But the worship of Bohemia is something; nay, Bradley found it much.
He could count among the occasional visitors to his temple some of the leading names in Art and Science. Fair votaries came to him by legions, led by the impassioned and enthusiastic Alma Craik. The society journals made much of him; one of them, in a series of articles called ‘Celebrities in their Slippers,’ gave a glowing picture of the new Apostle in his study, in which the sweetest of Raphael’s Madonnas looked down wonderingly on Milo’s Venus, and where Newman’s ‘Parochial Sermons’ stood side by side with Tyndall’s Belfast address, and the original edition of the ‘Vestiges of Creation.’ The correspondent of the ‘New York Herald’ telegraphed, on more than one occasion, the whole, or nearly the whole, of one of his Sunday discourses—which, printed in large type, occupied two columns of the great Transatlantic daily; and he received forthwith, from an enterprising Yankee caterer, an offer of any number of dollars per lecture, if he would enter into a contract to ‘stump’ the States.
Surely this was fame, of a sort.
Although, if the truth must be told, even Bohemia did not take the New Church overseriously, Bradley found his intellectual forces expand with the growing sense of power.
Standing in no fear of any authority, human or superhuman, he gradually advanced more and more into the arena of spiritual controversy; retired further and further from the old landmarks of dogmatic religion; drew nearer and still nearer to the position of an accredited teacher of religious æstheticism. Always literary and artistic, rather than puritanical, in his sympathies, he found himself before long at that standpoint which regards the Bible merely as a poetical masterpiece, and accepts Christianity as simply one manifestation, though a central one, of the great scheme of human morals.
Thus the cloud of splendid supernaturalism, on which alone has been projected from time immemorial the mirage of a heavenly promise, gradually dissolved away before his sight,
And like the cloudy fabric of a vision
Left not a wrack behind.
The creed of spiritual sorrow was exchanged for the creed of spiritual pleasure. The man, forgetful of all harsh experience, became rapt in the contemplation of ‘beautiful ideas’—of an intellectual phantasmagoria in which Christ and Buddha, St. John and Shakespeare, Mary Magdalene and Mary Shelley, the angels of the church and the winged pterodactyls of the chalk, flashed and faded in everchanging kaleidoscopic dream.
The mood which welcomed all forms of belief, embraced none utterly, but contemplated all, became vague, chaotic, and transcendental; and Ambrose Bradley found himself in a fairy world where nothing seemed real and solemn enough as a law for life.