The stripling’s voice broke, lost its treble, and for awhile was awkward to the ear, as his lank limbs to the eye; and a-top of the change the down came upon his lip, adding the last touch of whimsy to youth’s ungainliness. Betty came through the awkward age less awkwardly, showing a lithe gracefulness in her very lankness of limb.
The girl it was who began to show shy reservations.
The lad was becoming restless with—he knew not what. Coming adolescence was setting his youngster blood a-jigging. Boyhood was gone—youth not fully come. Romance was singing in his ears—adventure thrumming impatient fingers on the windows of his fancy—hot instincts leading his feet—wilfulness challenging his daring.
In all this dangerous period of his cubhood, the girl’s sweet companionship steadied the lad—kept him from many tomfool waywardnesses. Her fragrant hair, loose-flowing to the winds, brushed his cheek and veiled him in from much unwholesomeness. The girl’s slender gloved hands held the key to his nobility—opened to him only the view of the best that was in him; whilst his protection of her, and his frank confidence in her, filled the lad’s body with early manhood that had otherwise been filled with indecision and with many and uncouth vulgarities.
And just as, his voice breaking, a hoarser accent came into his speech, so, too, a more robust accent came into his thinking. He began to question, first of all here and there, then from roof to base, what he had accepted with a boy’s frank acceptance.
The Why and the Whence and the Whither had begun to trouble.
He and Betty had taken to going to church of a Sunday evening. At last, puzzled by many things, the lad went boldly and called on the vicar. Encouraged by the well-bred courtesy of the gentle-hearted man and by the noble simplicity and selflessness of his life, and full of eager questionings, he had gone again a time or so; but he found his blunt queries evaded—the deep inmost and basic meaning of life and death, when he pressed for an answer, was at once thrust behind a screen of God and angels, seen dimly across a gulf of heavens and hells, in the human form and habit, and with those earthly functions of which the disembodied spirit had no further need, and through a veil of vague talk of the inspired word.
The inspired word!
Inspiration that could allow discrepancies in the simplest details of the most important things—one gospel giving the Annunciation to Mary, another to Joseph—one giving the Anointing by a woman to the beginning of the ministry, the others to the eve of the Crucifixion—all differing in the statement of the great and solemn act of the very Crucifixion—one stating that the Christ bore His cross, the others that Simon bore it—disagreeing even as to the bitter drink that was given and when given—disagreeing as to the hour of the great tragedy—every one of them all contradicting each other as to the sayings on the cross—the statement by Christ in one gospel to the repentant thief that they would that day be in Paradise denying that the Christ really descended into Hell and rose again the third day—one gospel contradicting the others as to the acts and sayings of these thieves—all at variance even about the last dying words—all writing different inscriptions over the suffering head—one stating that the body was embalmed, another denying its embalming.
There were larger discrepancies: How could the devil tempt God? And even so, what virtue were in so easy a triumph? Why had God, out of His creation of all things, created the devil? How could He punish for sin who had created sin? Why did God create a world so faultily that He Himself condemned it? Why punish His own bungling upon His miserable creatures? How could He set up as eternal reward the prospect of the good being with Him in the heavens and listening to the agony of the victims of His poor maimed handiwork in hell? What had man done more loathsome than to create a Hell? Was this gruesome heaven of gloating over the agony of the damned to be our Immortality? If these things had been written to-day instead of coming out of the dim glamour of the centuries, would they be believed?