To help me—what are these, at best, beside
God helping, God directing everwhere,
So that the earth shall yield her secrets up,
And every object there be charged to strike,
Teach, gratify, her master God appoints?”
His black arts were neither secret nor sublime, but the openly belauded methods of investigation, involving the tortures of sentient beings for the sake of learning the idle arts these pedants taught at the schools. He, too, had invoked the aid of the sullen forces of Nature, from which he had thrust Nature’s God, and they had done his bidding in a way—and the way was hopeless and dark. He had long felt this reckoning-day with himself must come; he was too honest to go on much longer leaving the question of his responsibility unsettled; he was too healthy-brained to give way to despair, till he had found a modus vivendi with his better nature impossible. Early bereft of a mother’s care, his father, wholly absorbed in his literary pursuits, and keeping up merely the slightest correspondence with his son, whom he had apparently almost forgotten, Elsworth had very few family ties, and was perfectly master of his own position. He had no fear of his father’s withdrawing his allowance of £300 a year. As it happened, he had the day before been paid a sum of rather over £100 by his agents; he was not in debt, save in a small sum to his landlady, and the hospital beadle, with some trifling amounts in the neighbourhood of St. Bernard’s which his man of business would pay. Why not cut the old familiar scenes? The wilderness period has to be gone through by every man with a work to do; the retreat is salutary for the stricken soul. Why not enter into it at once? He was a man of resolute will, possessed by a strong determination when the right and proper thing to be done confronted him. He had true stuff in his composition; originality, firm purpose. Boldness to do and dare came to him from his father, who had won his promotion in Indian warfare through a grandly conceived and brilliantly original movement, which had insured the enemy’s defeat at the moment his own seemed imminent. It should be done; he would go away early in the morning light. “Let him that is on the house-top not come down to take anything out of the house.” And he went not down, nor took anything of his old life, but made straight for Paris that same day, for, like his father when he made his brilliant move, he had formed a plan and carried it out.
He gave directions to his lawyer to discharge all claims upon him, to say that he had gone abroad, and would not return for some time, but begged him not to disclose his whereabouts to any one without first communicating with him at the address he should forward, when he had chosen his headquarters.
Now he began to enter into himself. He must seek some hallowed place of prayer to consecrate his remaining years to God, and renew his baptismal vows, to drink a deep draught of the Divine Spirit as he entered on his new work.
He turned into Notre Dame, to see the place again, and investigate some details of the architecture. He sat down on a bench before the high altar; they were singing the vesper service. A sense of heavenly calm pervaded his soul, his turbulent thoughts were quelled; his disquiet, his vague apprehensions, his disgust with life, all seemed to melt away as the influence of prayer lulled his troubled soul on the breast of God. The organ ceased to peal, the monotone of the priests and the clear young voices of the choir had died away. He peacefully slept in the house of prayer, and angels seemed to whisper sweet words to him, and glorified saints from out the storied panes to counsel him. He was aroused by a Suisse, who, noting him as a tourist, and having an eye to a douceur, invited him to come and see the relics, and the treasures in the sacristy and chapels. He declined, and moved away—moved to a less conspicuous place, and again sat down to muse on the great things the sacred fane had witnessed in the past. How many and great events of human history had been enacted under its shadow and beneath its roof! Here, and on that very altar, had been enthroned a vile woman to be worshipped as Goddess of Reason, a visible presentment of what a nation or a single human soul meant when it had cast out God. Could anything, had anything kept the intellect of man from madness when bereft of the idea of essential goodness outside the mean world of man? All history, he must confess, answered “No.” And “No” was thunder-pealed from that desecrated altar, where the idea of God had been openly crucified amid the highest civilization of modern Europe, by the lusts and madness of the age of science. Dethroned and cast out for what? When all was gone, and the last traces of the faith stamped out, as far as might be, what was to come in its place? What for that market woman kneeling by his side rapt by devotion at least to an idea more exalted than her business or her pleasures could have suggested? Surely something ennobling her small surroundings, if only by its poetry and sentiment. And that workman there under the sculpture of the Cross-bearer? Not altogether waste of time for him to meditate a few moments on sacrifice of self for good of other men. It might help him perhaps to bear a hand at a neighbour’s overpressing burden. And those little children before the picture of the Infant Saviour? At least for them such idealism must be a factor in their mental development which could ill be spared. Philosophy was good for men, the wisdom of the sages had often balanced a wavering mind, and strengthened the fibre of men to dare and do great things; but it was not possible for the masses of mankind to be so sustained any more than it was possible they could be all fed and housed like princes. Was not this contemned Christian religion which he had been helping to push aside, philosophy made easy for simple folk, unlearned and without culture? Would it not still further belittle their poor lives to take their faith from them? For them Plato, Dante, and Shakespeare were not horn-books. Was it so very wise to take away their gospels, and their psalms, and leave them nothing to elevate the daily round of life’s task above the muddy floor of their miserable dwellings?
And so he mused on all these things, and the worshippers came and went, knelt in prayer, and laid their poor burdens at the feet of God; took in from the infinite a draught of the water of life, wept their tears, sighed up to the throne of the Heavenly their anxieties; asked direction from the Wisest they knew of, wandered a little out of themselves a while; felt that bread and meat were not alone the sustenance of man, and went on their way. And as he thought and pondered in his heart, the sinking sun gloaming through the great west window scattered a thousand jewels over the floor around him, and he rose and knew that religion brightens life, and colours with rose and gold the dark shadow brooding over the soul of man. Not altogether was it a fact that man had been wholly wrong in his faith, and had done nothing but “build him fanes of fruitless prayer,” or had reaped from them nothing but the opportunities to “roll the psalm to wintry skies.”