“This is all very interesting,” replied Francis, rather at a loss where to begin. “My eldest son would discuss the merits and demerits of civilisation with you better than I, and certainly with more warmth than I can bring to bear on the subject.”
He had an uncomfortable feeling that he entirely agreed with old Lawrie, and an equally uncomfortable sense that he would agree also with the opposite side if it were presented, and suddenly candour made him say so. Lawrie chuckled and rode off on his crotchet of loneliness again:
“That is so. That is so. Because of the habit of loneliness there cannot be unity among men. What men think is of no importance, because it has so little relation to what they do or what they are. The opinion of any body of men, even the most intelligent, is generally only the lowest common multiple of their prejudices. Theories are quite useless, so are opinions. When a man is in possession of the truth he acts. When he is not he theorises, or cowers behind his prejudicies, which amounts to the same thing. Look at the people in this town. How many of them are capable of action, how many are there whose days are not spent in superficial employments, first to get bread, and second to escape boredom when their work is done. They muddle through their work, they make a great deal of money for a few people who have no idea what to do with it when they have got it, and, since they are in an intolerable position, they have nothing to support them, and the monstrous system they have drifted into creating, but a hard, conceited pride. That makes them blinder than ever. They can do nothing to make their city beautiful, nothing to remedy the shiftless blundering of their fathers, nothing in the way of art to make amends to the people whose lives they have cramped and ruined in their factories and slums. Their only notion is to get more and more money out of them.”
“I never thought of it like that,” rejoined Francis. “All the people I meet seem to be very pleasant.”
“They don’t know they’re doing it. They follow their own little rules of expedience and call them the unchanging laws of God. Your Pharisee always imagines he has made things all right by taking God’s name in vain, vain indeed, for they beget nothing but vanity. I’m just as bad as they, for I’ve sold my three sons to them for a wage that begins at ten shillings a week and, in the course of thirty years, will grow into a salary of three hundred pounds a year.”
“I have worked for thirty years and more for very little more than that.”
“Aye, but you believe that you are working in a holy cause, so that the work itself is enough, and you’re content while you can pay your way. All work ought to be in a holy cause and done in a holy spirit. . . . I used to think that when I was a young man. I used to feel it too. I think so now, but I don’t feel it any more. These things just go on, and I sit and watch them and do nothing, and I understand why everyone else does nothing either. It’s the old men who profit by it all and the young men are never wise enough to overturn it, and they could so easily by refusing to step into the old men’s shoes. But we must all grow old.”
“The youngest time in all my life,” said Francis, “was during the years after I first came here, when I had to fight to do things in my own way in my own church.”
“Exactly,” said old Lawrie. “That’s it. The fighting; the fighting to do things in your own way, in your own life; if you can do it, if you can keep it up, and hold out to the very end.”
Francis pounced on that as an opportunity of coming to his mission, and he set forth all that he had to say about Bennett.