“Garibaldi called upon his volunteers to disregard all worldly allurements, to embrace suffering, wounds and death for the cause of Italian unity. And the young men flocked to his banners. Let the young men once grasp that not God but they themselves can win for all mankind freedom and joy, and an ever-increasing number of them will be willing to make the necessary sacrifice.
“One man showed them the way. There have, at various times, been born exceptional men through whom the spirit we call God has been able to manifest itself, to speak aloud to men. Of all these, your Christ was perhaps more than any of the others imbued with this spirit of God. In Christ’s voice we recognize the voice of God. It is the voice we hear within us, speaking to each of us individually. Christ’s one commandment: ‘Love one another,’ is the commandment that God has been whispering to us from the beginning of creation. Out of that Commandment life sprang. Through that commandment alone can life be made perfect. Love one another. It would solve every problem that has plagued mankind since the dawn of the Eocene epoch. It would recall man’s energies from the barren fields of strife to mutual labour for the husbandry of all the earth. In the words of your prophet: ‘The Wilderness be made glad, the desert rejoice and blossom as the rose.’ Why has man persisted in turning a deaf ear to this one supreme commandment? Why does man persistently refuse to follow the one guide who would lead him out of all his sorrows? To love is as easy as to hate. Why does he set himself deliberately to cultivate the one and not the other? There is no more reason for a French peasant hating a German farm labourer, for a white man hating a brown man, for a Protestant hating a Catholic, than for loving him. But our hate we take pains to nourish, it is a part of our education. We teach it to our children. At the altar of hate man is willing to make sacrifice; he will give to his last penny. On the altar of hate the mother will consent to the slaying of her own first-born. All things that are good come to man through love. No man denies this. No man but seeks, within the circle of his own home, to surround himself with love. Life without love is every man’s fear. To gain and keep love man sacrifices his own ease and comfort. To love is sweeter than to hate. Man watches himself, lest by sloth or indifference he should let love die; plans and labours to strengthen and increase love. If he would, he could love all men. If man took the same pains to cultivate his will to love that he takes to cultivate his will to hate, he could change the world.
“Man excuses himself for disregarding Christ’s express commandment by telling himself that the salvation of the world is God’s affair, not his. God’s love will make for man’s benefit a new heaven and a new earth. There is no need for man to bestir himself. While man pursues his greeds and hatreds God is busy preparing the miracle. One day, man is to wake up and find, to his joy, that he loves his fellow man; and the tears of the world will be wiped away. It is not God, it is man that must accomplish the miracle. It is by man’s own endeavour that he will be saved; by cleansing himself of hate, by setting himself in all seriousness to this great business of loving. Until he obeys Christ’s commandment he shall not enter the promised land.
“I have put it more or less into my own words,” she explained, “but I have given you the sense of it. He thought the time would come—perhaps soon—when the thinkers of the world would agree that civilization had been progressing upon a wrong line—that if destruction was to be avoided, man must retrace his steps. He thought that, apart from all else, the mere instinct of self-preservation would compel the race to turn aside from the pursuit of material welfare to the more important work of its spiritual development. He did not expect any conscious or concerted movement. Rather he believed that men and women in increasing numbers would withdraw themselves from the world, that they might live lives in conformity with God’s laws. He was a curious mixture of the religious and the scientific. He often employed the word God, but could not explain what he meant beyond that he ‘felt’ him. He held that the only altar at which a reasonable man could worship was the altar erected by the Greeks: ‘To the Unknown God.’ Christ he regarded as a Promethean figure who had received the fire from heaven and brought it down to men. That fire would never be extinguished. The spirit of Christ still moved about the world. It was the life force behind what little love still glowed and flickered among men. One day the smouldering embers would burst into flame.”
Betty put in two or three years at The Priory on and off, occupying herself chiefly with writing. But the wanderlust had got into her blood, and her book finished she grew restless.
One day Anthony and Eleanor had dined with her at The Priory. Eleanor had run away immediately after dinner to attend a committee meeting of the Children’s Holiday Society of which she was the president. Betty, she was sure, sympathized sufficiently with the movement to forgive her. She would be back soon after nine. Betty and Anthony took their coffee in the library.
“I wanted you both to come tonight,” she explained. “I’ve got into a habit of acting suddenly when an impulse seizes me. I may wake up any morning and feel I’ve got to go.”
“Whither?” he asked.
“How much money can I put my hands on within the next few months?” she asked.