Mr. Haldane’s face wore a grim smile as he heard the bitter emphasis of the vicar’s reply.
“Ah, my worthy friend,” he said, “you illustrate how necessary it is that when one has his hand full of truth he should only open it one finger at a time. If you revolt thus angrily against the new gospel, what can be expected from the ignorant and the vicious? The meaning and purpose of life does not depend on whether the individual man shall perish or shall be immortal. If perish he must, he may at least perish heroically. Annihilation or immortality does not affect the validity of religion, whose paramount aim is not to prepare for another world, but to make the best of this—to realize its ideal greatness and nobility. If life should suddenly appear a mockery, contrast the present with that remote past of the naked savage of the stone age, or the brutal condition of his more remote sylvan ancestor, learning to walk erect and to articulate; and then summon up a vision of the possible future, when superstition shall have ceased to embitter man’s life, when a knowledge of natural law shall have made men virtuous, when disease shall have vanished from the world, and the nations shall, in a golden age of peace and perfected arts, have learnt the method of a patriarchal longevity. Millions of individuals have wept and toiled and perished to secure for us the present; we and millions shall weep and toil and perish to secure the future for them.”
“And that you take to be the significance of life, the progress of the race?”
“And is not that at least as noble a significance as a heaven peopled with the penitent thief, the drunkard, the gallow’s-bird, the harlot, the thousand bestial types of humanity redeemed by vicarious agony—the thousand brutes of civilization who, in this age, are not fit for life even on this earth, to say nothing of an enlarged immortality?”
“But with ever-rising grades of immortality before them, even those bestial types might ascend to a perfect manhood, and shall they perish?”
“Have they not been ascending ever since the Miocene?” asked Mr. Haldane, with a scornful laugh. “However, it is little use discussing the matter. As you have said, we cannot agree upon first principles. Let me show you, instead, some of my curiosities. Did you ever see the Mentone skull? Here is a plaster cast of it.”
“And do you accept this dark and comfortless creed of your husband?” asked Mr. Santley, turning to Mrs. Haldane as he took the cast in his hand.
“Oh no,” she replied, raising her soft dark eyes to him earnestly; “the progress of humanity does not satisfy me as an explanation of the enigma of life in man or woman. I cannot abandon my old faith and trust in the God-Man for an unknown power who does not care for my suffering and cannot hear my prayers. What to me can such a god be? And what can life be but a mockery if my soul, with its yearnings and aspirations and ideals, ceases to exist after death—has no other world but this, in which I know its infinite wants can never be satisfied?”
The vicar’s face brightened, and his heart beat with a strange, impulsive ardour as he listened to her. Why had this woman, whose enthusiasm and sympathy might have enabled him to realize his own high ideal of the spiritual, been denied him? What evil destiny had bound her for ever to a man whose paralyzing creed must make a perpetual division between them—a man who could look into her sweet face and yet think of her as merely a beautiful animal; who could fold her in his arms, and yet tranquilly accept the teaching that at death that pure, radiant soul of hers would be for ever extinguished? These thoughts and feelings went through the vicars consciousness swiftly as sunshine and shadow over a landscape.
His eyes dropped on the plaster cast in his hand.