Paul Faber, Surgeon

by George MacDonald

I may here mention, as I shall have no other opportunity, that a new chapel was not built; that the young pastor soon left the old one; that the deacons declared themselves unable to pay the rent; that Mr. Drake took the place into his own hands, and preached there every Sunday evening, but went always in the morning to hear Mr. Wingfold. There was kindly human work of many sorts done by them in concert, and each felt the other a true support. When the pastor and the parson chanced to meet in some lowly cottage, it was never with embarrassment or apology, as if they served two masters, but always with hearty and glad greeting, and they always went away together. I doubt if wickedness does half as much harm as sectarianism, whether it be the sectarianism of the church or of dissent, the sectarianism whose virtue is condescension, or the sectarianism whose vice is pride. Division has done more to hide Christ from the view of men, than all the infidelity that has ever been spoken. It is the half-Christian clergy of every denomination that are the main cause of the so-called failure of the Church of Christ. Thank God, it has not failed so miserably as to succeed in the estimation or to the satisfaction of any party in it.

But it was not merely in relation to forms of church government that the heart of the pastor now in his old age began to widen. It is foolish to say that after a certain age a man can not alter. That some men can not—or will not, (God only can draw the line between those two nots) I allow; but the cause is not age, and it is not universal. The man who does not care and ceases to grow, becomes torpid, stiffens, is in a sense dead; but he who has been growing all the time need never stop; and where growth is, there is always capability of change: growth itself is a succession of slow, melodious, ascending changes.

The very next Sunday after the visit of their deputation to him, the church in Cow-lane asked their old minister to preach to them. Dorothy, as a matter of course, went with her father, although, dearly as she loved him, she would have much preferred hearing what the curate had to say. The pastor's text was, Ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law—judgment, mercy, and faith. In his sermon he enforced certain of the dogmas of a theology which once expressed more truth "than falsehood, but now at least conveys more falsehood than truth, because of the changed conditions of those who teach and those who hear it; for, even where his faith had been vital enough to burst the verbally rigid, formal, and indeed spiritually vulgar theology he had been taught, his intellect had not been strong enough to cast off the husks. His expressions, assertions, and arguments, tying up a bundle of mighty truth with cords taken from the lumber-room and the ash-pit, grazed severely the tenderer nature of his daughter. When they reached the house, and she found herself alone with her father in his study, she broke suddenly into passionate complaint—not that he should so represent God, seeing, for what she knew, He might indeed be such, but that, so representing God, he should expect men to love Him. It was not often that her sea, however troubled in its depths, rose into such visible storm. She threw herself upon the floor with a loud cry, and lay sobbing and weeping. Her father was terribly startled, and stood for a moment as if stunned; then a faint slow light began to break in upon him, and he stood silent, sad, and thoughtful. He knew that he loved God, yet in what he said concerning Him, in the impression he gave of Him, there was that which prevented the best daughter in the world from loving her Father in Heaven! He began to see that he had never really thought about these things; he had been taught them but had never turned them over in the light, never perceived the fact, that, however much truth might be there, there also was what at least looked like a fearful lie against God. For a moment he gazed with keen compassion on his daughter as she lay, actually writhing in her agony, then kneeled beside her, and laying his hand upon her, said gently:

"Well, my dear, if those things are not true, my saying them will not make them so."

She sprung to her feet, threw her arms about his neck, kissed him, and left the room. The minister remained upon his knees.

CHAPTER XXIX.

THE DOCTOR'S HOUSE.

The holidays came, and Juliet took advantage of them to escape from what had begun to be a bondage to her—the daily intercourse with people who disapproved of the man she loved. In her thoughts even she took no intellectual position against them with regard to what she called doctrine, and Faber superstition. Her father had believed as they did; she clung to his memory; perhaps she believed as he did; she could not tell. There was time yet wherein to make up her mind. She had certainly believed so once, she said to herself, and she might so believe again. She would have been at first highly offended, but the next moment a little pleased at being told that in reality she had never believed one whit more than Faber, that she was at present indeed incapable of believing. Probably she would have replied, "Then wherein am I to blame?" But although a woman who sits with her child in her arms in the midst of her burning house, half asleep, and half stifled and dazed with the fierce smoke, may not be to blame, certainly the moment she is able to excuse herself she is bound to make for the door. So long as men do not feel that they are in a bad condition and in danger of worse, the message of deliverance will sound to them as a threat. Yea, the offer of absolute well-being upon the only possible conditions of the well-being itself, must, if heard at all, rouse in them a discomfort whose cause they attribute to the message, not to themselves; and immediately they will endeavor to justify themselves in disregarding it. There are those doing all they can to strengthen themselves in unbelief, who, if the Lord were to appear plainly before their eyes, would tell Him they could not help it, for He had not until then given them ground enough for faith, and when He left them, would go on just as before, except that they would speculate and pride themselves on the vision. If men say, "We want no such deliverance," then the Maker of them must either destroy them as vile things for whose existence He is to Himself accountable, or compel them to change. If they say, "We choose to be destroyed," He, as their Maker, has a choice in the matter too. Is He not free to say, "You can not even slay yourselves, and I choose that you shall know the death of living without Me; you shall learn to choose to live indeed. I choose that you shall know what I know to be good"? And however much any individual consciousness may rebel, surely the individual consciousness which called that other into being, and is the Father of that being, fit to be such because of Himself He is such, has a right to object that by rebellion His creature should destroy the very power by which it rebels, and from a being capable of a divine freedom by partaking of the divine nature, should make of itself the merest slave incapable of will of any sort! Is it a wrong to compel His creature to soar aloft into the ether of its origin, and find its deepest, its only true self? It is God's knowing choice of life against man's ignorant choice of death.

But Juliet knew nothing of such a region of strife in the human soul. She had no suspicion what an awful swamp lay around the prison of her self-content—no, self-discontent—in which she lay chained. To her the one good and desirable thing was the love and company of Paul Faber. He was her saviour, she said to herself, and the woman who could not love and trust and lean upon such a heart of devotion and unselfishness as his, was unworthy of the smallest of his thoughts. He was nobility, generosity, justice itself! If she sought to lay her faults bare to him, he would but fold her to his bosom to shut them out from her own vision! He would but lay his hand on the lips of confession, and silence them as unbelievers in his perfect affection! He was better than the God the Wingfolds and Drakes believed in, with whom humiliation was a condition of acceptance!

She told the Drakes that, for the air of Owlkirk, she was going to occupy her old quarters with Mrs. Puckridge during the holidays. They were not much surprised, for they had remarked a change in her manner, and it was not long unexplained: for, walking from the Old House together one evening rather late, they met her with the doctor in a little frequented part of the park. When she left them, they knew she would not return; and her tears betrayed that she knew it also.