“Worse,” said Gildea, “worse!”
“What, then?”
“You believe in theology which is as bad a superstition as, what Judge Parker calls, ‘the calm blissful sea of pure theistic belief.’ (You notice how emphatic he is about his superstition and casual about his truth?)”
“Stop a moment now, my bright Apollo, and explain to me, what you have not yet attempted to, what the superstition of Theism is?”
“What is Theism?—‘It is a faith,’ answers our good Judge, ‘which is the faith of all others’ (that is to say the faith of Judge Parker and all the ‘celebrated unitarian ministers’), ‘to be clung to, cherished and maintained as long as man exists—belief, trust in, and love for the All-loving, All-righteous, All-wise Universal Spirit of God.’ Now observe that this faith, this unique faith of faiths, is ‘refreshing, and invigorating in its simplicity’—(as, we might add, is also its formulator, if we did not shun flippancy as we would the pest)—‘warm and glowing in its absolute unclouded devotion to, love for, and perfect trust in God alone—proclaimed by Nature!’ O wise Judge, O upright Judge, O Judge much more elder than thy looks, where, when, and how, in the name of all observers of Nature from Darwin through Haeckel to Tennyson, did you discover therein either this love or righteousness of which you make such mention? ‘The struggle for existence and survival of the fittest,’ the parent of theistic righteousness and love! ‘Proclaimed by Nature!’—and Nature in italics! O immemorial phrase that eats up all the others even as Aaron’s rod swallowed up all the rods of the magicians!—Who, after this, would care to trouble himself with all the other potent items of this faith of faiths? The idea of God, God ‘the All-loving, All-righteous, All-wise Universal Spirit’ ‘originated in instinct,’ and is not the slow and painful growth of time? Think of the love of Jehovah! the righteousness of Baal! the wisdom of Moloch!—The beauty and sympathy and warmth of the theistic form of belief,” he added, “are recognizable as a half-hearted mixture of the clap-trap of Religion and Science—Superstition, which knows that it is naked, and sews fig-leaves together, and make itself an apron!”
Maddock, however, could have no confidence in the expressed views of this man, from whose face the light of amusement, amusement at others and himself, seemed never to be absent long. There had, indeed, been moments when it required all Maddock’s intuition to prevent his perception rising in absolute revolt against what seemed Gildea’s flagrant insincerity: then his perception had said to him that this was but a youth, endowed with brilliant abilities, the mere exercise of which was a pleasure and satisfaction to him, caring too little for any one thing to owe it loyalty. Whereto his intuition had replied that this was not a youth but a man, and a man whose secret could not thus be read. And the feeling that Maddock had, once before that day, felt towards Gildea returned now with an intensity and strangeness that seemed to Maddock, when he afterwards considered it, as little short of wonderful. Maddock’s profundity was often beyond the average, and herein indeed lay his secret, herein nestled “the heart of his mystery.”
“And yet,” said Gildea, “here, as in the other case, the common-sense view of belief has, of course, its excellence. ‘To take nothing else,’ says the Judge, ‘the very idea of “space” and “distance” that astronomy has given us fills the mind with wonder and with awe, clothing nature with a sublimity, a majesty, and a beauty which, otherwise, we had never known.’ For observe that Space and Time, these two inexhaustible ideas, are not, to our average intelligent secular view of things, the mere words that they are to the orthodox: they are realities thus far, that they help us to perceive that ‘there exists throughout space,—throughout the vast limitless universe,—motion, order, beauty; that there is behind all motion, all order, all beauty, a force that produces the motion, the order, and the beauty.’ And further. They are realities thus far, that they help us to be (whatever Dr. Maddock, in a polemico-theological spirit, may declare) earnest in our life and earnest in our wish to bring home to others the truth of that life, a ‘most serious and difficult task!’ They help us to all this, and an unrecognized intuitional belief in the essence which, in other forms and other men whom we fail to appreciate, not to say understand, we condemn—our intuitional belief, I say, in the Faith, Hope, and Love, which are the great movers of the progress of Humanity both upward and onward, will not let the forms that portions of this belief may take in us make the whole grow cold, lifeless, petrified, but the beauty and melody of our acts will often be found to contradict the deformity and discord of our words.”
“I confess, Sir Horace,” said Maddock, “that you are a puzzle to me. I really should not be surprised to see you some day walking side by side with the Judge, the best friends in the world!”
“And perhaps,” said Gildea, “the Judge would not subsequently be surprised to see me doing the same with yourself! For that indeed is the only use of such poor creatures as I: we see the good in opponents and serve as links in the spiritual bridge of Humanity.”
“I should very much like,” said Maddock, “to hear how you would abuse me to him. I think I see the urbane expression with which you would delight him by shewing how, in this ecclesiastical, metaphysical, theological polemist here, habemus confitentem asinum; and then turn upon him and say: ‘The question that now arises, my dear Judge, is, has this man nothing but faults—has he no excellencies? does there remain, after the attack on him of so eminent a biblical critic as Judge Parker is, no residuum of real and vital truth? Let us see.’”