the essence of the situation is that the sufferer should be aware that his deeds do not deserve punishment, and that the sufferings he endures should be permitted in order that his faith in God as well as his faith in his own integrity should be tested.

The truth is that the word patience is used in English in a double sense; it is applied to a sort of unreasoning stupidity, which accepts suffering and pain without adding to it by imaginative comparison; such patience knows nothing of the pain of which Dante speaks, the pain of contrasting present unhappiness with past delight; and similarly, it does not suffer the pangs of anticipation, the terrors of which Lord Beaconsfield spoke, when he said that the worst calamities in his life were the calamities which never happened. Nine-tenths of the misery of suffering lies in the power of forecasting its continuance and its increase, and the lesser patience of which I have spoken is the patience which, by no effort of reason, but by pure instinct, hears the burden of the moment in the spirit of the proverb that "sufficient for the day is the evil thereof."

But there is a nobler and a purer quality of patience which is perhaps one of the highest and most hopeful attributes of humanity, because it is nurtured in so strong a soil, and watered with the dew of tears; this is a certain tranquil, courageous, and unembittered sweetness in the presence of an irreparable calamity, which is in its very essence divine, and preaches more forcibly the far-reaching permanence of the spiritual clement in mankind than a thousand rhapsodies and panegyrics extolling human ingenuity and human greatness. Mankind has a deeply rooted and childlike instinct that apology and repentance ought to be met with the suspension of pains and penalties, and the hardest lesson in the world to learn is that guilt may be forgiven, but that the consequences of guilt may yet have to be endured. When we have really learnt that, we are indeed perfected. St. Peter in one of his epistles says that it is less creditable to be patient when one is buffeted for one's faults than when one suffers for one's virtues. I fear that I cannot agree with this. One may be convinced of the justice of a sentence, but the more one is convinced of it, the more does one regret the course of conduct that made the sentence necessary. The sinner who suffers for his sin bears not only the pain of the punishment but also the sense of shame and self-condemnation. The good man who suffers for his goodness does indeed have to bear the burden of an awful mystery, a doubt whether God is indeed on the side of the righteous; but he is not crushed beneath the additional burden of self-contempt, he has not the humiliating sense of folly and weakness which the transgressor has to bear; and thus it so often happens that the well-meaning transgressor is slow to learn the lesson of patience, because he takes refuge in a vague sort of metaphysics, and attributes to heredity and environment what is really the outcome of his own wilfulness and perversity.