Robert guessed it all, and whatever remorseful love could do to soften such a strain and burden he tried to do. He encouraged her to find work among the poor; he tried in the tenderest ways to interest her in the great spectacle of London life which was already, in spite of yearning and regret, beginning to fascinate and absorb himself. But their standards were now so different that she was constantly shrinking from what attracted him, or painfully judging what was to him merely curious and interesting. He was really more and more oppressed by her intellectual limitations, though never consciously would he have allowed himself to admit them, and she was more and more bewildered by what constantly seemed to her a breaking up of principle, a relaxation of moral fibre.
And the work among the poor was difficult. Robert instinctively felt that for him to offer his services in charitable work to the narrow Evangelical, whose church Catherine had joined, would have been merely to invite rebuff. So that even in the love and care of the unfortunate they were separated. For he had not yet found a sphere of work, and, if he had, Catherine's invincible impulse in these matters was always to attach herself to the authorities and powers that be. He could only acquiesce when she suggested applying to Mr. Clarendon for some charitable occupation for herself.
After her letter to him, Catherine had an interview with the vicar at his home. She was puzzled by the start and sudden pause for recollection with which he received her name, the tone of compassion which crept into his talk with her, the pitying look and grasp of the hand with which he dismissed her. Then, as she walked home, it flashed upon her that she had seen a copy, some weeks old, of the Record lying on the good man's table, the very copy which contained Robert's name among the list of men who during the last ten years had thrown up the Anglican ministry. The delicate face flushed miserably from brow to chin. Pitied for being Robert's wife! Oh, monstrous!—incredible!
Meanwhile Robert, man-like, in spite of all the griefs and sorenesses of the position, had immeasurably the best of it. In the first place such incessant activity of mind as his is in itself both tonic and narcotic. It was constantly generating in him fresh purposes and hopes, constantly deadening regret, and pushing the old things out of sight. He was full of many projects, literary and social, but they were all in truth the fruits of one long experimental process, the passionate attempt of the reason to justify to itself the God in whom the heart believed. Abstract thought, as Mr. Grey saw, had had comparatively little to do with Elsmere's relinquishment of the Church of England. But as soon as the Christian bases of faith were overthrown, that faith had naturally to find for itself other supports and attachments. For faith itself—in God and a spiritual order—had been so wrought into the nature by years of reverent and adoring living that nothing could destroy it. With Elsmere, as with all men of religious temperament, belief in Christianity and faith in God had not at the outset been a matter of reasoning at all, but of sympathy, feeling, association, daily experience. Then the intellect had broken in, and destroyed or transformed the belief in Christianity. But after the crash, faith emerged as strong as ever, only craving and eager to make a fresh peace, a fresh compact with the reason.
Elsmere had heard Grey say long ago in one of the few moments of real intimacy he had enjoyed with him at Oxford, 'My interest in philosophy springs solely from the chance it offers me of knowing something more of God!' Driven by the same thirst he too threw himself into the same quest, pushing his way laboriously through the philosophical borderlands of science, through the ethical speculation of the day, through the history of man's moral and religious past. And while on the one hand the intellect was able to contribute an ever stronger support to the faith which was the man, on the other the sphere in him of a patient ignorance which abstains from all attempts at knowing what man cannot know, and substitutes trust for either knowledge or despair, was perpetually widening. 'I take my stand on conscience and the moral life!' was the upshot of it all. 'In them I find my God! As for all these various problems, ethical and scientific, which you press upon me, my pessimist friend, I, too, am bewildered; I, too, have no explanation to offer. But I trust and wait. In spite of them—beyond them—I have abundantly enough for faith—for hope—for action!'
We may quote a passage or two from some letters of his written at this time to that young Armitstead who had taken his place at Murewell, and was still there till Mowbray Elsmere should appoint a new man. Armitstead had been a college friend of Elsmere's. He was a High Churchman of a singularly gentle and delicate type, and the manner in which he had received Elsmere's story on the day of his arrival at Murewell had permanently endeared him to the teller of it. At the same time the defection from Christianity of a man who at Oxford had been to him the object of much hero-worship, and, since Oxford, an example of pastoral efficiency, had painfully affected young Armitstead, and he began a correspondence with Robert which was in many ways a relief to both. In Switzerland and Italy, when his wife's gentle inexorable silence became too oppressive to him, Robert would pour himself out in letters to Armitstead, and the correspondence did not altogether cease with his return to London. To the squire during the same period Elsmere also wrote frequently, but rarely or never on religious matters.
On one occasion Armitstead had been pressing the favourite Christian dilemma—Christianity or nothing. Inside Christianity, light and certainty; outside it, chaos. 'If it were not for the Gospels and the Church I should be a Positivist to-morrow. Your Theism is a mere arbitrary hypothesis, at the mercy of any rival philosophical theory. How, regarding our position as precarious, you should come to regard your own as stable, is to me incomprehensible!'
'What I conceive to be the vital difference between Theism and Christianity,' wrote Elsmere in reply, 'is that as an explanation of things Theism can never be disproved. At the worst it must always remain in the position of an alternative hypothesis, which the hostile man of science cannot destroy, though he is under no obligation to adopt it. Broadly speaking, it is not the facts which are in dispute, but the inference to be drawn from them.
'Now, considering the enormous complication of the facts, the Theistic inference will, to put it at the lowest, always have its place, always command respect. The man of science may not adopt it, but by no advance of science that I, at any rate, can foresee, can it be driven out of the field.
'Christianity is in a totally different position. Its grounds are not philosophical but literary and historical. It rests not upon all fact, but upon a special group of facts. It is, and will always remain, a great literary and historical problem, a question of documents and testimony. Hence, the Christian explanation is vulnerable in a way in which the Theistic explanation can never be vulnerable. The contention, at any rate, of persons in my position is: That to the man who has had the special training required, and in whom this training has not been neutralised by any overwhelming bias of temperament, it can be as clearly demonstrated that the miraculous Christian story rests on a tissue of mistake, as it can be demonstrated that the Isidorian Decretals were a forgery, or the correspondence of Paul and Seneca a pious fraud, or that the mediæval belief in witchcraft was the product of physical ignorance and superstition.'