It was to Bérigny that I went for Mass. The curé spoke to me afterwards, as I was sitting under the shadow of the Calvary. He is a simple soul; but he talked with spirit and intelligence about his Church and his country. I found him still smarting under the well-meant fussiness of two old maids from Bournemouth who were at the Hôtel du Dauphin last month. It appears that they distributed Evangelical tracts in French, wherein the present troubles of the Church in France were explained as a divinely appointed punishment of Popery and as a divine call to the French people to embrace Scriptural truth. The curé spoke with fine scorn of that British sectarian animosity which hates the Pope ten times worse than the Devil. And he confirmed what I had learned from the more blatant Paris journals--that the so-called campaign against clericalism is at heart a campaign against Christianity, and not only against Christian dogma, but even against many ancient precepts of Christian morals. More. He confirmed what I have myself read in the speeches of deputies and even of Ministers--that the attack is not merely against Christianity, but against the whole idea of supernatural religion, and that it is avowedly an attempt to establish a lay state, a purely secular community trained from childhood to believe that all religion is superstition and that human science alone can teach men how to live and die.
After the curé went home to break his fast, I still lingered in the churchyard. A new plank-monument had been raised during the week over a new tomb; and its jet-black letters on a snow-white ground reminded me of the resolve I had made to offer a De Profundis for the faithful dead.
I found the place in my paroissien, and said the opening words aloud. The sound of my own voice in that sunny field of death frightened me, and I stopped. I began again, reading to myself. But it was of no use. I couldn't go on.
When it comes to downright earnest, you can't skip from one religion to another. Lost in a crowd one can coquet with another religion, tolerate it, even enjoy its unfamiliar ancient ritual. But, with my De Profundis it was different. I couldn't shed my Protestantism like an old cloak in the twinkling of an eye.
Not that I felt, as I sat down again on the platform of the Calvary, that praying for the dead was false doctrine and superstitious error. I dared not say it was true; but still less dared I say that it was false. I thought of the two old maids from Bournemouth, their half-knowledge, their meddling; and I felt it would be, at the very least, an unpardonable impertinence to offer doubting prayers for needs that I could only half understand.
I ought to have remembered the Ancient Mariner; how, with a heart as dry as dust, seven days, seven nights, he stood alone on a wide, wide sea with Death; how, at last, he watched the water-snakes, coiling and swimming, blue, glossy green, and velvet black, in the shadow of the ship; how a spring of love gushed from his heart and he blessed them unaware; and how, the self-same moment, he could pray.
With me it was the other way about. At Bérigny this morning I began with faith and ended with unfaith. I went to pray and came away to doubt. Hardly had I clasped my book and resolved that it would be bad taste to pray, before a shadow fell upon all things. The light of the sun was broad and bright; but, within me, there grew a bleak wonder that any one should be able to believe in God.
I mean the Christian's God, of course. If He is truly identical with the eternal Cause of the universe and yet yearns for man's love and worship, how can his heart be content that his right arm should hang idle while puny unbelievers are closing his temples and muzzling his messengers?
I looked along the wooded ravine where the beck chatters down to Sainte Véronique, with Grandpont spire away to the right, and I thought of Susan and Ruddington and Gibson. If God's delight is in the virtuous happiness of men and women, why this hateful tangle? Perhaps it was a blasphemous thought; but the tangle was so cruel, so useless, so cunning, that it seemed to require an omnipotent Devil for its explanation.
The cruelty of it brought tears to my eyes. I thought, for the first time, of a coincidence that deepened the wrong. Susan, Ruddington, and I--we are all orphans. As for Gibson, if he has parents it is fifteen years since they made a sign. Each one of us robbed before we could speak, or think, or remember, of a mother's care and love; and, for compensation, Gibson cheated of love altogether, Susan beloved where she cannot love. Ruddington loving with no love to answer.