Part 11

“And am I not right in thinking that the only two native subjects, which are capable of arousing public interest and curiosity here, are those which appeal to the two portions of your mass of intelligent money-makers—things pertaining to business, and things sectarian?”

The Doctor suddenly regained his humour.

“Are,” he said, the deep humorous smile playing about his mouth, “are all the fashionable young men who come out here in yachts as acute observers as you, Sir Horace?—But I object to your word sectarian: you should say religious. I am quite ready to admit that (to put it as a Melbourne printer put it to me the other day) the only subject that will pay for book-printing here is Religion, and Religion, alas, in its polemical aspect. But I cannot look upon this, as you seem to do, as a great misfortune. I—I ... well, I may say _candidly_, that I rather _like_ a bit of polemics now and then, and the shouts of the men round the ropes do not altogether disgust me, as of course” (his eyebrows went up) “they ought to do! No, I do not look upon that purely intellectual life of yours as by any means the ideal for us to aim at. It smacks too much of dilettantism for _me_!”

Gildea smiled.

“Dear Doctor,” he said, “we all know that you prefer a climate where the sky is not always a cloudless vault of blue insipidity. The sound and feel of a buffeting wind is pleasant to you. As I said just now, you prefer Strauss to Renan, and the good secular Saint Matthew Arnold finds small favour in your eyes. Now too that you are taking to science, I expect every day to hear you tell us Cuvier was a greater man than Darwin, and that Huxley is an impudent young amphioxus that has no place beside the dignity of our dear old behemoth, Owen.”

“Now I really won’t let you poke fun at me,” said the Doctor, “I really won’t! The next thing is, that you will be saying something rude about Professor Mosley and his “Ruling Ideas in Early Ages,” and scoffing at my idea of having some of his essays reproduced in our _Daily Telegraph_.”

“Oh no, Doctor, I will not do that. Even Mosley’s essays are better than the sermons of the local ecclesiastics.”

“You are very impudent,” said Maddock, his face all beaming, “to call me a local ecclesiastic! I shall have to get you to write a pamphlet on my review of ‘Religionless Religion,’ so as to be able to denounce you _ex cathedra_!”

“Well, I should very much like to do so, only ... you know my cowardice: I cannot write——”

“Even letters to your best friends, to explain that you have only gone off to sea at an hour’s notice, and are not, as they anxiously expected, drowned, or murdered and secreted in some hole in the slums.”

“I prostrated myself in apology to Mrs. Maddock.”

“Yes, in over a week! As for Dr. Maddock, of course such a casual acquaintance as _he_ could not expect.... Ah, you are a quite too eccentric young man, Sir Horace! I wish you were well married, with a definite aim in life. Someday one of your wild freaks will end you, and then, what, what will have been the result of those great abilities with which God has gifted you?—Now,” proceeded the Doctor, “this is not an extract from the _Daily Telegraph_ sermon corner, but only the expression of the affectionate anxiety of one who hopes you will allow him to call himself your true friend.”

Gildea kept silence for a moment. Talk of this sort only served to show him how completely his real inner view of things was unknown to his companion, and so the idea of making an answer did not occur to him: he felt how useless it would be. Then he genially thanked the Doctor for his friendship and its kind wishes, and added lightly:

“You ask what will be the result of, as you are pleased to say, those great abilities with which God has gifted me. The result (you perceive it) will be nothing; but, Doctor, what, let me ask you, in a hundred years will be the result of those great abilities with which God has gifted _you_? In the hundred and first year we shall start equal; and I, who have not a belief in a personal God and a personal immortality as _you_ have, find the whole matter, I confess, rather absurd! This would not probably have been so always. If I had lived in the days when action indeed contained the highest stakes of life, I should have played for them; but, as it is, the highest stakes now belong to the thinker, the writer, and I—I cannot write ... even letters! I, like all my contemporaries, am more or less under the sad dominion of the perception of, what Leopardi calls, the ‘infinita vanità del tutto,’ but, unlike the best of them, I have no care for the only immortality we have left, the immortality of Art or Science. I think of the hundred, or thousand, or million and first year, and find myself smiling.”

Gildea was soliloquising, Maddock forgotten. He had, then, after all, drifted into making the answer, the idea of making which had, by reason of its clear uselessness, not occurred to him; and yet he had not made it to Maddock, but to himself. Maddock, indeed, did not altogether understand it, but the feeling of it, the belief that inspired it, he felt and hastened to reply to. He laid his hand gently on Gildea’s arm, bringing him to a pause, and said simply:

“_Look!_”

They had come down as far as Farm Cove—skirted it, turning off along Lady Macquarie’s Walk—then mounted up onto the drive, and, having passed by the Chair, were now standing on the brow of the slope with an open view of Garden Island (Clark Island being hidden), the harbour, and the woody hills behind it. Great deep masses of cloud, luminous-white or here and there shaded with that slaty black which denotes incipient rain, were moving in the blue vault of the heavens. Light and shade lay everywhere in alternate streaks or patches. One round piece of water to the left was like a burnished blazing mirror of steel. Other parts were blue, gray, or dark, reflecting the cloud-colours above them. The anchored ships rose and fell gently, their flags fluttering. A steamer came stealing out of one of the harbour arms into the open. The only sounds of life were the far-off hammer-strokes of the builders, the occasional cry of the white fleeting sea-gulls, the striking of a ship’s bells, the cricket humming at their feet.

“And,” Maddock said, in his deep voice of earnestness, “in the face of such a scene as this—the free glory of nature so great and so glad, the wonderful toil and effort and happiness of mankind—you will say to yourself: ‘_There is no soul in me, for there is no God to give it!_’ Ah, my dear Sir Horace, you surprise and grieve me! Are you not—you, oh heavens, _you_!—at heart an atheist? are you not guilty of that grossest of anthropomorphisms yourself?”

Gildea smiled, a fine sweet smile of sadness that made even the strong steady heart of his companion turn faint for a moment and sick. There was something so absolutely inevitably hopeless, as it seemed to Maddock, in this strange soul that he saw before him, now for the first time laid bare. Here was a patient for which the physician felt he had no power of healing or even alleviation. What view of christian faith and hope and love did not this strange soul know? Maddock, for the first time in his life, felt himself in the presence of one, the breadth and depth and height of whose spiritual experience encompassed him like an ocean. The words of remonstrance died on his lips: exhortation lay lifeless in him: silence and sorrow possessed him. He turned away with a heavy sigh, a sigh which was the unconscious acknowledgment to himself that life and death, time and eternity, man and God, could indeed be read in two diametrically different ways. For the first time in his life he realized the truth of “the Everlasting No” in a human soul greater than his own.

They walked on together for a little in silence. Then Gildea said as simply and naturally as if nothing unusual had happened:

“Now, Doctor, tell me will you come and have lunch with me? Mrs. Maddock, you say, has shaken you off for the sake of a long morning with Lady Whitfield, and why should you not retort on her spinster’s déjeuner with a bachelor’s lunch? I ought to have thought of it before.”

The Doctor again suddenly regained his humour.

“Thank you,” he said, “I shall be charmed.”

“Nay,” said Gildea, smiling, “but I must bid you pause a moment, aimless dreamer that I am, and tell you who you will meet there. Perhaps you will want your assent back again.”

“Speak on,” said Maddock, “and, provided it is not some one who will object to my smoking afterwards, I ... I don’t think I shall!”

“The guests, then, are three in number. Firstly, James Alcock, who, they tell me, is the most secular and scientific member of all the Australian Legislative Assemblies——”

“Go on,” said Maddock.

“Doctor,” Gildea said, “he reads Haeckel and swears by no other prophet of Science. Pause before it is too late. They say too that he sleeps every saturday and sunday with Mill “On Liberty” under his pillow, and all Spencer’s “Principles” strewed about the counterpane. He knew my father years ago in England, and his heart warms towards me as towards an incipient disciple.”

“Secondly—”

“Secondly, Francis Fitzgerald, a young man learned with all the learning of the Egyptians; a pilgrim and devotee at that simple west-England shrine which holds the Catholic pearl beyond all price, John Henry Newman; a scholar of the Parisian seminaries; a pupil of the inner Jesuit circle—”

“Thirdly—”

“Frank Hawkesbury, the young Australian poet; a Socialist, delighting in Trades-Unions, Religious Revivals (the Salvation Army is a hobby of his), and Secular Organizations with a grand impartiality! Nay, it is even whispered that he had dealings with Holden and the Irish and Continental Nihilists two years ago in London. Our friend Mrs. Medwin almost fainted when Sydney Medwin asked her if she would care to know him.”

“I have looked through one of the young man’s books of poems,” Maddock said, serenely, “and rather liked them. He is in earnest. Your lunch will be amusing.—It smacks to me,” he added, with a touch of grimness in his humour, “a little of those shows one sees now and then at the street-corners. They call them, I believe, happy families.”

Gildea laughed.

“Yes, Doctor,” he said, “but what if the animals should take to fighting? Alas, then, for the canaries and the mice, who will be worried and eaten by the dogs and the cats.”

“Which are who, or who are which?”

“Let us say that Alcock is a dog, and Fitzgerald a canary.”

“Then _you_, I suppose, are the mouse and _I_ the cat? But what is your young Australian poet to be? You have left him out.”

“Oh, he will be a rabbit. You will see that he can burrow. It is the forte of Socialists, burrowing.—Now,” he proceeded, “we must go this way if we are to get to my rooms in time. And as we go, will you let me first express some tentative thoughts of mine, and then ask you a few questions about your friend Mr. Parker and yourself?”

“Ask on,” said Maddock, getting into step, “and I will do my best to answer you.”

II.

“It is about this little book of his,” Gildea said, with slow reflectiveness, “‘Religionless Religion.’ I found it interesting.”

“Indeed?” said Maddock, “As interesting as the production of your dear continental sceptics?”

“Well now,” Gildea said, in a tone that implied a certain amount of candour, “to tell, what the French call, the true truth, I was struck by several things both in it and in your reply to it. I thought that it would have been difficult to have found a more typical example of the average intelligent secular view of theological Christianity than that of our good Judge.”

“I agree with you, and that was one of the reasons that made me decide to attack it. It is typical.”

“And, therefore, to anyone who is, though only as an amateur, an observer of things contemporary, it is interesting. Its very deficiencies will be instructive. Well, what I want you to do, Doctor, if you will be so good, is to help me with your superior knowledge of the things treated of to arrive at the spiritual condition of the treater. Perhaps you will not find the attempt too uninteresting, or....” He paused with a movement of courtesy.

Maddock, who had a faint suspicion that Gildea was mocking, half grumbled out humorously:

“Go on, then! Qualify yourself as a psychologist, my dear fellow, and then we will have a plunge into social metaphysics. It is refreshing in a country where they are all partizans, and Matthew Arnold and the purely intellectual life are not appreciated. _Sic itur ad astra._ In the name of all the lucidities, forward!”

“In the first place, then, we have to notice, have we not, that the little book is polemical, which, at any rate to the amateur observer of things contemporary, detracts somewhat from its historical value; for, after all, is not a polemist, to a large extent a man who defends the delusions of his friends against the delusions of his enemies, and leaves Truth, like the proverbial pounds, to look after herself? But, if we always remember to take off a percentage for the polemics, we need not miss what it is that the polemist really means and feels?”

“Πως γαρ οὐ?” said Maddock.

“And the more easily, as our Parker is in earnest about, what he calls, ‘his most serious and difficult task.’”

“Forensic flourishes!”

“—In earnest as far as suits the disposition of a theistic polemist.”

“—Microscopically, that is to say. The lawyer’s, and especially the successful lawyer’s, habit of thought tends towards earnestness as the sparks fly downwards.”

“For the average lawyer’s habit of thought is perhaps the most typical example of the average intelligent secular view of things. Is it not the final fruit of what is called common-sense, that is to say of the sense of common people? Our good Judge more than once speaks of himself and his audience as “persons of ordinary common-sense,” as opposed to “metaphysicians,” and especially “ecclesiastical metaphysicians.” He wants clear solid statements which his mind can see, and as it were, touch and handle. He scoffs at all statements other than these, looking upon them as at bottom sophistical. It follows that, when he comes to criticise the Bible, he claims the right to criticise it, not only with the same spirit, but with the same manner, as he would criticise any other book. He will not only look at it straight, fearlessly, logically, but he will demand of its statements that they be clear and solid, that they bear the ordinary interpretation of ordinary statements. He will apply the same principles of examination to Moses and Jesus as he would do to Blackstone or Chitty. And all the secular persons of ordinary common-sense cry out: ‘Hear, hear!’”

“With the Judge,” said Maddock, “a metaphysician is a man who examines the Bible by the aid of principles other than those of one who is ignorant of all contemporary history save that which the Bible gives him.”

“The consequence of which is, that he is capable of such a statement as, that ‘without question early Christianity was far more free from paganism and from the taint of superstition than the Christianity of our own time,’ and others of a like force.”

“He has no notion whatever of the philosophy of history—of, what I call, the development of divine Truth.”

“And yet he is contradictory enough, while asserting the degradation of the Christian ideal, to lay much stress on the development of Divine truth in a civilization that has, till comparatively lately, been Christianic. Yes, he sees the development of divine Truth, but he does not understand the forms which that development has taken in Christianity. The Trinity—the Atonement—the Deity of Christ—are to him ‘mere crude superstitions which disfigure and obscure pure and true religion.’ It never seems to have occurred to him that, although these doctrines may be empty formulæ to him, they were and are passionate realities to others.”

“That is very true.”

“He will talk with the same ignorance of what he would call Jesuolatry as a Protestant will of what he calls Mariolatry, neither he nor the Protestant understanding any more of a deep spiritual truth than its cut-and-dried dogmatical letter.” The Doctor assented, though with a movement of slight qualification.

“We agree at starting, then, that his criticism as that of an historical Bible student does not exist. The authorities he quotes are, as you point out in your Reply, ludicrous. They culminate in his poor little some ‘celebrated Unitarian minister’ or other, than whom the habit of thought of the legal Biblical critic can, it is to be hoped, no further go! He is too, we agree, careless and superficial even in his own style, but we must not lay too much stress on individual cases of this in the face of his request for ‘indulgence’ for his ‘doubtless many imperfections here.’”

“When a man speaks publicly of such a grave matter as religion,” said Maddock, “he should _not_ be careless, he should _not_ be superficial! We have a right to demand of those who make explosives, that they, at any rate, do not smoke in the magazine.”

“True; but, if we all got our deserts, who, you know, should escape whipping? Certainly not the producers of orthodox religious literature.”—(The Doctor, after a pause, assented as before).—“Well, we will proceed further against our good Judge, and say that his appreciation of what is, as he says, ‘good and ennobling’ is ludicrously inadequate. What can be said of a man who seriously speaks of Jesus, ‘when, in the garden of Gethsemane, he went apart and prayed, three times over, the same prayer to God, within a short period,’—of Jesus thus ‘_doing that which he told his disciples not to do—“use not vain_ repetitions, _as the heathen do,” for the reason that your heavenly Father knoweth what things ye have need of_ before _ye_ ask _Him_.’ Habemus confitentem asinum! We can only burst out laughing: a reply to such a statement is impossible! The lawyer’s habit of thought is at its apogee, and (as Heine says) ‘_Gegen die Dummheit kämpfen wir Götter selbst vergebens._’—Against stupidity the very gods themselves struggle in vain.” The Doctor assented smiling.

“And statements similar to this are not scarce here. Our good Judge, then, has not, it is clear, much experience of the spiritual life, of those who live in the spirit. The ‘sudden conversion of Paul,’ for instance, strikes him as one of the (it is supposed) ‘improbabilities so forcible that no sane _thinking_ man or woman can accept’ the inspiration of the Scriptures which relate them. Now, any one who knows anything of human nature other than that of ‘persons of ordinary common-sense,’ knows that such ‘sudden conversions’ are not only not improbable, but passably frequent. In some cases, as in that of Staniforth, quoted by Arnold in his ‘St. Paul and Protestantism,’ the circumstances approach so closely to those of Paul’s that we are enabled to assign to them a definite place in the science of psychology. Nor are our good Judge’s ‘errors,’ as you say, exhausted yet. We have still to bring against him the charge of, what Celsus calls, κουφοτης, and Arnold translates ‘want of intellectual seriousness.’ So confused and incoherent is his knowledge of the real position that the secular biblical critic takes up, that he absolutely calls the position taken up by the orthodox biblical critic (that is to say, biblical _critics_ who are orthodox; as, for instance, you yourself, my dear Doctor): he absolutely calls this position critically ‘untenable,’ not perceiving that it is his own only differing in degree!—This is simply appalling! The κουφοτης of the Secularists is not a whit better, after all, than that of the Christians!”

“Yes,” said Maddock, disregarding the last remark, “but then you must remember that the Judge ‘does not intend to resort to any process of subtle argument, nor to make any display of scholastic knowledge, nor to indulge in learned disquisitions.’ He merely writes ‘popular, clear, and simple’ nonsense for ‘the doubter who is trying to grope his way to the light, but cannot; to the Atheist who believes in nothing, neither in a Supreme Power, nor in a future life.’ And your secular ingratitude to him, Sir Horace, strikes me, I must confess, as keener-toothed than the winter wind of orthodoxy!”

“Doctor,” said Sir Horace, “you are poking fun at me! But I, who am, as Shelley said of himself ‘rather serious’—I proceed in my examination, whose sole confirmation as truth I find in your words or gestures of approval. You will, I hope, forgive me for any repetition I may make of your own criticism, as a master should a humble disciple? It is only a proof of attention and admiration.”

“Go on,” said Maddock, “mocker!”

“All these faults, then, which we have remarked in our good Judge—his polemically; his ignorance of the grammar (or, perhaps, as your Reply says, the alphabet) of historical criticism; his ludicrously inadequate conception of the good and the ennobling, of the spiritual calibre of such men as, for instance, St. Paul; his superficial acquaintance with the data of the subject of which it is treating; and, finally, his κουφοτης, his want of intellectual seriousness—all these faults, are we not agreed, are the faults of the average intelligent secular view, in its negative consideration of Christian Theology? The question that now arises is, has this view nothing but faults?—has it no excellencies? Does there remain, after the attack on it of so admirable a theological polemist as Dr. Maddock is, no residuum of real and vital truth? Let us try and see.—To begin with, did we not find that, despite a contradiction, our good Judge perceived the reality of, what you so finely call, the development of divine Truth?—

“_Yet I doubt not thro’ the ages one increasing purpose runs,_ _and the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns._”

“No,” said Maddock, “I cannot grant him even that! A faint glimmering of a thing cannot be called a perception. Consider this very contradiction of his! Consider, again, his unspeakably gross and ignorant treatment of the Old Testament which he brands with blood-thirstiness and impurity. He works by a rule of thumb. The higher spiritual mathematics are mere names to him. He is—I must declare—too much of a blockhead to ever rise beyond the spiritual Rule of Three.”

“I agree to a large extent, dear Doctor; but you will admit, I think, that even the Rule of Three is not without its use, without its real and vital truth?”

“Not when the schoolboy cannot use it properly! I have pointed out, for example, that, in attacking the doctrine of the Divine Sonship, he only attacks a dummy doctrine of his own. Your schoolboy does not know which of the three is his third quantity! He wants, then, to be whipped and put onto the dunce’s stool—to encourage the others!” The Doctor spoke for the first time with a little testiness.