“Be it so,” replied the vicar, in an undertone. As he spoke he bit his lip, and his cheek coloured. The thought was not meant for utterance, but it slipped into words before he was aware. For the full significance of that thought was a singular exemplification of the conflicting spiritual and animal natures of the man. That divorce of death which had been pronounced inevitable opened before him, in a dreamy vista of the future, a new world of ecstatic beatitude, where his soul and the radiant spirit of the woman who stood beside him should be mingled together in indissoluble communion.
CHAPTER VII. CELESTIAL AFFINITIES.
Shortly afterwards Mrs. Haldane suggested that they should take a turn about the grounds, instead of wasting the sunshine indoors. As they left the chapel the vicar paused and looked back at the ivy-draped building, with its half-hidden lancets.
“You have turned a sacred edifice to a strange use,” he said. “Here, within the walls where past generations have dwelt and worshipped, you have set up your apparatus for the destruction of man’s holiest heritage. Pardon me if I speak warmly, but to me this appears to be sacrilege.”
“The Church has always been intolerant of science and research,” replied Mr. Haldane, good-humouredly, “and it is the fortune of conflict if sometimes we are able to make reprisals. But, seriously, I see no desecration here.”
“No desecration in converting Gods house into a laboratory to analyze soul and spirit into function and force!”
“No desecration,” should say, “in converting the shrine of a narrow, selfish superstition into a schoolroom where one may learn a truer and a grander theology, and a less presumptuous and illusive theory of life. It is, however, impossible for us to be at one on these matters; let us at least agree to differ amicably. Your predecessor and I found much of common interest. He was of the old school, but life had taught him a kindly tolerance of opinion. To you, as I gleaned from your sermon yesterday, the new philosophy and modern criticism are familiar. You must surely concede that the old theological ground must be immeasurably widened, if you are still resolved to occupy it. Why should you fear truth, if God has indeed revealed Himself to the Church?”
“The Church does not fear truth,” replied the vicar; “but she does fear the wild speculations and guesses at truth which unsettle the faith of the world. For myself I have looked into some of these fantastic theories of science, and I repudiate them as at once blasphemous and hopeless. It is easy to destroy the old trust in the beneficence of Providence, in the redemption and destiny of man; but when you have accomplished that, you can go no further. Tyndall proves to you that all life in the world is the outcome of antecedent life; Haeckel contends that science must in the long run accept spontaneous generation. Your leading men are at loggerheads; and it signifies little which is right, for in either case the causa causans is only removed one link further back in the chain of causation. Some of you hold that there is only matter and force in the universe, but on others it is beginning to dawn that possibly matter and force are in the ultimate one and the same. And again, it signifies little which is right, for both, being conditioned, must have had a beginning. A God, a creative Power, is needed in the long run—‘a power behind humanity, and behind all other things,’ as Herbert Spencer describes it; a God of whom science can predicate nothing, of whom science declares it to be beyond her province to speak, but of whom every heart is at some time vividly conscious and has been from the beginning—demonstrably from the Paleolithic period until now.”