The form of faith his conscience holds the best,
Whate’er the process of conviction was. (ll. 296-297.)
The Roman Catholic faith is that in which the Bishop was born and educated. It had been decided from childhood that he should become a priest: hence his choice of vocation. And this faith is, for him, one in which power temporal, as well as spiritual, puts forth its claims. Its undaunted champion may assert “I have loved justice and hated iniquity, therefore I die in exile,” but in drawing the distinction between “Peter’s creed” and that of Hildebrand, Blougram recognizes by implication the political aspect of the cause for which the struggle thus closing had been sustained.
VI. If then, in satisfaction of the demands of those uncompromising advocates of truth of whom Gigadibs is representative, the prelate of the nineteenth century shall renounce his position as confessor of the creed of the eleventh, in what rank of life may he take his stand? From what career may faith be, without injurious effects, wholly excluded? For if faith, to merit its title, is to be unmixed with doubt, equally must unbelief be unalloyed in quality. A life apart from faith? That of Napoleon? If so, then does the critic claim that Napoleon shares with him the “common primal element of unbelief,” belief being an impossibility. Yet to such an admission the Corsican’s whole career would give the lie. Whatever the character of the faith which sustained him, faith there was, sufficient to lead him on to colossal deeds: his trust may have been “crazy,” “God knows through what, or in what”; but to all intents and purposes it was faith, possessing the essential element of faith, life, and the inspiration of life:
It’s alive
And shines and leads him, and that’s all we want.
But to the Bishop such a life would have been impossible, since he has not the clue to Napoleon’s faith. “The noisy years” would not have offered him his ideal, even were this life all. And he does not himself believe that this life is all: although he will not assert that to him a future state of existence is matter of absolute certainty. If the career of “the world’s victor” is not then possible without faith of some kind, what of that of the artist, of the poet? With a return to the earlier cynical recognition of his own limitations, the Bishop enquires of what use an attempt on his part to emulate Shakespeare when endowed by nature with neither dramatic nor poetic faculty? Nevertheless he finds that he has much in life which Shakespeare would have been glad to possess. The author of Hamlet and of Othello might in truth enjoy the good things of earth by the mere exercise of imagination; yet, strange anomaly, he built himself
The trimmest house in Stratford town;
Saves money, spends it, owns the worth of things.
Even a Shakespeare, then, may be more or less of a materialist. Thus the successful churchman who has attained the object of his ambition, whose life is one of pleasantness and peace, may with confidence, turning to the poet, ask him—
If this life’s all, who wins the game?
VII. If, however, the existence of another life is to be recognized; if belief is to be allowed to take the place of scepticism, then the face of the argument is at once changed, and the Bishop is as ready as is his critic to admit that enthusiasm is the grandest inspiration of human nature. But he is—or so he would have his listener believe—no more capable of the enthusiastic faith of Luther than of the strategic achievements of Napoleon or the dramatic creations of Shakespeare. Nevertheless, the negations of the sceptic’s creed bear for him no attraction. In either case remains the risk that faith or absence of faith may prove error. The uncertainty on both sides being equal, it is not as well to be Strauss as Luther. Better even the mere desire for belief in the story of the Gospels, than a dispassionately critical attempt to reconcile discrepencies in that which has no personal interest for the enquirer: the one means spiritual vitality, the other stagnation.
VIII. With line 647, once more reverting to his earlier demonstration of the impossibility of a “pure faith,” the Bishop would submit that the Divine Presence is veiled rather than revealed by Nature, until such time as man shall have become capable of being “confronted with the truth of him.” But what of the mediaeval days, “that age of simple faith”? Were men the better for their simplicity of belief? By no means, replies the casuist of the nineteenth century, whose faith “means perpetual unbelief.” The simple faith proved itself unequal to the task of inspiring a life of outward morality: men could and did