‘O God! God!’ he cried, ‘I forgot Thee in mine own vain-glory, in my wicked lust of happiness and power! I wandered farther and farther away from Thy altars, from my childish faith, and at every step I took, my pride and folly grew! But now, at last, I know that it was a brazen image that I worship—nay, worse, the Phantom of my own miserable sinful self. Punish me, but let me come back to Thee! Destroy, but save me! I know now there is no God but One—the living, bleeding Christ whom I endeavoured to dethrone!’
She drew her face from his breast, and looked at him in terror, It seemed to her that he was raving.
‘Ambrose! my poor Ambrose! God has forgiven you, as I forgive you. You have been His faithful servant, His apostle!’
‘I have been a villain! I have fallen, as Satan fell, from intellectual vanity and pride. You talk to me of the great work that I have done; Alma, that work has been wholly evil, my creed a rotten reed. A materialist at heart, I thought that I could reject all certitude of faith, all fixity of form. My God became a shadow, my Christ a figment, my morality a platitude and a lie. Believing and accepting everything in the sphere of ideas, I believed nothing, accepted nothing, in the sphere of living facts. Descending by slow degrees to a creed of shallow materialism, I justified falseness to myself, and treachery to you. I walked in my blind self-idolatry, till the solid ground was rent open beneath me, as you have seen. In that final hour of temptation, of which I have spoken, a Christian would have turned to the Cross and found salvation. What was that Cross to me? A dream of the poet’s brain, a symbol which could not help me. I turned from it, and have to face, as my eternal punishment, all the horror and infamy of the old Hell.’
Every word that he uttered was true, even truer than he yet realised.
He had refined away his faith till it had become a mere figment. Christ the Divine Ideal had been powerless to keep him to the narrow path, whereas Christ the living Lawgiver might have enabled him to walk on a path thrice as narrow, yea, on the very edge of the great gulf, where there is scarcely foothold for a fly. I who write these lines, though perchance far away as Bradley himself from the acceptance of a Christian terminology, can at least say this for the Christian scheme—that it is complete as a law for life. Once accept its facts and theories, and it becomes as strong as an angel’s arm to hold us up in hours of weariness, weakness, and vacillation. The difficulty lies in that acceptance. But for common workaday use and practical human needs, transcendentalism, however Christian in its ideas, is utterly infirm. It will do when there is fair weather, when the beauty of Art will do, and when even the feeble glimmer of æstheticism looks like sunlight and pure air. But when sorrow comes, when temptation beckons, when what is wanted is a staff to lean upon and a Divine finger to point and guide, woe to him who puts his trust in any transcendental creed, however fair!
It is the tendency of modern agnosticism to slacken the moral fibre of men, even more than to weaken their intellectual grasp. The laws of human life are written in letters of brass on the rock of Science, and it is the task of true Religion to read them and translate them for the common use. But the agnostic is as shortsighted as an owl, while the atheist is as blind as a bat; the one will not, and the other cannot, read the colossal cypher, interpret the simple speech, of God.
Ambrose Bradley was a man of keen intellect and remarkable intuitions, but he had broadened his faith to so great an extent that it became like one of many ways in a wilderness, leading anywhere, or nowhere. He had been able to accept ideals, never to cope with practicalities. His creed was beautiful as a rainbow, as many-coloured, as capable of stretching from heaven to earth and earth to heaven, but it faded, rainbow-like, when the sun sank and the darkness came. So must it be with all creeds which are not solid as the ground we walk on, strength-giving as the air we breath, simple as the thoughts of childhood, and inexorable as the solemn verity of death.
Such has been, throughout all success or failure, and such is, practical Christianity. Blessed is he who, in days of backsliding and unbelief, can become as a little child and lean all his hope upon it. Its earthly penance and its heavenly promise are interchangeable terms. The Christian dies that he may live; suffers that he may enjoy; relinquishes that he may gain; sacrifices his life that he may save it. He knows the beatitude of suffering, which no merely happy man can know. We who are worlds removed from the simple faith of the early world may at least admit all this, and then, with a sigh for the lost illusion, go dismally upon our way.
That night Ambrose Bindley found, to his astonishment, that Alma was still at his mercy, that at a word from him she would defy the world. Therein came his last temptation, his last chance of moral redemption. The Devil was at hand busily conjuring, but a holier presence was also there. The man’s soul was worth saving, and there was still a stake.