“Comfortable!” she said. “Yes. Comfortable! Think of it. Churches, comfort! Irredeemable hideousness and the comfort of congregations as a set-off to it.”
Mrs. Ascher panted. I could see the front of her dress—she wore a very floppy scarlet teagown—rising and falling rapidly in the intensity of her passion. I understood more or less what she felt. If God is at all what we think He is, sublime, then there is something a little grotesque about requiring a cushioned pew, a good system of heating and a nice fat footstool as aids to communion with Him. Yet I am not convinced that man is incapable of the highest emotion when his body is at ease. Some degree of physical comfort seems to be required if the excursions of the soul are to be successful. I cannot, for instance, enjoy the finest kinds of poetry when I am very thirsty; nor have I ever met any one who found real pleasure in a statue when he had toothache. There is something to be said for the theory of the sceptical bishop in Browning’s poem, that the soul is only free to muse of lofty things
“When body gets its sop and holds its noise.”
“The whole Irish question,” said Mrs. Ascher, and she spoke with the most tremendous vehemence, “is a struggle not between political parties—what are political parties?”
“Rotten things,” I said. “I quite agree with you there.”
“Not between conceptions of religion—— What is religion but the blind gropings of the human soul after some divine perfection vaguely guessed?”
That is not what religion is in Ireland. There is nothing either dim or vague about it there, and nobody gropes. Every one, from the infant school child to the greatest of our six archbishops, is perfectly clear and definite in his religious beliefs and suffers no doubts of any kind. That is why Ireland is recognised everywhere as an island of saints. But of course Mrs. Ascher could not be expected to know that.
“It is a struggle,” she said, getting back to the Irish question as the subject of her sentence, “between a people to whom art is an ideal and a people who have accepted materialism and money for their gods, an atheist people.”
It has been the great misfortune of my life that I have never been able to escape from the Irish question. It was discussed round my cradle by a nurse whom my parents selected for her sound Protestant principles. The undertaker will give his views of the Irish question to his assistant while he drives the nails into the lid of my coffin. I should not have supposed that any one could have hit on an aspect of it wholly new to me. But Mrs. Ascher did. Never before had I heard the problem stated as she stated it.
“That,” I said, “is an extraordinarily interesting way of looking at it. The only difficulty I see is——”