Chapter 7

And then Hugh saw in a flash that the essence of the Gospel itself was like that. When he read the sacred record in the light of Plato, it seemed to him as if it must in some subtle way be pervaded by the same bright intuitions as those which lit up the Greek mind. It seemed to Hugh a strange and bewildering thing that the pure message of simplicity and love, with its tender waiting upon God, its delight in flowers and hills, its love of great ideas, its rich poetry, its perfect art, had taken on the gloomy metaphysical tinge that St. Paul, with all his genius, had contrived to communicate to it. Surely it was intolerable to believe that all those subtle notions of sacrificial satisfaction, of justification, of substitution, had ever crossed the Saviour's mind at all. In a sense He fulfilled the law and the prophets, for they had laid down, in grief and doubt, a harsh code of morality, because they saw no other way of leavening the conscience of the world. But the Saviour, at least in the simple records, had not trafficked in such thoughts; he had but shown the significance of the primary emotions, had taught humanity that it was free as air, dear to the heart of God, heir of a goodly inheritance of love and care. St. Paul was a man of burning ardour, but had he not made the mistake of trying to lend too intellectual, too erudite, too complicated a colour to it all? The essence of the Gospel seemed to be that man should not be bound by the tradition of men; but St. Paul had been so intent upon drawing in those to whom tradition was dear, that in trying to harmonise the new with the old, he had made concessions and developed doctrines that had detrimentally affected Christianity ever since, and gone near to cast it in a different mould. Of course there was a certain continuity in religion, a development. But St. Paul was so deeply imbued with Rabbinical methods and Jewish tradition, that in his splendid attempt to show that Christianity was the fulfilment of the law, he had deeply infected the pure stream with Jewish ideas. The essence of Christianity was meant to be a _tabula rasa_. Christ bade men trust their deepest and widest intuitions, their sense of dependence upon God, their consciousness of divine origin. In this respect the teaching of Christ had more in common with the teaching of Plato, than the doctrine of St. Paul with the doctrine of Christ. Christ was concerned with the future, St. Paul with the past; Christ was concerned with religious instinct, St. Paul with religious development. The strength of the gospel of Christ was that it depended rather on the poetical and emotional consciousness of religion, and thus made its appeal to the majority of the human race. Plato, on the other hand, was too intellectual, and a perception of his doctrine was hardly possible except to a man of subtle and penetrating ability. Hugh wondered if it would be possible to put the doctrine of Plato in such a light that it would appeal to simple people; he thought that it would be possible; and here he was struck by the fact that Plato, like Christ, employed the device of the parable largely as a means of interpreting religious ideas. The teaching of the Gospel and the teaching of Plato were alike deeply idealistic. They both depended upon the simple idea that men could conceive of themselves as better than they actually were, and upon the fact that such a conception is the strongest motive force in the world in the direction of self-improvement. The mystery of conversion is nothing more than the conscious apprehension of the fact that one's life is meant to be noble and beautiful, and that one has the power to make it nobler and more beautiful than it is.

It seemed to Hugh, reflecting on the development of Christianity, that perhaps it was not too much to say that the Pauline influence had been to a great extent a misfortune; it was true that in a sense he had resisted the Jewish tyranny, and moreover that his writings were full of splendid aphorisms, inspiring thoughts, generous ideals. But he had formalised Christianity for all that; he had linked it closely to the Judaic system; he was ultimately responsible for Puritanism; that is to say, it was his influence more than any other that had given the Jewish scriptures their weight in the Christian scheme. It seemed to Hugh to be a terrible calamity that had reserved, so to speak, a place in the chariot of Christ for the Jewish dispensation; it was the firm belief in the vital inspiration of the Jewish scriptures that had produced that harsh and grim type of Christianity so dear to the Puritan heart. With the exception of certain of the Psalms, certain portions of Job and of the prophets, there seemed to Hugh to be little in the Old Testament that did not merely hamper and encumber the religion of Christ. What endless and inextricable difficulties arose from trying to harmonise the conception of the Father as preached by Christ, with the conception of the vindictive, wrathful, national, local Deity of the Old Testament. How little countenance did Christ ever give to that idea! He did not even think of the Temple as a house of sacrifice, but as a house of prayer! How seldom he alluded to the national history! How human and temporary a character He gave to the law of Moses! How constantly He appealed to personal rather than to national aspirations! How he seemed to insist upon the fact that every man must make his religion out of the simplest elements of moral consciousness! How often he appealed to the poetry of symbols rather than to the effectiveness of ceremony! How little claim he laid, at least in the Synoptic Gospels, to any divinity, and then rather in virtue of his perfect humanity! He called himself the Son of Man; in the only recorded prayer He gave to His disciples, there was no hint that prayer should be directed to Himself; it was all centred upon the Father.

Here again the Aristotelian method, the delight in analysis, the natural human desire to make truth precise and complete, had intruded itself. What was the Athanasian creed but an Aristotelian formula, making a hard dogma out of a dim mystery? The outcome of it all for Hugh was the resolution that for himself, at all events, his business was to disregard the temptation to formularise his position. With one's limited vision, one's finite inability to touch a thought at more than one point at a time, one must give up all hope of attaining to a perfected philosophical system. The end was dark, the solution incomprehensible. He must rather live as far as possible in a high and lofty emotion, beholding the truth by hints and glimpses, pursuing as far as possible all uplifting intuitions, all free and generous desires. It was useless to walk in a prescribed path, to frame one's life on the model of another's ideal. He must be open-minded, ready to revise his principles in the light of experience. He must hold fast to what brought him joy and peace. How restful after all it was to know that one had one's own problem, one's own conditions! All that was necessary was to put oneself firmly and constantly in harmony with the great purpose that had set one exactly where one was, and given one a temperament, a character, good and evil desires, hopes, longings, temptations, aspirations. One could not escape from them, thank God. If one only desired God's will, one's sins and sufferings as well as one's hopes and joys all worked together to a far-off end. One must go straight forward, in courage and patience and love.

XII

Sacrifice--The Church--Certainty

Hugh made friends at Cambridge with a young Roman Catholic priest, who was working there. His new friend was a very simple-minded man; he seemed to Hugh the only man of great gifts he had ever known, who was absolutely untouched by any shadow of worldliness. Hugh knew of men who resisted the temptations of the world very successfully, to whom indeed they were elementary temptations, long since triumphed over; but this man was the only man he had ever known who was gifted with qualities that commanded the respect and admiration of the world, yet to whom the temptations of ambition and success seemed never to have appeared even upon the distant horizon. He was an interesting talker, a fine preacher, and a very accomplished writer; but his interest was entirely centred upon his work, and not upon the rewards of it. He was very poor; but he had no regard for anything--luxury, power, position--that the world could give him. He had no wish to obtain influence; he only cared to make the work on which he was engaged as perfect as he could. The man was really an artist pure and simple; he seemed to have little taste even for pastoral work.

One day they sat together, on a hot breathless afternoon, in a college garden, on a seat beneath some great shady chestnut-trees, and looked out lazily upon the heavy-seeded grass of the meadow and the bright flower-borders. The priest said to Hugh suddenly, "I have often wondered what your religion really is. Do you mind my speaking of it? You seem to me exactly the sort of man who needs a strong, definite faith to make him happy."

Hugh smiled and said, "Well, I am trying, not very successfully I fear, to find out what I really do believe. I am trying to construct my faith from the bottom; and I am anxious not to put into the foundations any faulty stones, anything that I have not really tested."

"That is a very good thing to do," said the priest. "But how are you setting to work?"

"Well," said Hugh, "I have never had time before to think my religion out; I seem to have accepted all kinds of loose ideas and shaky traditions. I want to arrive at some certainties; I try to apply a severe intellectual test to everything: and the result is that I seem obliged to discard one thing after another that I once believed."

"Perhaps," said the priest after a silence, "you are doing this too drastically? Religion, it seems to me, has to be apprehended in a different region, the mystical region, the region of intuition rather than logic."

"Yes," said Hugh, "and intuitions are what one practically lives by; but I think that they ought to be able to stand an intellectual test too--for, after all, it is only intellectually that one can approach them."

The priest shook his head at this, with a half-smile. And Hugh added, "I wish you would give me a short sketch, in a few words if you can, of how you reached your present position."

"That is not very easy," said the priest; "but I will try." He sate for a moment silent, and then he said, "When one looks back into antiquity, before the coming of Christ, one sees a general searching after God in the world; the one idea that seems to run through all religions, is the idea of sacrifice--a coarse and brutal idea originally, perhaps; but the essence of it is that there is such a thing as sinfulness, and such a thing as atonement; and that only through death can life be reached. The Jews came nearest to the idea of a personal, ruling God: and the sacrificial system is seen in its fullest perfection with them. Then, in the wise counsels of God, it came about that our Saviour was born a Jew. You will say that I beg the question here; but approaching the subject intellectually, one satisfies oneself that the purest and completest religion that the world has ever seen was initiated by Him; it is impossible, in the light of that religion, not to feel that one must give the greatest weight to the credentials which such a teacher put forward; and we find that the claim that He made was that He was Himself Very God. The moment that one realises that, one also realises that there is no _primâ facie_ impossibility that God should so reveal Himself--for indeed it seems an idea which no human mind would dare to originate, except in a kind of insane delusion; and the teaching of Christ, His utter modesty and meekness, His perfect sanity and clear-sightedness, make it evident to me that we may put out of court the possibility that He was under the influence of a delusion. He, it seems to me, took all the old vague ideas of sacrifice and consummated them; He showed that the true spirit was there, hidden under the ancient sacrifices; that one must offer one's best freely to God; and in this spirit He gave Himself to suffering and death. He founded a society with a definite constitution, He provided it with certain simple rules, and said that, when He was gone, it would be inspired and developed by the workings of His Spirit. He left this society as a witness in the world; it has developed in many ways, holding its own, gaining strength, winning adherents in a marvellous manner. And I look upon the Church as the witness to God in the world; I accept its developments as the developments of the Spirit. I see many things in it which I cannot comprehend; but then the whole world is full of mysteries--and the mysteries of the Church I accept in a tranquil faith. I have put it, I fear, very clumsily and awkwardly; but that is the outline of my belief--and it seems to me to interpret the world and its secrets, not perfectly indeed, but more perfectly than any other theory."

"I see!" said Hugh, "but I will tell you at once my initial difficulty. I grant at the outset that the teaching of Christ is the purest and best religious teaching that the world has ever seen; but I look upon Him, not as the founder of a system, but as the most entire individualist that the world has ever known. It seems to me that all His teaching was directed to the end that we should believe in God as a loving Father, and regard all men as brothers; the principle which was to direct His followers was to be the principle of perfect love, and I think that His idea was that, if men could accept that, everything else mattered little. They must live their lives with that intuition to guide them: the Church seems to me to be but the human spoiling and complicating of that great simple idea. I look round and see the other religious systems of the world--Mahomedanism, Buddhism, and the rest. In each I see a man of profound religious ideals, whose system has been adopted, and then formalised and vitiated by his followers. I do not see that there is anything to make me believe that the same process has not taken place in Christianity. The elaborate system of dogma and doctrine seems to me a perfectly natural human process of trying to turn ideas, essentially poetical, into definite and scientific truths, and half its errors to arise from feeling the necessity of reconciling and harmonising ideas, which I have described as poetical, which were never meant to be reconciled or harmonised. And then there is the added difficulty that, owing to the system of the Church, the ideas of the earliest Christian teachers, like St. Paul, have been accepted as infallible too; and hence arises the dilemma of having to bring into line a whole series of statements, made, as in St. Paul's case, by a man of intense emotion, which are neither consistent with each other, nor, in all cases, with the teaching of Christ. My idea of Christianity is to get as close to Christ's own teaching as possible. I do not concern myself with the historical accuracy of the Gospel narratives, or even with the incidents there recorded. Those records are the work of men of very imperfect education, and feeble intellectual grasp, in the grip of the prejudices and beliefs of their age. But their very imperfection makes me feel more strongly the august personality of Christ, because the principles, which they represent Him as maintaining, seem to me to be entirely beyond anything that they could themselves have originated. It seems to me, if I discern Christ rightly--speaking of Him now purely as a man--that if He could return to the earth, and be confronted with the system of any of the Churches that bear His name, He would declare it to be all a horrible mistake. It seems to me that what He aimed at was a strictly individualistic system, an attitude of sincerity, simplicity, and loving-kindness, free from all formalism (which He seems to have detested above everything), and free, too, from all elaborate and metaphysical dogma. Instead of this, He would find that men had seized upon the letter, not the spirit, of His teaching, and had devised a huge mundane organisation, full of pomp and policy, elaborate, severe, hard, unloving. Now if I apply my intellectual tests to the central truths of Christianity, such as the law of Love, the power of self-sacrifice, the brotherhood of men, they stand the test; they seem to contain a true apprehension of the needs of the world, of the methods by which the happiness of humanity may be attained. But when I apply the intellectual test to the superstructure of any Church, there are innumerable doctrines which appear to me to be contrary to reason. It is difficult indeed, in this world of mystery, to affirm that any mystical claim is not true, but such claims ought not to appear to be repugnant to reason, but to confirm the processes of reason, in a region to which reason cannot scientifically and logically attain. Such doctrines, for instance, as prayers to saints for their intercession, or the efficacy of Masses for the dead, seem to me to have a certain poetical beauty about them, but to be contrary both to reason and experience. I do not see the slightest hint of them in the teaching of Christ, or anything which can be taken as giving them any support whatever. They seem to me purely human fancies, hardened into a painful mechanical form, which forfeit all claim to be inspired by the Spirit of Christ. But I must apologise for giving you such an harangue--still, you brought it on yourself."

The priest smiled quietly. "I quite see your point," he said, "and we are at one in your main position; the difficulty of the Church is that it has to organise its system for people of all kinds of temperament, and at all stages of development. But the spirit is there--and if one lets go of the letter, the grasp of many human beings is so weak that they tend to lose the spirit. The Church no doubt appears to many to be over-organised, over-definite, but that is a practical difficulty which every system which has to deal with large masses of people is confronted with. It is the same with education; boys have to do many definite and precise things which seem at the time to have no educational value; but at the end of their time they see the need of these processes."

Hugh laughed. "I wish they did!" he said; "my own belief is that, in education as well as religion, we want more individualism, more elasticity. I think it is very doubtful whether great ideas, rigidly interpreted and mechanically enforced, have any value at all for undeveloped minds; the whole secret lies in their being liberally and freely apprehended."

"What really divides us," said the priest--"and I do not think we are very far apart--is my belief that God has not left the world without a definite witness to Himself--which I believe the Church to be."

"Yes," said Hugh, "I believe that the Church is a witness to God: any system which teaches pure morality is that; but I could not limit His witness to a single system; Nature, beauty, music, poetry, art--to say nothing of sweet and kindly persons--they are all the witnesses of His spirit; and the Church is, in my belief, simply hampered and restricted from doing what she might, by the woeful rigidity, the mechanical and hard precision, which she has imported into the spiritual region. The moment that the liberty of the spirit is restricted, and grace is made to flow in definite traditional channels, that moment the stream loses its force and brightness."

"I should rather believe," said the priest, "that, with all the obvious disadvantages of organisation, left to itself, the stream welters into a shapeless marsh, instead of making glad the City of God! And may I say that you, and those like you, with ardent spiritual instincts, make the mistake of thinking that we exclude you; indeed it is not so. You would find the yoke as easy and the burden as light as ever. In submission you would gain and not lose the liberty of which you are in search."

The priest soon after this took his leave. Hugh sate long pondering, as the evening faded into dusk. Was there no certainty, then, attainable? And the answer of his own spirit was that no ready-made certainty was of avail; that a man must begin from the beginning, and construct his own faith from the foundation; that reason must play its part, lead the soul as far as it could, and set it in the right way; but that the spirit must not halt there, but pass courageously and serenely into the trackless waste, content, if need be, to make mistakes, to retrace its path, only sincerely and gently advancing, waiting for any hint that might fall from the divine spirit, interpreting rather than selecting, divesting itself of preferences and prejudices one by one, and conscious that One waited, smiling and encouraging, but a little ahead upon the road, and that any turn in the path might reveal his bright coming to the faithful eye.

XIII

Waiting for Light