It was recovery, to some extent discovery, which befell him, but there was no change of purpose, no sudden intellectual or moral conversion.
He had always cared more for Truth, for the knowledge of God, than for anything else in the world. In the years most outwardly happy he was crying out in the darkness for light, with a soul athirst for God, and, as was said before, he did most truly re-echo St. Augustine's words, 'Fecisti nos ad Te, et inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in Te.'
It is difficult for anyone who has lived in closest intimacy with him to speak of him in words which will not to those who did not know him seem exaggerated, nay, extravagant; to those who knew and loved him, cold, inadequate, lifeless; for he bore 'the white flower of a blameless life' from boyhood onwards, and in heart and life he was unstained, pure, unselfish, unworldly in the truest sense.
When the Shadow of Death lay on him, and the dread messenger was drawing near, and he looked back on his short life, he could reproach himself only for what he called sins of the intellect, mental arrogance, undue regard for intellectual supremacy.
No one better understood him than the friend[128] who wrote:
When a man has lived with broad and strong interest in life, neither discarding nor slighting any true part of it in home, or society, or work, the various aspects of his character and career are likely to be many and suggestive. And so there may be some warrant for an attempt to disengage one line of advance in the life, one trait in the example, and to concentrate attention upon that, while the other and perhaps more widely recognised elements are for the moment left unnoticed. There was one such line of advance in the life of George Romanes, of which it may be hard to speak, but wrong, perhaps, to be wholly silent. Few men have shown more finely the simplicity and patience in sustained endeavour which are the conditions of attainment in the quest of truth. It is easy to see how the training and habits of a mind devoted to natural science may render faith more difficult, and cross or check the venture of the soul towards the things eternal and unseen. But there is one quality proper to such a mind which should have a different effect, and act as a safeguard against a fault that often checks or mars the growth of faith. That quality is tenacity of uncorrelated fragments; the endurance of incompleteness; the patient refusal to attenuate or discard a fact because it will not fit into a system; the determined hope that whatsoever things are true have further truth to teach, if only they are held fast and fairly dealt with. The sincerely scientific mind shows such tenacity as that under every trial of its faith and patience, howsoever long and unpromising and unrelieved; for it knows itself responsible not for attainment, but for perseverance; not for conquest, but for loyalty. It resists even the temptation to dislike the untidy scraps of observation or experience which will match nothing and go nowhere; for it suspects and reveres in all the possibility of new light.
And surely there is a like excellence of thought, rare, and high, and exemplary, in regard to the things unseen, the things that are spiritually discerned. Scattered up and down the world, coming one way or another within the ken of all men, there are facts of plain experience which will not really fit, unmutilated, undisfigured, into any scheme or view of life that leaves God out of sight. They are facts, it may be, of which a full account can hardly, if at all, be given. They are fragmentary, isolated, imponderable; clearer at one time than at another; largely dependent, for anything like due recognition, upon the individual mind, and heart, and will. Yet there they are, flashing out at times with an intensity which makes all else seem pale and cold; disclosing, or ready to disclose, to any quietness of thought, great hints of worlds unrealised and possibilities of overwhelming glory.
And it is on loyalty, on justice to such fragments of truth, unaccounted for and unarranged, that for many men the trial of faith may turn. All is not lost, and everything is possible, so long as the mind refuses to doubt the reality of the light that has come, perhaps, as yet only in broken rays. Of such justice and loyalty George Romanes set a very high example. The strength and simplicity and patience of his character appeared in nothing else more remarkably, more happily, than in his undiscouraged grasp of those unseen realities which invade this world in the name and power of the world to come. The love of precision and completeness never dulled his care for the things that he could neither define, nor label, nor arrange; in their fragmentariness he treasured them, in their reserve he trusted them, waiting faithfully to see what they might have to show him. And they did not fail him. This is not the place in which to try to speak of the graces and the gladness which from such loyal sincerity passed into his life, nor of the clearer light that grew and spread before his wistful, hopeful gaze. But it hardly can be wrong to have said thus much of so noble and so timely a pattern of allegiance to all truth discerned; and of this great lesson in a life which seemed even here to have the earnest of that promise—'He that seeketh, findeth'—a life which seemed to be moving steadily towards the blessing of the pure in heart, the vision of Almighty God.[129]
F. P.