“But surely, Mr. Derwent, we are all church members,” said she, simply.
“The church itself is not Christian,” said he, as simply. “I doubt if it ever has been, since it got established in Rome, it or its Eastern and Western successors. The fact is, the only two high religions of the world have both rested on the abnegation of self: the Buddhist, by quietism and annihilation; the Christian, by action and sacrifice. But the Jews and Mahometans founded their ethics upon the development of self, upon visible rewards, slaves and flocks and herds, personal aggrandizement; and these things they obtained by wars of conquest, by the church militant, as rewards of the holy zeal that made converts by physical victory. Then Christ came; and it was his only work to remove this idea, to change this life, not as a king of a victorious people, but as a vessel of divine spirit. But this one work and faith of Christ, this only thing that made his teachings new, regenerative of the world, is just alone what all our churches, Protestant and Catholic, unite in evading, in dodging, in interpreting away. The one thing they will not follow Christ in is his unselfishness.”
“But we cannot all be saints and martyrs,” said Mrs. Gower.
“If we were all Christians, there would be no martyrs,” said Derwent.
“I think,” said Wemyss, softly, as if he were studying the painting of a fan, “I think that Mr. Derwent is historically right. Such was undoubtedly the pure doctrine, the face of the pale Christ as it first appeared, palsying the hand of art and civilization, unnerving the arm of war, bleaching life of all color and flower, whelming the sunlight of Greece in the pale artificial cloister, quenching the light of the world in an unsane, self-wrought asceticism.
‘When for chant of Greeks the wail of Galileans
Made one whole world moan with hymns of wrath and wrong.’
We may know the gods are but a beautiful fancy; but it would almost prove a devil’s existence, that humanity had hardly found itself at peace with itself in a fair and fertile earth, fanned by sea-winds and warmed by summer suns, when some devil’s instinct made it fashion for itself a cruel fetich, oppress its brief mortal hours with nightmares of immortal torture, curse itself with grotesque dreams of Calvaries and hells.” And Mr. Wemyss snuffed at the rosebud in his hand, as a Catholic might sprinkle holy-water.
“But, my good sir,” answered Derwent, and his voice rang with the disdain of the athlete for the æsthete, “Christ has not taken from you the flowers of the field nor the breezes of the sea, although his curse be on your factories and mints, your poison-stills and money-mills, your halls and courts and prisons. He has given you the soul of a man for the life of a dog. Any pig may possess, an ape can dress itself in trinkets; but only souls can dream, think, do, be free. Assert your souls in freedom, not weight them down with things. Think you that beauty, glory, love, and light come from possessing tangible objects?”
Caryl Wemyss made no reply; but raised a glass of Yquem to his lips and sipped it slowly. The rest were not in it at all, as Van Kull good-naturedly whispered to Pussie Duval. In his simple way, Kill Van Kull suspected that he would some day be damned; but he took it in good part. John Haviland made answer. “You, too, think Christianity is communism?” said he.