Beth smiled. "I could not be so kindly courteous," she said. "Some things make me fierce. The kingdom of heaven is or is not within us, I believe; and half the time I know it is not in me, because there is no room for anything in me but the hate and rage that rend me for horror of all the falsehood, injustice, and misery I know of and cannot prevent. A sense of humour would save the church perhaps; but I'm too sore to see it. All I can say is: your religion to me is horrifying—human sacrifice and devil-worship, survivals from an earlier day welded on to our own time, and assorting ill with it. I would not accept salvation at the hands of such futile omnipotence, such cruel mercy, such blood-stained justice. The sight of suffering was grateful to man when the world was young, as it still is to savages; but we revolt from it now. We should not be happy in heaven, as the saved were said to be in the old tales, within sight of the sinners suffering in hell."
"Which is to say that there is more of Christ in us now than there was in the days of old," he said, speaking dispassionately, and with the confident deliberation of one who takes time to think. "I believe those old tales were founded on muddle-headed confusion of mind in the days when dreams were as real to mankind as the events of life. There are obscure tribes still on earth who cannot distinguish between what they have done and what they have only dreamt they did, and probably every race has gone through that stage of development. I don't know if excessive piety be a disease of the nerves, as some say, although what is piety in one generation does appear to be perversity in the next, as witness the sons of the clergy, and other children of pious people, who don't answer to expectation, as a rule. And I don't go much on churches or creeds, or faith in this personality or that. The old ideas have lost their hold upon me, as they have upon you; but that is no reason why we should give up the old truths that have been in the world for all time, the positive right and wrong, which are facts, not ideas. I believe that there is good and evil, that the one is at war with the other always; and that good can do no evil, evil no good. I've got beyond all the dogma and fiddle-faddle of the intellect with which the church has overlaid the spirit, and all the ceremonial so useful and necessary for individual souls in early stages of development. I used to think if I could find a religion with no blood in it, I would embrace it. Now I feel sure that it does not matter what the expression of our religious nature is so that it be religious. Religion is an attitude of mind, the attitude of prayer, which includes reverence for things holy and deep devotion to them. I would not lose that for anything—the right of appeal; but now, when I think of our Father in heaven, I do not despise our mother on earth."
Beth sat some time looking thoughtfully into the fire. "Go to sleep," she said at last, abruptly. "You ought not to be talking at this time of night."
"I wish you would go to sleep yourself," he said, as he settled himself obediently; "for I lose half the comfort of being saved, while you sit up there suffering for me."
The expression was not too strong for the strain Beth had to put upon herself in those days; for she had no help. Ethel Maud Mary and Gwendolen felt for her and her patient, as they said; but there of necessity their kindness ended. The other lodgers kept Gwendolen for ever running to and fro; each seemed to think she had nobody else to look after, and it was seldom indeed that any of them noticed her weariness or took pity on her. Beth did everything for herself, fetched the coals from the cellar, the water from the bath-room, swept and dusted, cleaned the grate, ran out to do the shopping, and returned to do the cooking and mending. Ethel Maud Mary stole the time to run up occasionally to show sympathy; but her own poor little hands were overfull, what with her mother ill in bed, both ends to be made to meet, and lodgers uncertain in money matters. She lost all her plumpness that winter, her rose-leaf complexion faded to the colour of dingy wax, and her yellow hair, so brightly burnished when she had time to brush it, became towzled and dull; but her heart beat as bravely-kind as ever, and she never gave in.
She climbed up one day in a hurry to Mr. Brock's room, which Beth occupied, snatching a moment to make inquiries and receive comfort; and as soon as she entered she subsided suddenly on to a chair out of breath.
"How you do it a dozen times a day, Miss Maclure, I can't think," she gasped.
"Those stairs have taught me what servants suffer," Beth said, as if that, at all events, were a thing for which to be thankful.
"You'd not have driven 'em, even if you hadn't known what they suffer," said Ethel Maud Mary. "That's the worst of this world. All the hard lessons have got to be learnt by the people who never needed them to make them good, while the bad folk get off for nothing."
"I don't know about not needing them," said Beth. "But I do know this: that every sorrowful experience I have ever had has been an advantage to me sooner or later."