But as he grew older and learned life as it is, he became able to see that it was not applicable at all to life, that life was much rougher and harder than he supposed, and required very different rules. He slowly grew disillusioned. And with the disillusion came bitterness. If you have never believed in any certain thing, never taken it to yourself, you can go on theoretically admiring it, and, if that becomes impossible, you can eventually let it go without trouble. But if you have believed, if you have strongly believed and desired to accept, when you find that your belief and acceptance have been misplaced, there comes a revulsion. If it cannot be all, it must be none. Love turns to hate, never to indifference. Belief changes to absolute rejection, never to toleration.
This code of Christ could not be absolutely followed in daily life, therefore it was absolutely untrue. And being untrue he could not bear to hear it preached every Sunday as a teaching from on High. He shrank from it unconsciously as from a theory he had loved and which had deceived him: the love remained, the confidence was gone. He was betrayed. But he never reasoned about it till he had rejected it. Then he sought to justify by reason what he had already accomplished in fact.
So do men think things, because they have done or wish to do them; never the reverse.
It seems trivial after the above to recall a minor point wherein instinct has had much to say.
I can remember as a boy how I disliked to hear the church bells ringing for service. I hated them. They made me shudder. And I used to think to myself that I must be naturally wicked and irreligious to be so affected. "They ring for God's service and you shudder. You must be indeed the wicked boy they say." So I thought many a time.
And now I know that I disliked the bells then, as I dislike them now, because of all sounds that of bells is to me the harshest and noisiest. I dislike not only church bells, but all bells. I have no prejudice against dinner, yet I would willingly wait in some houses half an hour, or even have it half-cold if it could be announced without a bell. And church bells! Very few are in tune, none are sweet toned, all are rung far louder and faster than they should be, so that their notes, which might be bearable, become a wrangling abomination.
But I love the monastery gongs in Burma because they are delicately tuned, and they are rung softly and with such proper intervals between each note that there is no jar, none of that hideous conflict of the dying vibrations with the new note that is maddening to the brain.
It is trivial, maybe, but it is real. And out of such trivialities is life made. Out of such are our recollections built. I shall never remember the call to Christian prayer without a shudder of dislike, a putting of my fingers in my ears. I shall never recall the Buddhist gongs ringing down the evening air across the misty river without there rising within me some of that beauty, that gentleness and harmony, to which they seem such a perfect echo.