Gerald Eversley's Friendship: A Study in Real Life

by J. E. C. Welldon

Why, then, does the Christian Church make use of metaphor? Partly, perhaps, because it is natural to human language to express the spiritual in terms of the sensuous; are not conception, apprehension, religion itself, terms of the senses? But partly, too, because metaphor appeals to the emotions; its very vagueness is suggestive, stimulating, inspiring, and it is by the emotions that religion lives. To say, then, that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, is not to say that that is intrinsic absolute truth.

Gerald Eversley had surrendered his faith in the divine nature of Christ. But he still clung to faith in Him as the highest or archetypal man, understanding so His self-chosen title ‘the Son of Man.’ This is the confession which, it will be remembered, he tried to make once to his father. He essayed to speak of Christ as perfect man, though not divine. He forgot that, if there were a perfect man, he would be more than man. Imperfection is an attribute of humanity.

Yet how infinitely touching is at times the desire of those who no longer believe Him divine to acknowledge and reverence Him as the head of the whole human family! They still speak of Him as ‘the Great Master,’ ‘the Holy One,’ ‘the Lord,’ nay even as ‘the Saviour.’ It is the glow that flushes the horizon when the sun has already sunk into the waves.

Gerald Eversley, in this phase of his belief or unbelief, said to himself, ‘He is nearer to me than he was, now that I think of him as man. Time was when his voice came to my ears, as it were, through long and distant avenues. Now I speak to him face to face. He is my elder brother, like myself, yet oh! how much higher! I grasp his hand. He goes before me on the dark and lonesome road. What need to dream of him as descending from heaven, or emptied of a divine glory? It is enough that one who walked upon the earth, a man among men, living the common life of men, tempted as men are, suffering like men, yet lived so sublime a life as to extort from human souls the vain ascription of divinity. That is my comfort, greater than if he had been the firstborn of Creation, and legions of angels had waited upon his word.’

Gerald Eversley did not long deceive himself with the imagination that the residuary Christ of his speculations was the same Being whom he had known and adored in childhood. It is the idlest of idle superstitions that modern reason or sentiment can rewrite the Gospel. Human thought did not create Christ, as Rousseau’s Vicaire Savoyard knew well. Neither can it re-create Him. And if the re-creation were possible, there would be a new Christ. If the angels of God were not obedient to His summons, His strong forbearance in not calling upon them was a mockery. If He could not have saved Himself from death, then His death is no longer meritorious. If he was, like other men, of the earth earthy, where then is the condescension of His humanity? Such a Christ may be a Friend, an Exemplar, a spiritual Leader; the world’s Saviour and Redeemer He is not.

For a while Gerald Eversley flattered himself that this was enough. The miraculous (he said) does not happen. Then there is no Christ. Gerald Eversley manufactured his own Christ and sought to worship Him; but the prayer died away upon his lips.

Yet, after all, this manufactured Christ did not content him. It is easy to make a selection of His words and teachings that please the individual, and to leave the rest. It is easy, but it is not satisfying. And the worst is, that one person is as much entitled to make his selection as another. Gerald, being honest with himself, could not but own that there are words, and actions too, of Christ which do not harmonise with any such selective process. It was a pain to him that so much must be left out. The divine and the human elements are the warp and the woof in the sacred biography. The result of selection is destruction. An accomplished critic, in the exercise of his selective faculty, has decided that Christ could not have spoken the parable of the Prodigal Son. Is the result to discredit the parable of the Prodigal Son, or to discredit the principle of selection? Heaven help us when the Christ of God is dissolved in the crucible of critical taste!

I do not say that a human Christ is not worth having; I only say that he is not the Christ of Christendom. Perhaps Gerald Eversley felt it to be so too; for he wrote, ‘No man is happy in a God whom he fashions for himself. The objects of worship are given, not made; they proceed from God to man, not from man to God. Science can analyse, but it cannot create. It can explain every hue of the rainbow, but it cannot set the rainbow in the heaven.’

He had ceased to worship the divine Son of Man; was it likely that he would worship His shadow? Jesus Christ was to him one whom he could admire or reverence, like Socrates or Marcus Aurelius; He was no more a Guide for life and for death.

So Gerald Eversley faced faith on the ocean of life like a vessel without rudder or compass. The sanctions of his life, its encouragements, its consolations were lost. He was without faith in the world.