The Zeit-Geist

by L. Dougall

In Toyner's former religious experience he had been much upheld by the knowledge that he was walking in step with a vast army of Christians. Now he no longer believed himself in the ways of exclusive thought and practices in which the best men he knew were walking. The only religious thinkers with whom he had come in contact gave up a large class of human activities and the majority of human souls to the almost exclusive dominion of the devil. As far as Toyner knew he was alone in the world with his new idea. He had none of that vanity and self-confidence which would have made it easy for him to hold to it. It did not appear to him reasonable that he could be right and these others wrong. He did not know that no man can think alone, that by some strange necessity of thought he could only think what other men were then thinking. He felt homesick, sick for the support of those faithful ones which he had been wont to see in imagination with him: their conscious communion with God was the only good life, the life which he must seek to attain and from which he feared above all things to fall short; and that being so, it would have been easier, far easier, to call his new belief folly, heresy, nay, blasphemy if that were needful, and to repent of it, if he could have done so. He could not, do what he would; he saw his vision to be true.

The thing had grown with his growth; he believed that a voice from heaven had spoken it. Is not this the history of all revelation?

When I say that Toyner could not doubt his new conception of God and of the human struggle, I mean that he could not in sincerest thought hold the contrary to be true. I do not mean to say that daily and hourly, when about his common avocations, his new inspiration did not seem a mere will-o'-the-wisp of the mind. It took months and years to bring it into any accustomed relation to every-day matters of thought and act; and it is this habitual adjustment of our inward belief to our outward environment that makes any creed appear to be incontrovertible.

Oh the loneliness of it, to have a creed that no companion has! The sheer sorrow of being compelled by the law of his mind to believe concerning God what he did not know that any other man believed time and time again obscured Bart Toyner's vision of the divine.

The power of the miracle wrought at his conversion was gone; he had been taught that the miraculous power was only to be with him as long as he yielded implicit obedience, but that implied a clear-cut knowledge of right from wrong which Toyner did not now possess; many of the old rules clashed with that one large new rule which had come to him—that any way of life was wicked which made it appear that God was in some provinces of life and not in others. "Whatever is not of faith is sin"; but while an old and a new faith are warring in a man's soul the definition fails: many a righteous act is born of doubt, not faith. This was one reason why Toyner no longer possessed all-conquering strength. Another reason there was which acted as powerfully to rob him—the soul-bewildering difficulty of believing that the God of physical law can also be the God of promise, that He that is within us and beneath us can also be above us with power to lift us up.

Without a firm grip on this supernatural upholding power Toyner was a man with a diseased craving for intoxicants. He fled from them as a man flies from deadly infection; but with all the help that total abstinence and the absence of temptation can give he failed in the battle. A few weeks after he had returned to Fentown he was brought into his mother's house one morning dead drunk. The mother, whose heart had revived within her a little during the last year, now sank again into her previous dejection. Her friends said to her that they had always known how it would be in the case of so sudden a reformation. When Toyner woke up his humiliation was terrible; he bore it as he had borne all the rest of his pain and shame, silently enough. No one but Ann Markham even guessed the agony that he endured, and she had not the chance to give a kindly look, for at this time Toyner, unable to trust himself with himself, was afraid to look upon Ann lest he should smirch her life.

Again Toyner set his feet sternly in the way of sobriety. Ah! how he prayed, beseeching that God, who had revealed Himself to be greater and nobler than had before been known, would not because of that show Himself to be less powerful towards those that fear Him. It is the prayer of faith, not the prayer of agonised entreaty, that takes hold of strength. Toyner failed again and again. There was a vast difference now between this and his former life of failure, for now he never despaired, but took up the struggle each time just where he had laid it down, and moreover the intervals of sobriety were long, and the fits of drunkenness short and few; but there were not many besides Ann who noticed this difference. And as for Toyner, the shame and misery of failure so filled his horizon that he could not see the favourable contrast—shame and misery, but never despair; that one word had gone out of his life.

One day a visitor came hurrying down the street to Toyner's home. The stranger had the face of a saint, and the hasty feet of those who are conscious that they bear tidings of great joy. It was Toyner's friend, the preacher. Bart had often written to him, and he to his convert. Of late the letters had been fraught with pain to both, but this was the first time that the preacher had found himself able to come a long journey since he had heard of Toyner's fall. He came, his heart big with the prayer of faith that what he had done once he might be permitted to do again—lead this man once more into the humble path of a time-honoured creed and certain self-conquest. To the preacher the two were one and indivisible.

When this life is passed away, shall we see that our prayers for others have been answered most lavishly by the very contradiction of what we have desired?

The visit was well timed. Bart Toyner's father lay dying; and in spite of that, or rather in consequence of nights of watching and the necessary handling of stimulants, Bart sat in his own room, only just returned to soberness after a drunken night. With face buried in his hands, and a heart that was breaking with sorrow, Bart was sitting alone; and then the preacher came in.