Then he seeks to meet the objection that religion does not always moralise human lives. ‘It is true, but what if it is? Motives do not always produce their natural results; they may be counteracted by other motives or by passions stronger for a time than themselves, for man is not simply rational, he is a creature of emotion, impulse, passionate desire. The sea, high-swollen by gales, overleaps its walls, dashes its salt spray for a brief while above the cliff. Are the walls then useless? were it well to pull them down? Better to strengthen them, deepen them, heighten them. No; religion may be false, but it has no substitute.’
It is clear that when he wrote these words—and they were never cancelled—he longed to believe; he realised the beauty, the blessedness of belief. Would that beauty and blessedness be always his? He saw the storm descending upon him from afar, and he cowered before it. He ‘feared as he entered into the cloud.’ Men talk sometimes of ‘giving up’ religious belief; but no belief that is worth possessing was ever ‘given up;’ it is torn away by some cruel power irresistible, and the soul is left lacerated, bleeding from the wound. To Gerald Eversley (if he had ever known them) would have come home those wonderful lines which show that Goethe passed through deeper spiritual waters than he was fain to confess:
Wer nie sein Brod mit Thränen ass,
Wer nie die kummervollen Nächte
Auf seinem Bette weinend sass,
Er kennt Euch nicht, Ihr himmlischen Mächte.
Ihr führt ins Leben uns hinein,
Ihr lasst den Armen schuldig werden,
Dann überlasst Ihr ihn der Pein,
Denn alle Schuld rächt sich auf Erden.
Let us try to follow him in his wanderings.
All unbelief begins in a distrust of the goodness of God. To be able to say ‘I believe in God’ is to have a religion, nay, if the truth be told, it is to have all religion. That majestic article of belief is so high a triumph over the apparent faults, schisms, lapses, miseries, agonies of Nature, that he whose heart can say ‘I believe that God is good’ is prepared for other beliefs as developments of that.
Consider how great a belief it is—great in its difficulty, great in its august beneficence. ‘I believe in the All-Good,’ or, as Christ put it, ‘I believe in God the Father.’ Marvellous it is that Theist or Deist should have been a term used reproachfully. To believe in a superintending gracious Providence; to believe that in life’s sorrowful straits an Everlasting Eye oversees us, an Almighty Voice still bids us be of cheer; to believe that there is a soul of goodness in things evil, that life is a riddle of which the key is held in divine invisible hands, and that we see as yet but a fragment of the scheme that extends from eternity to eternity—is not this the heart of religion? is it not a solace, guidance, discipline of the soul? ‘I marvel,’ says Gerald Eversley in one of his letters, ‘that the mere faith in God, apart from prophets, priests, mediators, revealers, has not exercised a more sacred, divine influence among men. But I marvel yet more at the tenacious strength with which men in all ages and in all quarters of the world have adhered to that belief, so antithetical as it is to moral experience. The warrant of it lies not, methinks, in the phenomena of Nature or Life. It lies in the constitution of the human heart. Fecisti nos ad Te, as St. Augustine says, et cor nostrum inquietum est donec requiescat in Te. We cling to the faith in God, not because it is open to no objection, but because, when our vision is clearest, not chequered or distorted by pride, passion, cupidity, self-deception, no other faith than that is possible. I believe in God.’
When Gerald Eversley in his lonely meditations found that the belief in God (which he had always taken as axiomatic) was gravely questioned, it was as though the earth were quaking under his feet. The extinguishing of the sun or moon in the heaven would not be a more terrible shock than is the loss of God to a young soul. It is altogether desolate if bereft of Him. It is so trustful, so generous, so positive; it leans so hard upon its faiths, and is so sure of their ability to endure whatever assault of criticism may be opposed to them, that to lose aught is to lose all; and, when the faith in God fails, the man, from a sentiment of having been abused and cheated, plunges many a time headlong into sin. Oh! the pity that God should fail men in their bitter need of Him!
I find this passage in one of Gerald Eversley’s papers, written, it would seem, not long after the date of his leaving St. Anselm’s. It is like much that men have thought and written since the world was.
‘What is the voice of Nature? Is it love? I see a wild battling of forces, ruthless, inexplicable, working out good—such good as exists—by agonies of evil. I see the strong trampling on the weak, life issuing from suffering and death, pain inflicted every day upon the innocent and unoffending; everywhere violence, cruelty, pestilence, cataclysm the laws of the universe. No, the voice of Nature is not love.
‘What is the voice of History? Is that then love? Has the progress of man been effected by beneficent agencies? Are the hands of civilisation stained with no bloodshed? Everywhere the pages of human history exhibit the red fires of tyranny, injustice, persecution, conscience sacrificed at the stake, virtue outraged and expelled, vice enthroned in the palace, nay, in the sanctuary of God, armies of men slaughtered for a tyrant’s will, butcheries, fusillades, dragonnades, noyades, the axe, the scaffold, the guillotine. Everywhere, everywhere.