There was a brief pause, during which the chiming clock rang out the hour musically on the stillness. Then Villiers, still in a state of most profound bewilderment, sat down deliberately in a chair opposite Alwyn's, and placed one hand familiarly on his knee.
"Look here, old fellow," he said impressively, "do you really MEAN it!
… Are you 'going over' to some Church or other?"
Alwyn laughed—his friend's anxiety was so genuine.
"Not I!"—he responded promptly.. "Don't be alarmed, Villiers,—I am not a 'convert' to any particular set FORM of faith,—what I care for is the faith itself. One can follow and serve Christ without any church dogma. He has Himself told us plainly, in words simple enough for a child to understand, what He would have us to do, . . and though I, like many others, must regret the absence of a true Universal Church where the servants of Christ may meet altogether without a shadow of difference in opinion, and worship Him as He should be worshipped, still that is no reason why I should refrain from endeavoring to fulfil, as far as in me lies, my personal duty toward Him. The fact is, Christianity has never yet been rightly taught, grasped or comprehended,—moreover, as long as men seek through it their own worldly advantage, it never will be,—so that the majority of the people are really as yet ignorant of its true spiritual meaning, thanks to the quarrels and differences of sects and preachers. But, notwithstanding the unhappy position of religion at the present day, I repeat, I am a Christian, if love for Christ, and implicit belief in Him, can make me so."
He spoke simply, and without the slightest affectation of reserve.
Villiers was still puzzled.
"I thought, Alwyn," he ventured to say presently with some little diffidence,—"that you entirely rejected the idea of Christ's Divinity, as a mere superstition?"
"In dense ignorance of the extent of God's possibilities, I certainly did so," returned Alwyn quietly,—"But I have had good reason to see that my own inability to comprehend supernatural causes was entirely to blame for that rejection. Are we able to explain all the numerous and complex variations and manifestations of Matter? No. Then why do we dare to doubt the certainly conceivable variations and manifestations of Spirit? … The doctrine of a purely HUMAN Christ is untenable,—a Creed founded on that idea alone would make no way with the immortal aspirations of the soul, . . what link could there be between a mere man like ourselves and heaven? None whatever,—it needs the DIVINE in Christ to overleap the darkness of the grave, . . to serve us as the Symbol of certain Resurrection, to teach us that this life is not the ALL, but only ONE loop in the chain of existence, . . only ONE of the 'many mansions' in the Father's House. Human teachers of high morals there have always been in the world,—Confucius, Buddha, Zoroaster, Socrates, Plato, . . there is no end to them, and their teachings have been valuable so far as they went, but even Plato's majestic arguments in favor of the Immortality of the Soul fall short of anything sure and graspable. There were so many prefigurements of what WAS to come, . . just as the sign of the Cross was used in the Temple of Serapis, and was held in singular mystic veneration by various tribes of Egyptians, Arabians, and Indians, ages before Christ came. And now that these prefigurements have resolved themselves into an actual Divine Symbol, the doubting world still hesitates, and by this hesitation paralyzes both its Will and Instinct—so that it fails to cut out the core of Christianity's true solution, or to learn what Christ really meant when He said 'I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life,—no man cometh to the Father but by Me.' Have you ever considered the particular weight of that word 'MAN' in that text? It is rightly specified that 'no MAN cometh '—for there are hosts of other beings, in other universes, who are not of our puny race, and who do not need to be taught either the way, truth, or life, as they know all three, and have never lost their knowledge from the beginning."
His voice quivered a little, and he paused,—Villiers watched him with a strange sense of ever-deepening fascination and wonder.
"I have lately studied the whole thing carefully,".. he resumed presently, . . "and I see no reason why we, who call ourselves a progressive generation, should revert back to the old theory of Corinthus, who, as early as sixty-seven years after Christ, denied His Divinity. There is nothing new in the hypothesis—it is no more original than the doctrine of evolution, which was skilfully enough handled by Democritus, and probably by many another before him. Voltaire certainly threshed out the subject exhaustively, . . and I think Carlyle's address to him on the uselessness of his work is one of the finest of its kind. Do you remember it?"
Villiers shook his head in the negative, whereupon Alwyn rose, and glancing along an evidently well-remembered book-shelf, took from thence "Sartor Resartus"—and turned over the pages quickly.