Part 10 (1/2)

'To fall back on, indeed! and down on, too. At all events, you rich might help to make Christians of them, and men of them. For I'm beginning to fancy strangely, in spite of all the preachers say, that, before ever you can make them Christians, you must make them men and women.'

'Are they not so already?'

'Oh, sir, go and see! How can a man be a man in those crowded styes, sleeping packed together like Irish pigs in a steamer, never out of the fear of want, never knowing any higher amus.e.m.e.nt than the beer-shop? Those old Greeks and Romans, as I read, were more like men than half our English labourers. Go and see! Ask that sweet heavenly angel, Miss Honoria,'--and the keeper again blushed,--'And she, too, will tell you. I think sometimes if she had been born and bred like her father's tenants' daughters, to sleep where they sleep, and hear the talk they hear, and see the things they see, what would she have been now? We mustn't think of it.' And the keeper turned his head away, and fairly burst into tears.

Lancelot was moved.

'Are the poor very immoral, then?'

'You ask the rector, sir, how many children hereabouts are born within six months of the wedding-day. None of them marry, sir, till the devil forces them. There's no sadder sight than a labourer's wedding now-a-days. You never see the parents come with them. They just get another couple, that are keeping company, like themselves, and come sneaking into church, looking all over as if they were ashamed of it--and well they may be!'

'Is it possible?'

'I say, sir, that G.o.d makes you gentlemen, gentlemen, that you may see into these things. You give away your charities kindly enough, but you don't know the folks you give to. If a few of you would but be like the blessed Lord, and stoop to go out of the road, just behind the hedge, for once, among the publicans and harlots! Were you ever at a country fair, sir? Though I suppose I am rude for fancying that you could demean yourself to such company.'

'I should not think it demeaning myself,' said Lancelot, smiling; 'but I never was at one, and I should like for once to see the real manners of the poor.'

'I'm no haunter of such places myself, G.o.d knows; but--I see you're in earnest now--will you come with me, sir,--for once? for G.o.d's sake and the poor's sake?'

'I shall be delighted.'

'Not after you've been there, I am afraid.'

'Well, it's a bargain when you are recovered. And, in the meantime, the squire's orders are, that you lie by for a few days to rest; and Miss Honoria's, too; and she has sent you down some wine.'

'She thought of me, did she?' And the still sad face blazed out radiant with pleasure, and then collapsed as suddenly into deep melancholy.

Lancelot saw it, but said nothing; and shaking him heartily by the hand, had his shake returned by an iron grasp, and slipped silently out of the cottage.

The keeper lay still, gazing on vacancy. Once he murmured to himself,--

'Through strange ways--strange ways--and though he let them wander out of the road in the wilderness;--we know how that goes on--'

And then he fell into a mixed meditation--perhaps into a prayer.

CHAPTER V: A SHAM IS WORSE THAN NOTHING

At last, after Lancelot had waited long in vain, came his cousin's answer to the letter which I gave in my second chapter.

'You are not fair to me, good cousin . . . but I have given up expecting fairness from Protestants. I do not say that the front and the back of my head have different makers, any more than that doves and vipers have . . . and yet I kill the viper when I meet him . . . and so do you. . . . And yet, are we not taught that our animal nature is throughout equally viperous? . . . The Catholic Church, at least, so teaches. . . . She believes in the corruption of human nature. She believes in the literal meaning of Scripture.

She has no wish to paraphrase away St. Paul's awful words, that ”in his flesh dwelleth no good thing,” by the unscientific euphemisms of ”fallen nature” or ”corrupt humanity.” The boasted discovery of phrenologists, that thought, feeling, and pa.s.sion reside in this material brain and nerves of ours, has ages ago been antic.i.p.ated by her simple faith in the letter of Scripture; a faith which puts to shame the irreverent vagueness and fantastic private interpretations of those who make an idol of that very letter which they dare not take literally, because it makes against their self-willed theories.

'And so you call me douce and meek? . . . You should remember what I once was, Lancelot . . . I, at least, have not forgotten . . . I have not forgotten how that very animal nature, on the possession of which you seem to pride yourself, was in me only the parent of remorse., . . I know it too well not to hate and fear it. Why do you reproach me, if I try to abjure it, and cast away the burden which I am too weak to bear? I am weak--Would you have me say that I am strong? Would you have me try to be a Prometheus, while I am longing to be once more an infant on a mother's breast? Let me alone . . . I am a weary child, who knows nothing, can do nothing, except lose its way in arguings and reasonings, and ”find no end, in wandering mazes lost.” Will you reproach me, because when I see a soft cradle lying open for me . . . with a Virgin Mother's face smiling down all woman's love about it . . . I long to crawl into it, and sleep awhile? I want loving, indulgent sympathy . . . I want detailed, explicit guidance . . . Have you, then, found so much of them in our former creed, that you forbid me to go to seek them elsewhere, in the Church which not only professes them as an organised system, but practises them . . . as you would find in your first half-hour's talk with one of Her priests . . . true priests .

. . who know the heart of man, and pity, and console, and bear for their flock the burdens which they cannot bear themselves? You ask me who will teach a fast young man? . . . I answer, the Jesuit. Ay, start and sneer, at that delicate woman-like tenderness, that subtle instinctive sympathy, which you have never felt . . . which is as new to me, alas, as it would be to you! For if there be none now-a- days to teach such as you, who is there who will teach such as me?

Do not fancy that I have not craved and searched for teachers . . .

I went to one party long ago, and they commanded me, as the price of their sympathy, even of anything but their denunciations, to ignore, if not to abjure, all the very points on which I came for light--my love for the Beautiful and the Symbolic--my desire to consecrate and christianise it--my longing for a human voice to tell me with authority that I was forgiven--my desire to find some practical and palpable communion between myself and the saints of old. They told me to cast away, as an accursed chaos, a thousand years of Christian history, and believe that the devil had been for ages . . . just the ages I thought n.o.blest, most faithful, most interpenetrated with the thought of G.o.d . . . triumphant over that church with which He had promised to be till the end of the world. No . . . by the bye, they made two exceptions--of their own choosing. One in favour of the Albigenses . . . who seemed to me, from the original doc.u.ments, to have been very profligate Infidels, of whom the world was well rid .

. . and the Piedmontese . . . poor, simple, ill-used folk enough, but who certainly cannot be said to have exercised much influence on the destinies of mankind . . . and all the rest was chaos and the pit. There never had been, never would be, a kingdom of G.o.d on earth, but only a few scattered individuals, each selfishly intent on the salvation of his own soul--without organisation, without unity, without common purpose, without even a masonic sign whereby to know one another when they chanced to meet . . . except s.h.i.+bboleths which the hypocrite could ape, and virtues which the heathen have performed . . . Would YOU have had me accept such a ”Philosophy of History”?

'And then I went to another school . . . or rather wandered up and down between those whom I have just described, and those who boast on their side prescriptive right, and apostolic succession . . . and I found that their ancient charter went back--just three hundred years . . . and there derived its transmitted virtue, it seemed to me, by something very like obtaining goods on false pretences, from the very church which it now anathematises. Disheartened, but not hopeless, I asked how it was that the priesthood, whose hands bestowed the grace of ordination, could not withdraw it . . .