Mr. Eversley asked him what it was that he could not believe. Gerald could not tell him all; but he tried to say that, if Christ were only man, so much nearer to us than if removed by the great gulf of so-called Deity, and yet were so good, so gracious, so altogether lovely, then His example of goodness and purity would be a much more effectual help to the struggling, suffering children of men.
Mr. Eversley did not attempt to reason with him. His own soul was too deeply agonised for reasoning. But he proposed that they should kneel down together in prayer; and there, in the stillness of the night by the flickering embers, he prayed that God would, in His mercy, illumine the gloom of his dear boy’s spirit, and that for him, as for so many another plucked ‘as a brand from the burning,’ the end of all doubts and strivings might be peace. Then he kissed him, and Gerald went to bed.
But it was yet two hours before Mr. Eversley himself retired. To him the failure of faith in the Son of God was not an intellectual error nor a moral calamity; it was a sin against the Holy Ghost. What (he argued) had been the guilt of the Jews of old, but that, when the Lord Jesus ‘came unto His own,’ they received Him not? Whether the rejection of His divine light were due to worldliness or to moral obliquity, or, as he feared in Gerald’s case, to pride of intellect, did not in his eyes constitute the vital difference. The soul of every man either received Him as the Saviour or it did not. It did not, therefore, enter Mr. Eversley’s thoughts to try to meet his son’s difficulties by argument. He held that the remedy for unbelief lay not in arguments of probability, but in the prostration of the human intellect before the Unseen; and what was needed, where unbelief rose like a noxious vapour, was not a conviction of the reason, but a purification of the heart. Accordingly Mr. Eversley, when he was left alone, sank upon his knees and for an hour and more poured out his soul to God, imploring that, though He had justly punished him for his shortcomings by the alienation of his son who had been the joy of his life, yet He would not suffer that dear son to perish eternally, but would open his eyes to see in Jesus the one Saviour and Redeemer of the world. Then he took out his diary—it was always his last act before going to bed—and wrote in it these words: ‘Most painful interview with Gerald, who is sinking in the slough of unbelief. O God, help my dear boy. Bring him back to Thy Light and Thy Truth. And oh! forgive me if sin of mine have led to his fall. We lived but one life once. It is not so now. Forgive me, forgive me if the fault be mine, for Thy Son’s sake.’
During the remainder of the holidays Gerald Eversley attended the services in church regularly, and no word upon religion passed between his father and himself. Mrs. Eversley was constant in the performance of ‘good works.’ She remarked more than once that Gerald was ‘getting very dull.’
CHAPTER IX
LAST DAYS AT ST. ANSELM’S
One consolation Gerald Eversley possessed amidst the trials of which the last chapter has afforded a specimen. It lay in his visits to Helmsbury. Since the time of Harry Venniker’s illness it had become an almost understood thing that he should pay a visit to Helmsbury during all holidays. Lady Venniker’s tender heart had not lost the sense of gratitude for the sympathy he had shown when Harry was so near to the gates of the grave. He had become almost one of the family. He was permitted to enter into their intimate thoughts, and to tell them his own. It is true that Harry was unaware of his friend’s religious doubts and difficulties, nor would he have been able to appreciate them if he had been aware of them. His was not a nature that troubled itself about such things, and he would have been likely to dismiss speculations of a sceptical kind upon the Being of God and His relation to the souls and consciences of men as being, in his rough boyish phraseology, ‘all rot.’ But Lady Venniker, with true womanly instinct, divined that Gerald was not so happy in his mind as he used to be, that his unhappiness was occasioned by the stress of spiritual conflict, and that his spiritual conflict was in some way embittered by the circumstances of his home. Not that Gerald ever referred in censorious language to his home. On the contrary, he spoke of his early days at Kestercham as the happiest in his life, and of his father as the best man whom he had ever known.
In one respect Lady Venniker’s view of religion was so different from that in which Gerald had been brought up, that it came upon him as a revelation. She looked upon religious belief not as in any sense a burden or an obligation, but as a boon. She was only sorry for a person who did not believe in God; she was not angry with him at all, she could not imagine how anybody could be angry. She thought of one who had no sense for spiritual things as of one who had no ear for music or no eye for colour. She was very anxious, not so much to restore faith to him as to restore him to faith, or, in other words, to place him again in such a position that faith might seem to him not difficult, but easy and natural. She would sometimes remark that if a person is not moved by a beautiful scene, it is not the scene which needs changing, but the person. Only she did not think the change was best made by preaching, still less by scolding, but by living oneself in the light of the Divine Life. Our Lord (she would say) had never argued very much about God; only He lived the God-like life, and it was impossible to live near Him and not believe in God. The sunshine does not argue with the night shadows; it simply shines them away. And if Gerald ever expressed any surprise at the pure intensity of her faith, she used to say that by her long months of lying on the couch of sickness she thought God had given her more insight into the realities of the spiritual world than He gave sometimes to the strong and healthy who had not so much leisure for meditation.
Ethel Venniker, who was growing up from girlhood now into the dawn of a rich and beautiful womanhood, would often sit by when Gerald Eversley read some of his favourite passages of literature to her mother or discussed with her religious and other topics. Gerald could not help noticing the quick intelligence of her comments upon the reading, and how her cheek would flush at any deed or word of cruelty, and her eyes fill with tears at a tale of suffering.
‘O mamma,’ she cried once, ‘why is there so much misery in the world? I feel as if everybody ought to be happy as we are.’
‘It is, I think,’ her mother replied, ‘that those who are as happy as we are may try to make others happy too.’