Eustace Marchmont: A friend of the people

by Evelyn Everett-Green

“Because the voice of God has been awakened in the Church,” answered Bride, in a low tense tone. “Because God has at last answered the prayers of those who, ever since those awful days of the uprising in France, have been sending up supplications to His throne to send us light and help from above. He has answered. He has shown us through holy men, who have been, with fasting and prayer, making study of the prophetic books of Scripture, so long sealed to man, what all this stirring and uprising of the nations portends; and He has told us that this is the beginning of those judgments of God, which in the last days He will pour out upon the earth, when the apostasy of the world and of the Church shall be avenged, and the Lord will purify the earth before He comes to reign there. We know, because the voice of the Lord has spoken it. But the world will not hear His voice. The world will not listen; and the devil, for fear lest it should, sends false voices—messages from the dead—teaches men to inquire of spirits that peep and mutter, instead of inquiring to the living God; and so we see an awakening of the spirits of evil as well as of those of good; and so it will go on, each party growing stronger and stronger; though that of the evil one will have the seeming mastery, till the final struggle shall be consummated, and the enemies of God overthrown for ever.”

Eustace was saved the perplexity of trying to find an answer by the sudden approach of Mr. St. Aubyn (whose old-fashioned rectory house they were now passing) just as he turned out of his gate in the direction of the church. He greeted Bride and her companion cordially, made them promise to come to his house at the conclusion of the service and refresh themselves before their walk home, and then had them ushered into the rectory pew, which was always empty at this time of year, for his wife was a great invalid, and could only get out of doors in the most genial season of the year.

The little church of St. Erme was very antiquated, and interesting to archæologists; but under Mr. St. Aubyn’s care it had lost the air of neglect and desolation which was so common in rural churches. The congregation was good for the size of the place, and the service was reverently and intelligently conducted. The sermon was very simple, in accordance with the needs of the flock; but there was a vein of spirituality and piety running through it that struck Eustace as being unusual and original, and kept alive his interest in the views of “pietists,” as he classified them in his mind. He had been taught to regard every form of belief or unbelief as a portion of a classified system of speculation or philosophy; and he was glad to think he might have an opportunity of some conversation with Mr. St. Aubyn after the service, as he had struck him on other occasions when they had met as being a man of intellect and wide reading.

The Rector himself escorted the guests to his house, and Bride went upstairs to see the invalid, who reminded her a little of her own mother, and whose presence always acted on her soothingly and gratefully.

She felt refreshed by the hour spent in that quiet room, refreshed in body and mind. She had had food given her to eat; and communion of thought with one who sympathised with her, even where their opinions might not be altogether in accord, was more to her in those days than any bodily sustenance could be. Since her mother’s death Bride had been shut up entirely within herself, and it is not good for such an ardent soul as hers to be deprived of the natural outlet of speech with her fellow-man.

When the girl went downstairs again, she found the two men deep in talk, and sat quietly down in a shadowy corner to wait till they had finished. Mr. St. Aubyn observed her entrance, though Eustace, whose back was towards her, did not. The two were keenly interested in their discourse, and continued it with animation. Bride soon began to pick up the drift of it, and listened with wonder and amaze, a sense of indignation and sadness inextricably mixed together falling upon her as she realised what it all meant.

The two scholars were discussing the various phases of German rationalism which had arisen close on the heels of French and English deism; and from the tone taken by Eustace it was abundantly evident that he was deeply bitten by the philosophy of Wolff, by the destructive rationalism of Semler and Bretschneider, and the subjective philosophy of Kant and his followers, who evolve all things in heaven and earth from their own consciousness of them, on the principle that “cogito, ergo sum.”

He had been educated at Jena and Weimar, where this school of philosophy had its headquarters; and he was deeply impregnated with the teaching of those who had followed upon the first bold propounders of its doctrines. The names of Descartes and Locke, Spinoza and Fichte, fell glibly from his tongue, as he ran through in a masterly way the methods of these great thinkers of the different centuries, and strove to show how, one after another, each in a different way had struggled to show a blinded world that there could be no religion that did not appeal to the reason; that the allegorical and the dogmatic methods of interpreting Scripture had been tried in the balances and found wanting, and that only the historic—the true rational interpretation—could be found lasting with thinking men.

It was with a smile, and with great courtesy and patience, that Mr. St. Aubyn listened to the clear and terse arguments of his intellectual guest; and then he asked him what he thought of the Berlin school of thought, which had trodden quickly upon the heels of the one he had been ardently advocating—asked him what had been the teaching of Schleiermacher and Neander and De Wette, and whether they had been able (whilst giving all due weight to the value of reason) to remain where the destructive rationalist thinkers had left them. Already they had begun to strive to reconstruct a living and personal Christ out of the ruins of the historic method, which would have robbed Him of all but a shadowy existence as a misguided though well-meaning fanatic, deceiving and deceived. How was it men could never rest without some theory of a Divine personality, call it by what name they would? Was it not the most rational deduction to admit that the reason for this inherent longing (which none of the world’s greatest thinkers had ever attempted to deny) was that the subjective philosophy never can content the heart of man; that man must have an object of worship, an external standard, a living Head, and not an abstraction, simply because there is a living God, who created him in His own image; because he has been redeemed by a living and incarnate Saviour, and because the Spirit of the Eternal God the Father and the Son is for ever working in his heart, and seeking to bring it back to uniformity with the heart of Christ, overflowing with love towards God and towards man?

That, in brief, was the argument on both sides, only argued out at length with skill and knowledge and versatility of thought by each combatant. Bride, in her dim corner, sat and listened, and sometimes shivered in horror, sometimes glowed with an ecstatic rapture, but always listened with undivided attention, for these matters were not to her the dry arguments of philosophers merely, but indications of the spirit of perversity and blindness at work in the world in the latter days—the spirit of the lawless one, coming in every insidious form; first under the guise of liberality of thought and intellect, then teaching men to throw off from them all the fetters imposed by the precepts of Christ, all the external authority of the Church; paving the way for that other rising against kings and rulers and external authority of any kind whatsoever which she had been warned was one of the signs of the latter days, when the voice of the people should prevail once again, and they should give the power to him who should come “in his own name.”