The Masterfolk

by Haldane Macfall

The child had grown up without any kind of formal religious instruction—had picked up from the air, and from straying truths in the air, her sweet concept of life. The pure metal of her quick, alert and vigorous understanding required but little hammering. Only with the lad Noll had come unrest and questioning.

Major Modeyne had drifted from his Church—indeed, Betty remembered well a very severe fit of coughing that had overcome him in answer to an early childish demand of hers during a thunderstorm as to what God could find to do all day in heaven—coughing which became almost an apoplectic fit when, being unanswered, she concluded airily that the drab intercourse with pious people and the lack of good wholesome entertainment excused these outbursts of anger and violence, and no doubt led to the making of these noises and other suchlike unpleasantnesses.

Betty, with the strange reserve that covered all her deepest thinking, whispered no hint of her own birth in the same faith to the old lady; she tried instead to win from the beautiful and pure and faded mind of Miss Flora some conception of God and the mysteries—only to find the little old lady’s concept, for all the disguises of her delicate mind, exceedingly crude and vague—that, in fact, she had absolutely no concept at all. She saw that it was the wide compassion of the mystic Man of Sorrows that gave, as to most Papists, the exquisite faith in their mysteries. Yet, like the most orthodox, she spoke of the old and the new dispensation—God then had not known His own mind. Puzzled with the great fact that God and Son were absolutely destructive of each other—one the God of War, the other the God of Peace—one the God of Vengeance, demanding Punishment, the other the God of Mercy, offering Forgiveness; the one choosing an indifferent race as a chosen people, the other rejecting that race; the book of the laws of the one obliterating the book of the laws of the other—the girl had awakened from her childhood and realized that she had eaten of the fruit of knowledge, and that before the judgment-seat of that knowledge the God of her childhood stood convicted of the very sins, from killing downwards, for which that same God had condemned man to eternal punishments; and, with the true instinct for justice and for the humanities, she forthwith rejected the God and gave all her affection to the Christ, who had thwarted, and by thwarting had confessed the injustice of God.

And now, having so decided, and being in sight of a calm harbour of refuge, she found herself baffled with the fury of the factions that professed the Christ. The symbolism and the beauty of the Papist section beckoned her to Rome; but the genius of the child saw all things in the large, and was not to be led aside by details—she was repelled by the contradictions of its belief that at one turn appealed to reason, at the next rejected reason; repelled by its un-Christliness, repelled by the submission of the conscience to its priesthood, repelled by its condemnation of all outside its gates, repelled by its preposterous claims—by its belief in the real presence of the Christ in the wine and wafer of its sacraments.

She had only that day come upon a copy of the Cautels, and as she read the cautions to priests, after partaking of the sacraments, that they should not wash their mouths or spit before breaking their fast in case of ejecting the body of Christ in their spittle or vomit, she was stung with shame that such puerile things should be expected of her intelligence—it were as though she had been struck across the face with a whip. The strong blood of the master race leaped in her veins, and she found herself unable to believe that the toys which had amused her infancy were really alive.

To all the pettiness of the little petty quarrels that were galling the dignity of the age, her clear intellect was too contemptuous to give more than a passing thought. The symbols and the forms, the chief source of the wrangles and squabblings, were no trouble to her, had the things on which they were founded been deep and large with truth. With the greyness of mind, that made of these things a sin, she had no more sympathy than with the narrowness of head that made of them an important part of life....

She had wandered one day into a Quakers’ meeting-house—had been struck with the deep religious atmosphere, the far deeper mysticism than that of her own Church, for all its splendid forms and ceremonial and great beauty of service. She had not felt her reason sullied by the interposition of any gross human body between the Christ and her nobility. She had felt the wondrous dignity of the simple service, in spite of the greyness.

She had read of late a novel, a vulgar stupid book, in which a child brought up by an agnostic is made to commit suicide because it cannot believe in a hereafter—in hell. Her reason revolted at the shabby trick, for she saw that no child would commit suicide because there was not a hell; but rather because there was—indeed, she herself remembered that she had suffered torments at night and had wept until her nerves were shaken for fear of hell, and out of compassion for the poor lost souls—nay, had reeled before the brutality that had created these poor souls only to fling them to such hellish predestined doom for all eternity. This literary trash roused her to the feeble foundations of sand on which much so-called religious life is built—especially the religious side of women. For the book had a wide sale.

Creeds are an affair of race. They that are of a master race will hold a master creed—they that are of a sloven race will bow to sloven gods. It is the attribute of a slave people to pay homage from fear. This girl was of the master peoples. It was impossible for her to enslave her mind or her body or her soul with the blind credulities. She was of the mighty race that has bred the Protestors. With the passing of her childhood she put away the toys of the childhood of the world. In no bitter or harsh temper, but with affection and sadness she put them away—and took a deeper breath of life.

In monastic cells and blind gropings in dark corners where life is a denial, and in the shirking of contradictions, very God is not to be found; but out in the free fresh air of the great world. The truth cannot lie.