It was Christmas Eve when they moved him, and late that night Beth kept her vigil by him, sitting over the fire with her elbows on her knees and her face between her hands, listening dreamily to the clang and clamour of the church-bells, which floated up to her over the snow, mellowed by distance and full-fraught with manifold associations. As she sat there she pondered. She thought of the long way she had drifted from the days when she knelt in spirit at the call of the bells and lost herself in happy prayer. She thought of her husband's hypocrisy, and the way in which, when it dawned upon her, her own faith had melted from her; and she pondered on the difference it would have made if only she had been married early—just to a good man. It would not have been necessary for her to have loved him—not with passion—only to have relied upon him. Some one to trust, she craved for, more than some one to love; yet she allowed that a loveless marriage is a mock marriage. She did not regret the loss of her conventional faith, but she wished she could join the congregation just for the human fellowship. She felt the need of union, of some central station, a centre of peace, unlike the church, the house of disunion. Without knowing it, she leant to Quaker-Catholicism, the name assumed for her religious principles by Caroline Fox—Quaker-Catholicism having direct spiritual teaching for its distinctive dogma.
"What are you thinking about?" Arthur Brock said suddenly from the bed.
Beth started. She thought he was asleep.
"God," she said; with a gasp, "and going to church," she added, laughing at her own abruptness. "I was wanting a church to go to."
"You don't belong to the Established Church, then," he said. "Well, I don't go to church myself; but I make a difference on Sundays. I don't work, and I read another kind of book. It is my day for the plains of heaven. I should like to be there all the time, if I could manage it; but I can't, not being a monk in a cell. When I can, I make the ascent, however, with the help of the books that take one there."
"I used to read religious books too," said Beth; "but I found little illumination in them, most of them being but the dry husks of the subject, uninformed of the spirit, containing no vital spark, and stained with blood."
"How?" he exclaimed.
"This God of the Hebrews," Beth began, looking dreamily into the fire, "what is his history? He loved cruelty and bloodshed. The innocent animals first suffered in his service; but, not content with that, he went from bad to worse, as men do, and ended by demanding human sacrifice, the sacrifice of his own son. And for that specially we are required to adore him, although it must be clear to the commonest capacity to-day that the worship of such a deity is devil-worship. I do not say there is no God; I only say this is not God—this blood-lover, this son-slayer, this blind omniscience, this impotent omnipotence, this merciful cruelty, this meek arrogance, this peaceful combatant; this is not God, but man. The mind of man wars with the works of God to mar them. Man tries to make us believe that he is made in the image of God; but what happened was just the reverse. Man was of a better nature originally, a more manifold nature. He had intellect for a toy to play with on earth, and spirit for a power to help him to heaven. But instead of toiling to strengthen his spirit, he preferred to play with his intellect; and he played until he became so expert in the use of it, and so interested in the game, that he forgot his origin. And then it was that he projected an image of himself into space, and was so delighted with his own appearance from that point of view, that he called it God and fell down and worshipped it. If you would understand man, consider God; if you would know his God, study man."
Arthur Brock reflected for a little.
"What you say sounds real smart," he said at last, "and there's a kind of glamour in your words that dazzles and prevents one seeing just how much they mean at first. It is true that religion culminates in human sacrifice both here and in Africa, and, for refinement of horror, we have here the literal bloody sacrifice of a son by his father. But that is not God, as you say; that is the ultimate of the priest. And the priest is the same at all times, in all ages, beneath all veneers of civilisation. His credit depends upon a pretence to power. He is not a humble seeker after truth, but a bigoted upholder of error and an impudent time-server. He destroys the scientific discoverer in one age; in the next he finds his own existence is threatened because he refuses to acknowledge that the discoverer was right; then he confesses the truth, and readjusts his hocus-pocus to suit it. He does not ask us to pin our faith to fancies which seem real to a child in its infancy, yet he would have us credulous about those which were the outcome of the intellectual infancy of the race. What he can't get over in himself is the absence of any sense of humour. I'm real sorry for him at times, and I tell him so."