Part 14

“Well,” said Fitzgerald smiling, “we have had the Vision of the Future from the Christian, the Cultured, the Socialistic point of view, and now we see that Science too has her dreams. I have no objection myself to any of these Visions which, as I take it, all contain a not inconsiderable amount of truth. I would only observe that I believe them to be all impossible solely and individually. The Socialistic Future that would banish Christ, the Scientific that would also banish God, can no more exist as, in Mr. Alcock’s phrase, masters of the situation, than the Future of Christianity that would ignore the glory of our discoveries in Natural Law, or the Future of Culture that would deny to the People our highest joy.”

“No,” said Alcock drily, “we don’t want Superstition mixed up with Religion, _that_ is clear enough.”

“Nor yet,” added Fitzgerald sweetly, “do we want Superstition mixed up _without_ Religion.” (Alcock, with the look of a man who does not understand a thing and does not much care to, took a drink at his champagne, which, it was evident from the new expression on his face, was to his taste. Fitzgerald proceeded suavely to the table at large and more particularly to Maddock.) “For, as perhaps Mr. Alcock,” (with a slight bend of the head to Alcock), “will permit me to say, the purely scientific view of things, which sees, in the unrestrained application to civilized life of the brutality of Nature, the undoubted parent of a Civilization worthy of the name, may be after all, and I believe is, a great superstition. Is not a superstition a belief in a thing not worthy of that belief? And is it not, then, a superstition, in calculating the progress of Humanity, to leave out of all account, as the pure Scientists seem to me to do, the most distinctive thing in Humanity—Religion.”

“_I_ should say,” observed Alcock, “that _Reason_ is the most distinctive thing in Humanity.”

“Indeed?” asked Fitzgerald, “You surprise me! Is it not generally admitted now that the rudiments of Reason, and considerably more than the rudiments, are to be found in the animals? But I am not aware that anyone, not even Ernst Haeckel, has discovered in them the rudiments of Religion. Can we not, then, agree with Max Müller that it is ‘certain that what makes man man, is that he alone can turn his face to heaven; certain that he alone yearns for something that neither sense nor reason can supply?’”

Alcock had the look of a man who feels the prompting of flippancy and, restraining it, is amused at what his flippancy would have said. Fitzgerald, perceiving this, answered it:

“Müller,” he proceeded, “in criticising Kant, who is of course the Father of all the worshippers of Reason, again says finely that ‘he closed the ancient gates through which man had gazed into Infinity; but, in spite of himself, he was driven, in his “Criticism of Practical Reason,” to open a side-door through which to admit the sense of duty, and with it the sense of the Divine.—This is the vulnerable point in Kant’s philosophy,’ he goes on, ‘and if philosophy has to explain what is, not what ought to be, there will be and can be no rest till we admit, which cannot be denied, that there is in man a third faculty, which I call simply the faculty of apprehending the Infinite, not only in religion but in all things, a power independent of sense and reason, a power in a certain sense contradicted by sense and reason, but yet a very real power, which has held its own from the beginning of the world, neither sense nor reason being able to overcome it, while it alone is able to overcome both reason and sense.’”

“That it has held its own from the beginning of the world,” said Alcock, “is no proof that it will do so to the end.”

Fitzgerald smiled.

“What you say,” he answered, “makes clear to me, then, that you do not accept this ‘faculty of apprehending the Infinite,’ and philosophically make the best of it, but you wish to call it mere childishness or, as you say, superstition and—‘eliminate’ it! And yet you talk of Religion! What, may I ask, does a pure Scientist, as you seem to be, Mr. Alcock, _mean_ by Religion?”

“Well,” said Alcock frankly, “I confess that, to me, it means little more than credulity. I am not, of course, hostile to Religion; on the contrary, I support it. It helps to keep society together.”

“It will do,” said Hawkesbury, “for the People! Pending the arrival of that education, which is to teach them the high satisfaction of social evolution, the masses may amuse themselves with such used-out mummeries as the Devil, Christ, and God. The People is grateful. It has, it knows, as much to expect from Science as from Culture.”

Fitzgerald was quite amused.

“Mr. Alcock,” he said, “since you pure Scientists are generally reckoned as the foes of us Christians, we can ask you to do us no kinder service than to nail these colours of yours to the mast in the sight of all men. I do not alone mean your belief that Religion is all but a synonyme for credulity; but this general conception of things of yours which includes no further consideration for Religion than elimination. We can have no doubt of the results. The world will doubtless find in _our_ conception of things a certain amount of, what Mr. Hawkesbury has called, used-out mummery (for man’s free-will has ever turned use into abuse), but it will find also things which savour of the kindly earth and the genial sun; whereas, if you will let me say so, in _yours_ all that it will find will be the steel-cold atmosphere of some heatless planet, filled with the dreary whirr of abstract machinery. Superstition _with_ Religion, they will say, is better than Superstition _without_. And then, after they have given you a trial—and a trial they will give you, and such a great and long trial that we shall be eliminated almost as much as even you, Mr. Alcock, could wish us to be—then they will come back to us, and, having been driven by sore anguish of soul to re-discover, as their Father did, the sense of duty and of the Divine, they will find that this first step leads inevitably to another, and that to yet another. And, in the end, all high souls, and after them of course all other souls (for the wisdom of to-day is the common sense of to-morrow), will see that their best and truest Father was a man who, passing through all this before them, has these years stood with clear and radiant faith, his longing hands held out to all that would take their strong help and guidance to that place of joy and of peace!”

Alcock, supposing this man to be Jesus and having made it a rule never in mixed company to speak of that to him, under such circumstances, embarrassing personage, kept silence, looking at the table-cloth. Hawkesbury too did not understand the allusion, which even Maddock, unless he had been warned by Gildea of Fitzgerald’s connection with Cardinal Newman, might have missed. As it was, Gildea, perceiving and amused at Alcock’s misunderstanding, was ready to at once dissipate it.

“Newman,” he said, “is indeed the great modern example of a man of high intellect and all spiritual powers giving, not only, as Heine did, ‘his tribute of admiration,’ but everything he had, ‘to the splendid consistency of the Roman Catholic doctrine.’ I remember once hearing a rather able High-churchman say that he could not see, any more after than before reading the celebrated _Apologia_, why Newman had joined the Church of Rome: which is to say, that he could not see that, to a certain type of mind, the only two logical positions for a man of thought to-day are those of Scientific Atheism or of Catholic Faith.”

“He leaves no place, then,” said Hawkesbury, “for the Theists or the Pantheists?”

“The Theists,” answered Gildea, “leave no place for themselves—except in the spiritual out-houses and the Unitarian chapels. There is not, I think, in modern times, one man of first, or second, or even third-class intellectual power that has believed in a personal God and not believed in a divine Christ. All men of thought are really now divided into two classes, Christians and Atheists: the first believing in a personal Christ and a personal God, the second in Law. All other differences are, as it seems to me, at heart mere divergences of symbolism. We are accustomed, for instance, to call those who hold that matter produces spirit Materialists, and those who hold that spirit produces matter Idealists, and those who hold that matter and spirit are identic and divine, Pantheists; but really they are all Atheists. There is no Atheism, no disbelief in a personal God, more intense than that of our Idealists, Renan, Arnold, Emerson, who never cease, however, to talk of God and bid us find in Him our only comfort and guide: they are the true children of Goethe whose conception of God was Humanity in Nature, and of Religion Humanity in Art.”

“So we Catholics feel,” said Fitzgerald, “and this is, as I have implied, the great truth which we owe to the life and work of Newman. He has saved us from any temptation to compromise with Atheism. We are to stand to our guns, and, if we must perish, perish there!”

“The only thing is,” Gildea answered ruefully, “that no great spiritual movement, religious or otherwise, was ever yet produced, retained, or destroyed by the action of logic, and they have all partaken largely of the nature of compromise. Voltaire and the philosophes sent such a douche of logic onto Christianity in France that they literally beat it out of the country, but it came back again. And why? Because it contained the satisfaction of the demands of one side of Humanity which Logic had not, and could not have. Well, they compromised the matter, and the result is, (Dare I declare it, Fitzgerald?), none other than men like the fine and intellectual ecclesiastics who presided over the education of that lay priest, as he calls himself, Ernest Renan. History repeats itself. What Logic tried to do yesterday, Science is trying to do to-day. And, as you,” (he turned his eyes to Fitzgerald), “foresee, Christianity, and Religion generally will suffer a defeat and even decapitation, only to return with processions, ringing of bells and the glad shouts of the populace. Then the Parliament will shut up all the sunday theatres, and the skeletons of Professor Huxley and Herbert Spencer will be removed from the Pantheon at Westminster and lodged in Madame Tussaud’s, and the land have rest—for the space of forty years!”

“Well,” said Alcock, “you young gentlemen are getting too far head for steady-going seniors like Dr. Maddock and myself. We will ask for matches, and smoke a cigar, while you tell us all about our great-great-grandchildren.”

Cigars, cigarettes, and lights were brought and, with some pleasant small talk, the party loosened and eased its position at table and physical and mental state generally.

“Talking of compromise,” said Hawkesbury, taking his cigarette from his lips and leaning the elbow of the hand that held it on the table, “between Religion and Logic, or Reason, is not, what is called, Positivism an attempt to organise such a compromise?”

Gildea began to laugh.

“Ah,” he said, “is not Arnold’s ‘grotesque old french pedant,’ a late foolish Monsieur Comte, as Carlyle would say, to leave me alone even beyond ‘the long wash of Australian seas?’ Am I to be persecuted even here by his tiresome adaptations and school-boy notions, all bundled up in superlatively bad French?—You do not know,” he added, “what I chance to have suffered at the hands of my positivist friends at home, or I am sure you would not ask me to discuss them here where I am come for a holiday. They and Mr. Mallock are the most tiresome people in existence. You have heard of Mr. Mallock out here? and of his tilts with the junior Positivists?”

Hawkesbury acquiesced.

“We have heard of everything out here,” he said smiling.

“Mr. Mallock,” said Gildea, “was a young man who wrote a charming book called ‘The New Republic,’ one of the most charming books that had been written for several years, and then took to polemics, and has been logically agonizing there ever since. For this too we all ought to owe this religio-intellectual pedantry called Positivism a grudge. And, when we remember what Positivism did for George Eliot,—reduced a good quarter of herself and her characters into edificatory machines—I think that all of us, to whom Nature and Art are precious, should look upon Positivism as the contemporary accursèd thing.” Gildea spoke with a certain exaggerativeness of tone and manner that to Maddock, observing and listening to everything with humour, was somewhat puzzling. Maddock with average profundity suspected that here was a case of some personal memory of a more or less disagreeable character; but average profundity, when it has to deal with that which is out of the range of the average, nearly always makes mistakes. Gildea was subject to sudden losses of interest in what he was saying or doing, spiritual twinges of that terrible wound from which he suffered: to those to whom “the endless emptiness of all things” is a reality, moments of acute weariness and disgust are ever lying in wait, and then the harness of life and living is often resumed with impatience or even pettishness. It had been so just now with Gildea. He had looked forward to his meeting with Miss Medwin, and heard those beautiful lips open and sounds come forth that showed that, however fine the harp, its strings were unattuned. The sense of his intense and perpetual loneliness had rushed upon him, and he had gone back again into his surroundings with an irritation that in a few moments amused him at himself.

The talk passed onwards, Maddock for the first time taking his share in it. And yet again it came round to the People. It was clear that the strongest impression that had been given to the party was that of Hawkesbury’s Socialism.

“If I had been speaking of it some five or six years ago,” said Fitzgerald, “I should have certainly said that I thought the Secularists had made most impression on the People of late years. But, in the face of the American Revivalist meetings and the Salvation Army, I have had to modify my views.”

“These movements or rather this movement,” said Gildea, “strikes me as reactionary. British Middle-class Liberalism and Secularism have been at work, with much cry, and the egregious littleness of the wool has disgusted the People who have rushed off into the opposite extreme. The workmen, the skilled workmen, are I think secular. I remember hearing a lecturer on art who had been on a tour in America say, that the American workmen all asked him if he knew Darwin or Huxley or Tyndall, and expressed little or no care about anyone else, which seemed to surprise him.”

“Cardinal Manning,” Fitzgerald remarked, “said well, then, that ‘the spiritual desolation of London alone would make the Salvation Army possible’—‘this zealous but defiant movement.’ Are we right in our supposition, do you think, Mr. Hawkesbury?”

Hawkesbury assented.

“There are three movements,” he said, “at present going on among the People—the Socialistic, the Religious, and the Secular. They are all strong. In Ireland I have seen the two first clash, and the first was almost invariably victorious. If the priests will not go with the People in their socialistic views, (For of course the Irish Question is really a socialistic one, although it is not spoken of as such), then the priests are given up. Usually, however, the priests, being themselves of the People, are in full sympathy with them. The Socialists are by no means necessarily Atheists, but they are not Christians. ‘The sooner,’ I heard one of them say once, when pressed on the point, ‘the sooner Christ is made a thing of the past and Jesus a thing of the present, the better it will be for all of us.’ That expresses them excellently. The same idea lies at bottom in the popular Religious movement.—We Socialists,” he added with a touch of bright humour, “like the Booths better than we like the Bradlaughs, but we recognise that both are in earnest and working for the People.”

“And what, religiously speaking,” asked Fitzgerald, “do you believe is to be the future state of the People, and of us all?”

Hawkesbury had another touch of bright humour.

“Socialism,” he said, “nothing but Socialism! We are all Socialists, whether we know it or not. Just, then, as in the first and second centuries the platonistic Time-spirit radically influenced before it was absorbed into the christianic: so in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has the christianic Time-spirit radically influenced, before it shall be finally absorbed in, the socialistic. Socialism has, after all, its universal modern expounder in Goethe. Goethe was the first to look upon Civilization as a great organic whole, every part of which has fixed pleasures and duties. He was the first, we believe, to conceive a natural as opposed to an artificial Civilization. Carlyle, too, felt something of the sort, although he could not express it, any more than he could not express what he took God to be. But we know Carlyle loved us, and therefore we love Carlyle. As for your Idealists, Sir Horace,—Renan, Emerson, and Arnold—we have no care for them, nor they for us. I remember once hearing Holden call Arnold ‘the man who slew so many Philistines with the jawbone of an ass.’ Well, the remark is expressive of his attitude towards Culture.” Gildea and Fitzgerald were laughing, Maddock smiling.

“The end of it all,” said Maddock, “seems to be, then, Mr. Hawkesbury, that ‘the People,’ as we say, is the great unknown quantity of the social equation. We all more or less feel its power, and we all more or less wish that power to be arrayed on our side, but no one quite knows what it is and everyone is a little afraid of it.”

“You say truly,” said Hawkesbury, “The People is the great unknown power, and it puzzles us. Pharaoh has dreamed a dream, and there is none of all the magicians of Egypt and all the wise men thereof that can interpret it unto him. What to make of the People’s noisy Tichborne or Salvation Army devotions but political and religious infatuations? Be it so! But I will say this, that the People has a shrewd humorous instinct for both politics and religion that is a whole heaven above the purblind prudence of the Middle-class.” He sighed, the sigh of a man who has somewhat outspoken himself. “‘—And all these things,’ he added as if to conclude the matter, ‘are only known to the Deity.’”

Gildea smiled.

“Well,” he said, “Are there not those among us who look forward to what is to come with the brightest faith or with the darkest despair? And there are those who dream and those who doubt,—and those too who possess their souls with patience, nourishing a modest hope. For

“what was before we know not, and we know not what shall succeed.

“Haply the river of Time— as it grows, as the towns on its marge fling their wavering lights on a wider, statelier stream— may acquire, if not the calm of its early mountainous shore, yet a solemn peace of its own.”

Little more was said after this of the chief subjects of their talk, and presently both Fitzgerald and Hawkesbury took their leave, Maddock and Fitzgerald, and Alcock and Hawkesbury, expressing mutual hopes of seeing one another again.

V.

Maddock went out into the balcony and stood there, leaning on the rails, reflectively smoking his cigar and looking out at the scene stretched before him like a panorama. Alcock held quiet converse with Gildea for a few moments, apologetically asking permission to go and write a letter, the importance of which he would have explained at length, had not Gildea interposed.

“By all means,” said he; and, with a word of excuse to and gesture of acknowledgment from Maddock, took Alcock off into a room opposite, a study, where he ensconced him at the desk and, having pointed out the position of all the epistolatory necessities and told him to ring the bell for Edgar who would see that the letter was posted at once, withdrew and rejoined Maddock on the balcony.

“You will excuse Alcock,” Gildea said, lighting a cigarette, “He has a letter of importance to write, which he does not care to leave till we come back.”

Maddock at once acquiesced. There was a pause, both smoking with leisure.

At last:

“Well,” said Gildea, taking his cigarette from his lips, “and how did you like the happy family? You were a very quiet member of it.”

“Yes,” said Maddock, “I refrained from mewing and sat still, purring and pleasantly watching the others. It struck me, shortly after Alcock came in, that we were a very representative happy family.”

“We only wanted a genial Theist to make the pile complete. Your good Judge is a Theist. Now if we could only....”

“Ay, ay,” said Maddock with something like a chuckle, “Judge Parker is a Theist! As your friend the _Argus_ said, he was ‘the learned gentleman who discovered Unitarianism in the early months of 1885.’—Come now,” he proceeded with a sudden concentration of interest, “what are you going to say of the affirmative side of this man’s criticism, after your remark that there was not, in modern times, one man of real intellectual power that has believed in a personal God and not believed in a divine Christ? Are you going to turn upon me again with your precious purely intellectual view of things, and say: ‘The question that now arises is, has not Theism, after all,’ et cetera, et cetera, et cetera?”

“Certainly I am,” said Gildea laughing, “but all hope of utilizing the purely intellectual view seems lost after my unwary committal of myself.—No,” he added more seriously, “I have of course little more left to do than to try and get you to join me in abuse of the good Judge for his superstition, that is to say his Theism, and that other egregious vice of his—his ludicrously inadequate conception of what is ‘good and ennobling.’ To take the last first, I will say, as I once heard Hawkesbury say on a like occasion, that I would far sooner believe in the Orthodox Christ than in the Unitarian Jesus. Indeed I might broaden my saying, and declare to the whole Rationalistic conception of Christ and Christianity generally, what Carlyle declared to Voltaire: ‘Cease, my much respected Herr Von Voltaire, shut thy sweet voice; for the task appointed thee seems finished. Sufficiently hast thou demonstrated this proposition, considerable or otherwise: That the Mythus of the Christian Religion looks not in the eighteenth century as it did in the eighth.... Take our thanks, then, and—thyself away.’”

“Judge Parker’s view of Our Lord,” said Maddock frowning, “is,—not to say blasphemous,—simply _fatuous_! I do not know whether indignation at impudence or contempt at stupidity the most possesses a man, when he is told, by such an one as this, that ‘the Christian Theist, who regards Jesus as man, considers, and rightly from his point of view, that it _is_ within his power to attain to the life of, and to follow the example of, Christ.’ Imagine Judge Parker attaining to the life of anyone but a blatantly successful lawyer in the truculent spiritual quagmires of a colonial capital!”