‘WELL, MY DEAR COUSIN—You may possibly have some logical ground from which to deny Popery, if you deny all other religions with it; but how those who hold any received form of Christianity whatsoever can fairly side with you against Rome, I cannot see. I am sure I have been sent to Rome by them, not drawn thither by Jesuits. Not merely by their defects and inconsistencies; not merely because they go on taunting us, and shrieking at us with the cry that we ought to go to Rome, till we at last, wearied out, take them at their word, and do at their bidding the thing we used to shrink from with terror—not this merely but the very doctrines we hold in common with them, have sent me to Rome. For would these men have known of them if Rome had not been? The Trinity—the Atonement—the Inspiration of Scripture.—A future state—that point on which the present generation, without a smattering of psychological science, without even the old belief in apparitions, dogmatises so narrowly and arrogantly—what would they have known of them but for Rome? And she says there are three realms in the future state . . . heaven, hell, and purgatory . . . What right have they to throw away the latter, and arbitrarily retain the two former? I am told that Scripture gives no warrant for a third state. She says that it does—that it teaches that implicitly, as it teaches other, the very highest doctrines; some hold, the Trinity itself. . . . It may be proved from Scripture; for it may be proved from the love and justice of God revealed in Scripture. The Protestants divide—in theory, that is—mankind into two classes, the righteous, who are destined to infinite bliss; the wicked, who are doomed to infinite torment; in which latter class, to make their arbitrary division exhaustive, they put of course nine hundred and ninety-nine out of the thousand, and doom to everlasting companionship with Borgias and Cagliostros, the gentle, frivolous girl, or the peevish boy, who would have shrunk, in life, with horror from the contact. . . . Well, at least, their hell is hellish enough . . . if it were but just. . . . But I, Lancelot, I cannot believe it! I will not believe it! I had a brother once—affectionate, simple, generous, full of noble aspirations—but without, alas! a thought of God; yielding in a hundred little points, and some great ones, to the infernal temptations of a public school. . . . He died at seventeen. Where is he now? Lancelot! where is he now? Never for a day has that thought left my mind for years. Not in heaven—for he has no right there; Protestants would say that as well as I. . . . Where, then?—Lancelot! not in that other place. I cannot, I will not believe it. For the sake of God’s honour, as well as of my own sanity, I will not believe it! There must be some third place—some intermediate chance, some door of hope—some purifying and redeeming process beyond the grave. . . . Why not a purifying fire? Ages of that are surely punishment enough—and if there be a fire of hell, why not a fire of purgatory? . . . After all, the idea of purgatory as a fire is only an opinion, not a dogma of the Church. . . . But if the gross flesh which has sinned is to be punished by the matter which it has abused, why may it not be purified by it?’
‘You may laugh, if you will, at both, and say again, as I have heard you say ere now, that the popular Christian paradise and hell are but a Pagan Olympus and Tartarus, as grossly material as Mahomet’s, without the honest thorough-going sexuality, which you thought made his notion logical and consistent. . . . Well, you may say that, but Protestants cannot; for their idea of heaven and ours is the same—with this exception, that theirs will contain but a thin band of saved ones, while ours will fill and grow to all eternity. . . . I tell you, Lancelot, it is just the very doctrines for which England most curses Rome, and this very purgatory at the head of them, which constitute her strength and her allurement; which appeal to the reason, the conscience, the heart of men, like me, who have revolted from the novel superstition which looks pitilessly on at the fond memories of the brother, the prayers of the orphan, the doubled desolation of the widow, with its cold terrible assurance, “There is no hope for thy loved and lost ones—no hope, but hell for evermore!”
‘I do not expect to convert you. You have your metempsychosis, and your theories of progressive incarnation, and your monads, and your spirits of the stars and flowers. I have not forgotten a certain talk of ours over Falk Von Müller’s Recollections of Goethe, and how you materialists are often the most fantastic of theorists. . . . I do not expect, I say, to convert you. I only want to show you there is no use trying to show the self-satisfied Pharisees of the popular sect—why, in spite of all their curses, men still go back to Rome.’
Lancelot read this, and re-read it; and smiled, but sadly—and the more he read, the stronger its arguments seemed to him, and he rejoiced thereat. For there is a bad pleasure—happy he who has not felt it—in a pitiless reductio ad absurdum, which asks tauntingly, ‘Why do you not follow out your own conclusions?’—instead of thanking God that people do not follow them out, and that their hearts are sounder than their heads. Was it with this feeling that the fancy took possession of him, to show the letter to Tregarva? I hope not—perhaps he did not altogether wish to lead him into temptation, any more than I wish to lead my readers, but only to make him, just as I wish to make them, face manfully a real awful question now racking the hearts of hundreds, and see how they will be able to answer the sophist fiend—for honestly, such he is—when their time comes, as come it will. At least he wanted to test at once Tregarva’s knowledge and his logic. As for his ‘faith,’ alas! he had not so much reverence for it as to care what effect Luke’s arguments might have there. ‘The whole man,’ quoth Lancelot to himself, ‘is a novel phenomenon; and all phenomena, however magnificent, are surely fair subjects for experiment. Magendie may have gone too far, certainly, in dissecting a live dog—but what harm in my pulling the mane of a dead lion?’
So he showed the letter to Tregarva as they were fishing together one day—for Lancelot had been installed duly in the Whitford trout preserves’—Tregarva read it slowly; asked, shrewdly enough, the meaning of a word or two as he went on; at last folded it up deliberately, and returned it to its owner with a deep sigh. Lancelot said nothing for a few minutes; but the giant seemed so little inclined to open the conversation, that he was forced at last to ask him what he thought of it.
‘It isn’t a matter for thinking, sir, to my mind—There’s a nice fish on the feed there, just over-right that alder.’
‘Hang the fish! Why not a matter for thinking?’
‘To my mind, sir, a man may think a deal too much about many matters that come in his way.’
‘What should he do with them, then?’
‘Mind his own business.’