“And the Journal of the Age?”
“The editor cut me as soon as he found I believed in God in preference to himself. He is the fiercest opponent of Papal Infallibility with whom I ever had the honor of acquaintance.”
“I cannot say that your words and the manner in which you speak them do not impress me. Still, it never occurred to me that so insignificant a being as Roger Herbert was worthy the combined attack of the three formidable adversaries you have named. What have the devil, the world, and the flesh to do with me?”
“Yes, there is the difficulty, not only with Roger Herbert, but with everybody else. It does seem strange that influences so powerful and mysterious should be for ever ranged against such wretched little beings as we are, whom a toothache tortures and a fever kills. Yet surely man’s life on earth is not all fever and its prevention, toothache and its cure, or a course of eating, doctoring, and tailoring. If we believe at all in a life that can never end, in a soul, surely that is something worth thought and care. An eternal life that must range itself on one side or the other seems worthy of a struggle between the powers of good and evil, if good and evil there be. Nay, man is bound of his own right, of his own free will, of his very existence, to choose between one and the other, to be good or be bad, and not stumble on listlessly as a thing of chance, tossed at will from one to the other. We do not sufficiently realize the greatest of our obligations. We should feel disgraced if we did not pay our tailor or our wine-merchant; but such a thought never presents itself to us when the question concerns God or the devil, or that part of us that does not wear clothes and does not drink wine.”
He had risen while he was speaking, and spoke with an energy and earnestness I had never yet witnessed in any man. Whether right or wrong, his view of things towered so high above my own blurred and crooked vision that I felt myself crouch and grow small before him. The watch-tower of his faith planted him high up among the stars of heaven, while I groped and struggled far away down in the darkness. Oh! if I could only climb up there and stand with him, and see the world and all things in it from that divine and serene height, instead of impiously endeavoring to build up my own and others’ little Babel that was to reach the skies and enable us to behold God. But conversions are not wrought by a few sentences nor by the mere emotions of the heart; not by Truth itself, which is for ever speaking, for ever standing before and confronting us, its mark upon its forehead, yet we pass it blindly by; for has it not been said that “having eyes they see not, and having ears they hear not”?
“Kenneth,” I said, stretching out my hand, which he clasped in both of his, “the subject which has been called up I feel to be far too solemn to be dismissed with the sneer and scoff that have grown into my nature. Indeed, I always so regarded it secretly; but perhaps the foolish manner in which I have hitherto treated it was owing somewhat to the foolish people with whom I have had to deal from my boyhood. They give their reasons about this, that, and the other as parrots repeat their lesson, with interjectory shrieks and occasional ruffling of the poll, all after the same pattern. You seem to me to be in earnest; but, if you please, we will say no more about it—at least now.”
“As you please,” he replied. “Here I am at the end of my cigar. So good-night, my dear boy. Well, you have had my to-whit to your to-whoo.”
And so a strange day ended. I sat thinking some time over our conversation. Kenneth’s observations opened quite a new train of thought. It had never occurred to me before that life was a great battle-field, and that all men were, as it were, ranged under two standards, under the folds of which they were compelled to fight. Everything had come to me in its place. A man might have his private opinions on men and things, as he collects a private museum for his own amusement; but in the main one lived and died, acted and thought, passed through and out of life, in much the same manner as his neighbor, not inquiring and not being inquired into too closely. Life was made for us, and we lived it much in the same way as we learned our alphabet, we never knew well how, or took our medicine, in the regulation doses. Sometimes we were a little rebellious, and suffered accordingly; that was all. Excess on any side was a bore to everybody else. It was very easy, and on the whole not unpleasant. We nursed our special crotchets, we read our newspapers, we watched our children at their gambols, we chatted carelessly away out on the bosom of the broad stream along which we were being borne so surely and swiftly into the universal goal. Why should we scan the sky and search beneath the silent waters, trembling at storms to come and treacherous whirlpools, hidden sand-banks, and cruel rocks on which many a brave bark had gone down? Chart and compass were for others; a pleasant sail only for us. There was a Captain up aloft somewhere; it was his duty and not ours to see that all was right and taut—ours to glide along in slumbrous ease, between eternal banks of regions unexplored; to feast our eyes on fair scenes, and lap our senses in musical repose. That was the true life. Sunken rocks, passing storms, mutinies among the crew, bursting of engines—what were such things to us? Had we not paid our fares and made our provision for the voyage, and was not the Captain bound to land us safely at our journey’s end, if he valued his position and reputation?
The devil, the world, and the flesh! What nightmare summoned these up, and set them glaring horribly into the eyes of a peaceful British subject? What had the devil to do with me or I with the devil? What were the world and the flesh? Take my father, now; what had they to do with him? Or Fairy? Why, her life was as pure as that sky that smiled down upon her with all its starry eyes. Let me see; there were others, however, who afforded better subjects for investigation. Whenever you want to find out anything disagreeable, call on your friends and neighbors. There was the Abbot Jones, now; let us weigh him in the triple scale. How fared the devil, the world, and the flesh with the Abbot Jones? He was, as I said to Kenneth, a very genial man; he had lived a good life, married into an excellent family, paid his bills, had a choice library, a good table, was an excellent judge of cattle, and a preacher whom everybody praised. Abbot Jones was faultless! There was not a flaw to be found in him from the tip of his highly-polished toe to the top of his highly-polished head. He had a goodly income, but he used it cautiously; for Clara and Alice were now grown up, and were scarcely girls to waste their lives in a nunnery, like my cousins, the daughters of Archdeacon Herbert, who adored all that was sweetly mortifying and secluded, yet, by one of those odd contradictions in female and human nature generally, never missed a fashion or a ball. Yes, Abbot Jones was a good and exemplary man. To be sure, he did not walk barefoot or sandal-shod, not alone among the highways, where men could see and admire, but into the byways of life, down among the alleys of the poor, where clustered disease, drunkenness, despair, death; where life is but one long sorrow. But then for what purpose did he pay a curate, unless to do just this kind of dirty, apostolic work, while the abbot devoted himself to the cares of his family, the publication of an occasional pamphlet, and that pleasant drawing-room religion that finds its perfection in good dinners, sage maxims, and cautious deportment? If the curate neglected his duty, that was clearly the curate’s fault, and not the abbot’s. If the abbot were clothed, not exactly in purple, but in the very best of broadcloth, and fasted only by the doctor’s orders, prayed not too severely, fared sumptuously every day of his life, he paid for every inch of cloth, every ounce of meat, every drop of that port for which his table was famous; for he still clung to the clerical taste for a wine that at one time assumed a semi-ecclesiastical character, and certain crumbs from his table went now and then to a stray Lazarus. Yes, he was a faultless man, as the world went. He did not profess to be consumed with the zeal for souls. His life did not aim at being an apostolic one. He had simply adopted a profitable and not unpleasant profession. If a S. Paul had come, straggling, footsore, and weary, into Leighstone, and begun preaching to the people and attacking shepherds who guarded not their fold, but quietly napped and sipped their port, while the wolves of irreligion, of vice and misery in every form, entered in and rent the flock from corner to corner, the abbot would very probably have had S. Paul arrested for a seditious vagrant and a disturber of the public peace.
Take my uncle, the archdeacon; what thought he of the world, the flesh, and the devil? As for the last-named enemy of the human race, he did not believe in him. A personal devil was to him simply a bogy wherewith to frighten children. It was the outgrowth of mediæval superstition, a Christianized version of a pagan fable. The devil was a gay subject with Archdeacon Herbert, who was the wittiest and courtliest of churchmen. His mission was up among the gods of this world; his confessional ladies’ boudoirs, his penance an epigram, his absolution the acceptance of an invitation to dinner. He breathed in a perfumed atmosphere; his educated ear loved the rustle of silks; he saw no heaven to equal a coach-and-four in Rotten Row during the season. It was in every way fitting that such a man should sooner or later be a bishop of the Church Established. He was an ornament to his class—a man who could represent it in society as well as in the pulpit, whose presence distilled dignity and perfume, and whose views were what are called large and liberal—that is to say, no “views” at all. What the three enemies had to do with my uncle I could not see. I could only see that he would scarcely have been chosen as one of The Twelve; but then who would be chosen as one of The Twelve in these days?