Two days later they both left St. Anselm’s. Mr. Selby was the only master (except Mr. Brandiston) to whom Gerald Eversley bade farewell.
CHAPTER X
THE CRISIS OF FAITH
It is a hard thing to write the history of a soul. The human soul is not a simple study; it is constituted of so many parts, faculties, emotions, sympathies, antipathies, as to render its diagnosis imperfect, nay perhaps impossible. We seldom understand one another’s motives; we do not always understand our own. We are a mystery, each of us, to his neighbour; I had almost said we are a mystery each to himself.
Yet this is the task which must be undertaken in this chapter—to relate the spiritual agonies of a soul. It will be necessary to show by what process of reason or conviction one who had been trained in the safe though narrow path of Christian evangelical orthodoxy became, as it were, a wanderer, homeless and hopeless, how he passed from certainty to doubt, from doubt to negation, and at length went down into the valley of darkness from which there is often no return.
In the history of a soul, its own confessions, its own introspections, are the only guides. All else is conjecture, imagination. Such papers or letters as Gerald Eversley has left will therefore be used here, for in them he speaks for himself, and the record, though incomplete, is not untrue. But the difficulty in using them is that they lack date, method, consecutiveness; they are like the volcanic upheavings of a soul’s fiery unrest; the doubts which possessed him, and the reactions of his faith are welded together. Yet who is there that is at all times equally religious or equally irreligious? Is not every man a believer sometimes, a sceptic sometimes? Has not faith its days of sunshine and of cloud in every life? It is not perhaps faith or unfaith that discriminates mankind; it is rather the longing for faith, the anguish of unfaith, or the opposites of these.
Doubts of God break upon the soul as the waves upon the shore, surging, retreating, engulfing one another with incessant flux and reflux in measured advance until the flood or in measured ebb-tide, but alas! defertilising, devastating it always, and leaving it strewn with the débris of weed, shingle, shifting sand, and the wreckage of men.
How impotent, too, are words as images of thought! They pursue ideas, beliefs, reflections, with halting steps; for between the thought and its expression lies an interval, brief or prolonged, and while the mind is expressing itself, it moves. Men are often doubters before they confess their unbelief, and when they proclaim it, they are drawing near to faith again.
He whose spiritual history is here recorded was a youth. He lacked the moderating, chastening experience of age; he had seen only two-and-twenty years when this story comes to an end. His view of religion might have been calmer had his years been more; but it would not, I think, have been more touching or more tragical. The experienced Christian, the confirmed Agnostic may both alike smile—it were more fitting, perchance, that they should weep—at the half-reasonings, the lights and shadows of belief, the exaggerations and recoils in the lonely pilgrimage of this young soul. And yet this at least is sure, that if the fate of a human soul battling in the great waters within the sight and hail of the shore, and going down alone, does not profoundly move and thrill the nature of any one of us, it is ill for him; he is far—very far—from the kingdom of God.
Let it not be deemed that Gerald Eversley ever fell into the sophistry of treating religious belief as a thing indifferent. That miserable thought could not be his. Early hallowed associations possessed him. The beauty of a life ordered by religion was before his eyes. In the hours when he had drifted farthest from the sanctuary of God he would still, I think, have owned that life without religion, though it might be lived, and lived not selfishly nor unprofitably, yet was not, nor could ever be, the same thing.
And if he asked himself Is religion needed? he could give but one answer. The world around him, the world within him, were his witnesses. Human nature is not so constituted that it can afford to dispense with its strongest motive to morality. ‘Is it said,’ he writes, ‘that the belief in God does not make men moral? To say so is to deny the influence of belief upon action altogether. Why do men act in one way rather than in another? Because of their beliefs. Belief is the sole curb of passion. A man’s creed determines soon or late his deeds. Man, so far as he is a rational being, must be guided by his reasonable expectations of consequences, i.e. by his beliefs. What absurdity, then, to imagine that a belief in man’s responsibility for his actions—public or obscure—for his words, for his very thoughts, to an Infallible, Eternal and Almighty Judge, is not an infinitely potent cause of moral action! The man of belief and the man of unbelief stand on different platforms. It is the former who provides, the latter who accepts, the sanctions of morals. Infidelity may appeal to public opinion as a restraining force; but what created public opinion? Faith.’