To the obligation of the moral law he still clung. It was not in his nature to commit the baseness of discovering in infidelity a pretext for sin. The supremacy of honour, truth, charity, purity, was still the law of his life. Whether these high principles of conduct were self-sufficient, whether they could for ever flourish in a climate that knew not the golden sunlight, he did not ask, he did not wish to ask. He was trying to live the Christian life without Christ. He was not happy.
In the academical society to which he migrated from St. Anselm’s, he was subjected to a new and penetrating experience. His intellectual distinction won him, from the first, admission into a cultivated society. He was struck by the conversation of his associates. It was brilliant and fascinating. It sparkled with jest and epigram. It overran in festive good humour. But it lacked seriousness. It seemed remote from the realities of life. There was in it no sense of responsibility, of awe, of the sense of sin, of the longing for righteousness. The froth upon the cup was high and shining; but in the wine was no strength, no virtue. One of Gerald’s frequent companions at Balliol was heard to say that he did not see what good religion was; for he was doing his duty, and he could not do it better if there were a hundred Gods to punish him. Gerald thought of the Pharisee and the Publican, and of the reverential solemnity with which his father had been wont to repeat the words, ‘God be merciful to me a sinner.’
Yet the stream carried him away. How hard it is to live in the stream and not be borne away by it! And Gerald came to feel the absence of belief to be as natural as belief had once been to him. He took it for granted. He said to himself that nobody believed, because he and his half-score of friends were unbelievers. It began to seem to him a thing incredible that he had once enjoyed a simple unquestioning faith in God and Christ.
It may be that, if it were the Divine Will to test the worth of human souls, no better test were possible than the withdrawal of religious faith. Better, in God’s eyes it may be, than the soul that believes, is the soul that acquits itself nobly in the absence of belief. To steer straight on when the waves of the deep run mountain-high, and neither sun nor moon appears for many days in heaven—this is the triumph of a faithless faith. O soul, that deemest thyself forsaken of God, thou bearest within thee a God whose name is conscience.
And yet the desolation of being faithless—how great it is! Never had Gerald been so solitary before. He shrank more and more from going home. The meeting with his father was painful to him, for he had given up the habit of going to church. And if he knew that his father prayed for him, that was but one witness more to the vanity of prayer.
At college the men whom he met habitually were either the votaries or (more often) the enemies of religion, and he was neither. Except at Helmsbury, and there only on the rare occasions of conversation with Lady Venniker, he could look for sympathy nowhere. He found it not in the earth nor yet in the heaven, and he knew not that it could ever be found.
Unhappy then he was, and daily unhappier. If he asked, ‘Is there a God? do I stand in relation to Him? Has there been One who spoke on earth in the accents of heaven? Is man responsible except to man? Is there a hereafter? Whence came I? Whither am I going?’—the only answer was the echo of his own voice. Culture could tell him all things, save the one thing that his soul needed to know. It might be that that knowledge was for ever hidden. But if so, if the questions that man is compelled to ask are the questions to which an answer is denied, then is life vain, nebulous, self-torturing, nay, it is death.
Lonely was Gerald, indescribably lonely. One extract from his papers, written when he had been at college a year and more, may be given here; it will not unfitly bring this chapter to a conclusion.
‘I lay wakeful one night until the night was passing into morning. It was more than I could bear—that aching, terrible void. I could have chosen death rather than that living pain. At last I rose from my bed, half dressed myself, and went out. The night had been rainy. The lamps in the courtyard were just flickering on the verge of extinction; they seemed to me emblems of my own dying faith. For a time I stood upon the bridge, gazing downwards into the dark, sluggish water. Many thoughts, weird and dreadful, coursed through my mind; I can scarcely recall them. But I know I said, standing there, “Is life then worthy to be lived, if such be life? What is it that constrains me to suffer and live? Religion teaches that life is a service, and the living man a soldier set at his post by Divine Will, and it is treachery or cowardice to quit it until He gives the command. But I have done with religion. And if my life is my own, and death is sweeter, or less bitter, than life, why live?” So I said—but not yet, not yet. The roseate light began to play on the eastern horizon. I crossed the courtyard, and returned, not as I had come, but under the shadow of the old ivy-grown wall. When my servant came in the morning I was asleep.’
To this had Gerald Eversley come.