“Why then—why did you——”
“Why did I leave the monastery, uncle? Because I had come to see that the monastic system was based on a faulty ideal of Christianity, which had been tried for the greater part of nineteen hundred years and failed. The theory of monasticism is that Christ died to redeem our carnal nature, and all we have to do is to believe and pray. But it is not enough that Christ died once. He must be dying always—every day—and in every one of us. God is calling on us in this age to seek a new social application of the Gospel, or, shall I say, to go back to the old one?”
“And that is——?”
“To present Christ in practical life as the living Master and King and example, and to apply Christianity to the life of our own time.”
The Prime Minister had not taken his eyes off him. “What does this mean?” he had asked himself, but he only smiled his difficult smile and began to talk lightly. If this creed applied to the individual it applied also to the State; but think of a cabinet conducting the affairs of a nation on the charming principle of “taking no thought for the morrow,” and “loving your enemies,” and “turning the other cheek,” and “selling all and giving to the poor”!
John stuck to his guns. If the Christian religion could not be the ultimate authority to rule a Christian nation, it was only because we lacked faith and trusted too much to mechanical laws made by statesmen rather than to moral laws made by Christ. “Either the life of Christ, as the highest standard and example, means something or it means nothing. If something, let us try to follow it; but if nothing, then for God's sake let us put it away as a cruel, delusive, and damnable mummery!”
The Prime Minister continued to ask himself, “What is the key to this?” and to look at John as he would have looked at a problem that had to be solved, but he only went on smiling and talking lightly. It was true we said a prayer and took an oath on the Bible in the Houses of Parliament, but did anybody think for a moment that we intended to trust the nation to the charming romanticism of the politics of Jesus? As for the Church, it was founded on acts of Parliament, it was endowed and established by the State, its head was the sovereign, its clergy were civil servants who went to levées and hung on the edge of drawing-rooms and troubled the knocker of No. 10 Downing-Street. And as for Christ's laws—in this country they were interpreted by the Privy Council and were under the direct control of a State department. Still, it was a harmless superstition that we were a Christian nation. It helped to curb the masses of the people, and if that was what John was thinking of——
The Prime Minister paused and stopped.
“Tell me, my boy,” touching John's arm, “do you intend yourself to live—in short, the—well, after the example of the life of Christ?”
“As far as my weak and vain and sinful nature will permit, uncle!”