CHAPTER XIV

AN OLD WAY OF MAKING A NEW DEPARTURE

Nor blame the Rock, whose slippery edge was splashed Only by waves your frantic struggling washed. E. P. MASON.

My political career did not survive my husband’s death. The Holroyd ministry, it will be remembered, went out in ’63, and the sense of loneliness and depression I then felt did not allow me to stand again. Since, however, a certain misunderstanding has arisen about this, and it is necessary for me to clear, not only my own character, but the august memory of James Holroyd, I may be pardoned for printing here the letter which I received from him on its being made known that I did not intend to seek re-election:

AIX-LES-BAINS, _Oct. 12_.

DEAR LADY PORSTOCK,—

_I cannot tell you how sorry I am to hear that we are to lose your help at the forthcoming election. It is just the moment when splendid talents such as yours would be most useful to us. But I must not, of course, ask you to reconsider your decision. My own regret is shared, I need hardly tell you, in the fullest sense by my colleagues. I had a wireless only yesterday from Lord Brede to say, “Please express deep regret Lady Porstock very natural decision she has taken none more sorry than self to see ranks of old comrades in arms depleted tout lasse tout casse tout passe ac.ac.ac. Brede.” You will be glad to hear that Sir Hugh ffynes has consented to fill the Manchester N.W. (3) coupon, so that Liberalism in that constituency will not be without its worthy representative._

_Yours sincerely_, JAMES HOLROYD

About this time Francis and Gervase, who had both done very well at Eton, got leaving scholarships into the Guards. It was not so much the financial side of this that appealed to me (the scholarships had the effect of reducing the premium to £500) as the consciousness that my boys were well thought of by their masters and were worthy grandsons of Herbert Blisworth. And now what was left for me but to retire into the background? And what is left for me, you will ask, but to retire into the background, and bring these inconsequent memoirs to a conclusion? Well, I confess that I have finished with public affairs; and if any of my readers goes beyond this point, he must do it on the clear understanding that he has let himself be betrayed into taking an interest in the private affairs of a talkative old woman who was not, after all, much of a personage even in her day. Her private affairs, nay, her very private affairs, for what is so personal to each of us as his or her attitude towards religion? And that is all I have left to speak of. It is what we older folk begin to worry about when the interests of youth desert us and the friends of youth are taken from our side, and we find ourselves no longer battling with the winds of circumstance, but volplaning steadily towards the drome that waits for all of us at the last.

I know I have figured in these pages as a careless sort of butterfly, untroubled by any thought of my last end. Perhaps my readers will be disappointed in me at finding such a reversal of my old ways of thought. But, be that as it may, old age and bereavement and the lack of absorbing occupations combined to drive me in upon myself, and make me think about my last landing. It was natural that in this position I should turn for guidance to one who from quite an early age had manifested an interest in my spiritual affairs, who, indeed, had laughingly described himself as my “father professor,” Canon Dives. Canon Dives I have written, for so I shall always remember him, but indeed by this time he had attained that preferment for which his exceptional qualities had long marked him out, as Episcopal Bishop of Norwich.[15] So long as the Established Church remained a single body (only weakened by the secession of the Feminists in ’46, and the Enthusiasts in ’53), the Westernizing party had still sufficient weight to hinder the advancement of one who had always been so outspoken a champion of “relativist” views. But, as those of my readers who are interested in such subjects will remember, in 1964, only five years after Disestablishment became an accomplished fact, the ecclesiastical map was yet further complicated by a schism within the old Church of England. The Westernizers succeeded in securing for themselves that recognition by the Orthodox Churches of the East which remained theirs till, on the outbreak of the Great War, they were solemnly anathematized and cut off from Communion. But they secured this advantage at the price of separating themselves from the whole relativist party, which contained within itself so much that was most striking in the intellect of contemporary Christianity. At West Mill, our parish church had remained Anglican (it was only in the towns that the old churches were divided up among the various denominations), and at the schism Mr. Rowlands, after much hesitation, pronounced in favour of the relativists—it would have cost him a divorce to do otherwise—so that, at least for his lifetime, the position of the parish was defined. I was not very much influenced by this fact; but old friendship and the outstanding personality of the new Bishop of Norwich made me, as I say, turn to him.

I wrote, then, to Bishop Dives asking him for an exposition of the Christian religion suited to the beginner—to one who had been accustomed to regard the supernatural as not real, or, if real, not vital. He was kind enough to send me by return a record taken from one of his own recent sermons, preached at Holy Trinity Church, Brompton. It was part of a course, but he said it was exactly the thing for one in my state of mind. I mean to print the relevant part of it here.

“Everything is relative to a thinker. That is clear from the mere force of words; for what is a thing but a thought? When I think a thing I at the same time thing it: I give it thingness by thinking it. Now, that all thought is relative to a thinker has long been clear so far as the process of thought, what we call nowadays the thinkage, is concerned. It is the boast of modern philosophy, trained, and proud to have been trained, in the school of relativist Science, that it has gone further than this. It assures us (I trust I make my meaning clear) that it is not only our thinkage but our thoughtage that is relative to a thinker. If I think that two and two are four—allowing, for the sake of argument, that this is so, though I know well that there are serious difficulties about believing it to be so—if I think that two and two are four, then the fourness, if I may so express myself, of the two and the two combined is part of my thoughtage, and relative to me as a thinker.

“But not, let us hasten to add, of my thoughtage only. It is part of the race-thoughtage, the thoughtage which rises like an upgushing stream from the harmonious and simultaneous thinkage of the human species. I think we may go further, and say that it upgushes equally from the thinkage of all other spiritual beings, if there are any other spiritual beings in existence, and in so far as they exist. Now, when a thing is merely the thoughtage of my thinkage, what does that prove? Why, nothing or next to nothing; merely that it is thinkable. But when it is the thoughtage not only of my thinkage but of the world-thinkage, then we go further; then we are not content to say, This is thinkable; we must needs add, This is thinkworthy. More than that we do not know, and we shall never know. The old confidence that objects exist, outside of and apart from our thinkage, is gone. The old confidence that things are true, outside of and apart from our thinkage, is gone. That confidence, valuable as it has been in the training of our race, and powerfully as it has contributed to the development of our history, is no longer ours. It made the fatal mistake of distinguishing and abstracting our thoughtage from our thinkage. To repeat that mistake to-day would be to argue as if Mosenheim and Poschling had never existed—I mean, in so far as they ever did exist.

“Well, when first we realize that there is no such thing, properly speaking, as existence, and no such thing, as truth, we feel, for a time, unmanned. We are like aviators plane-wrecked on some little island far from all help, with nothing around us but sea and air. And we naturally ask ourselves, do we not, what have we saved from the wreck? If we are no longer allowed to say, ‘This exists,’ or ‘This is true’—or, at any rate, not allowed to say it without a great deal of qualification, a very great deal of qualification—what can we say? Oh, it is all right, my dear sisters and brothers, we have just one little plank saved to us from the wreck. And what is that plank? Why, we can still say, ‘This is thinkworthy.’ Oh, beautiful word, thinkworthiness! And beautiful thing, thoughtworthiness, I mean think—thoughtthinkiness, no, I don’t mean that (here the record is somewhat blurred, and it would appear as if Bishop Dives must have blown his nose). Oh, beautiful thing, thinkworthiness! If indeed thinkworthiness can be called a thing, and in so far as it is right to do so.

“It is thinkworthy, my dear sisters and brothers, that two and two make, or rather, in a phrase of less apparent grammar but more spiritual meaning, makes, four. It is thinkworthy that any two sides of a triangle are greater than the third. It is thinkworthy that thinks which are equal to the same think—I mean, things which are equal to the same thing, are equal to one another.

“Now, it is plain that all this is going to have a great influence, a very great influence indeed, upon the religious conceptions of our day. We used to say, for example, ‘The soul exists after death.’ We can no longer say that; we have to reduce our thought, that is our thinkage, to simpler elements. We have to say, ‘It is thinkworthy that if that thing which we call the soul is thinkworthy at all, then that thinkworthiness is still thinkworthy after death.’ Try it over a few times, and you will find it quite easy. And do not suppose that because such a formula as that has a less absolute and a less defiant ring about it than our old formula, ‘The soul exists after death,’ therefore we have lost something, and are poorer than our forefathers. No, oh no, quite the contrary. For we know now, what they did not know, that thingness and thinkworthiness are one. It cannot be too often repeated; in thinking a thing we thing it: our thinkage—wonderful thought! I mean, wonderful thoughtage!—thinks thingness into the thing! It cannot be too often repeated, the man who thinks things things things!

“And another great advantage arises, once we have mastered this salutary doctrine. The old religious formulas were always trying to make our thoughts correspond with realities conceived as real, truths conceived as true, outside of and apart from ourselves. They were always saying, I believe in this, I believe in that—oh dear, oh dear, oh dear! A generation or so back, there was a slang phrase which was used to express incredulity; when you meant, ‘That is not true,’ you said, ‘I don’t think!’ My dear sisters and brothers, there was a vast deal of profound philosophy in that simple piece of slang! Mosenheim himself would not have had them express themselves otherwise. If there is no such thing as truth, and you may take it from me that there is not, except in a very special sense which it would take too long to explain to you now—if there is no such thing as truth, then we are not going to burn one another for denying that this or that is true. We are going to abandon Truth, and go forward boldly, none knows whither.

“What, then, is religion? The best definition that has been given of it is, I suppose, Poschling’s: ‘Religion is that realization of the Ego under the stimulus, real or apparent, of the Non-ego, which finds its hyper-egoization in de-egoization and its de-egoization in hyper-egoization.’ Let it stand at that. We will now return to the short-sighted policy of Baasha”—the rest of Bishop Dives’ sermon did not bear upon my immediate difficulties.

I confess I was somewhat troubled by the tone of Bishop Dives’ utterance. It seemed to me to show all his old grasp of philosophical subtleties, but less than his old confidence in the claims of the supernatural. Could it be, I asked myself, that my oracle had himself changed with the change of the years, and gave forth now a different note? I was so troubled by this thought that I wrote again, asking him quite frankly to tell me if he thought his views were the same as when I knew him at Oxford, or different; and, if different, whether they had now reached a standstill, or whether they were still developing, and if so in what direction? His answer was a candid avowal:

DEAR LADY PORSTOCK—

_You have, with your usual directness and acumen, touched upon a point over which I have often questioned myself. Looking back over the years, it seems clear to me that my religious opinions have modified with time, and that, like the Greek poet long ago, “I grow old learning many things.” But, let it be observed, in these successive modifications of my point of view I am only following the example of what you and I recognize as being the Holy Catholic Church, which has learnt much, and, I think we may say, learned to forget much, since those early days when it seemed to dominate the world in the positiveness and self-assuredness of its youth._

_Now, picture to yourself some acrobat who finds it necessary, in the exercise of his profession, to walk every day, before an audience of neck-craning yokels, from one point to another over a tight-rope. He finds it easier to accomplish this (owing to a simple but interesting law of physics) if he carries with him a heavy pole that assures his balance. By degrees he finds that his skill is becoming greater; habit has made his task light to him. What does he do? He has six inches chopped off either end of his pole, so that his performance becomes at once more hazardous and more remarkable. Six months later, he finds that he can afford to shorten it once more. And so on, my dear Lady Porstock, and so on, until the pole in his hand is but a short stump, hardly more significant than the staff with which Babylonian fancy pictured Jacob as having crossed over Jordan._

_Is not that, if we will look into the facts closely, the position of the Church? It sets before itself one paramount object, the achievement of the Christian ideal; you and I will not quarrel, I think, as to what we mean by that. It is a difficult and a delicate task that it has set before itself; and it may well face the prospect with not much less misgiving than the acrobat who sees stretching before him the gossamer causeway of the tight-rope. And it starts out with a burden of dogmas and beliefs which encumbers it, and yet in encumbering it steadies its progress. And then, just as the acrobat, growing more steady on his narrow bridge of rope, finds himself capable of walking with less and less of pole to balance him, so the Church finds that with less and less of dogma, less and less of belief, it can walk along the narrow path prescribed for it to tread. Until the Reformation, it was able to steady itself by means of three things, tradition, the Bible, and human reason; the Reformation was the moment at which it decided that it could steady itself without tradition. In the nineteenth century, faced with the important claims of the evolutionary doctrine, it found that it could make a further advance still, and it cast aside the Bible as it had cast aside tradition, content to steady itself by human reason alone. It has been left to us in this century to learn that the human reason itself is an untrustworthy thing, on which it is fatal to repose any reliance; we are now learning, consequently, to dispense with the human reason equally._

_What, then, is the end of this process, or has it an end at all? For myself, I am content to believe that it has not. From century to century, it seems to me, we learn to get on with less and less of belief in supernatural things to encourage or to justify us, and I see no limit to that development. I go further, and say that I do not wish to see any limit to that development. The less we believe, clearly, the more creditable it is in us to call ourselves Christians still. Our object, therefore, at all times must be to reduce belief to its irreducible minimum; we must believe as little as we can, and be constantly on the lookout for some method by which we may be enabled to believe even less. It is not easy, this search of ours; like hill-climbers, we are bounded by our own horizon, and cannot yet see the full possibilities of disbelief that lie ahead of us. And just as, surely, we do not blame Luther because, with his limited perspective, he failed to disbelieve in the Bible; just as we do not blame Kant because he could not see how to disbelieve in the human reason; so, let us hope, our descendants will not be too hard on us because here and there we were guilty, through mere shortsightedness, of setting limits to our incredulity._

_And thus we come down to the very interesting question, Is there a vanishing-point? Will there come a time when we are able to call ourselves Christians without believing anything at all? For myself, I confess that I do not think so. It seems to me that it is an integral part of our Christian probation, this perpetual struggle to disbelieve; that, consequently, the residuum of belief must be conceived, not as a difference which will sooner or later disappear as the result of successive subtractions, but as a quotient with an infinite divisibility. To the last end of time, it seems to me, we shall be able to continue offering up the old prayer, that we may be helped in our unbelief._

_There, dear Lady Porstock, you have my view of the case. I only hope that these stumbling words of mine may help you to know your own mind._

_Yours quite sincerely_, AMPHIBOLUS NORVIC

I had just finished reading this remarkable letter, and was engaged in considering whether it was exactly what I wanted or exactly what I did not want, when the teletypewriter that connected with the front door rang at my elbow, and told me that Cardinal Smith had called. It was not much past five, but I knew his old-fashioned habits, so I whistled for tea and went down to show him up. When I saw him I had a curious experience. There is a certain smile one only sees (I think) on the faces of Catholic ecclesiastics, a smile which their friends call sanctified and their enemies cunning. To me it had always seemed to say, “I can afford to wait,” and it had always irritated me rather, as if its cocksureness indicated that sooner or later he was bound to make a proselyte of me. To-day it still seemed to say, “I can afford to wait,” only I found myself attaching a different significance to it. Well, he came up, and we had a long talk. I do not propose to describe it; after all, this is not a religious autobiography. But soon afterwards, when I was at my Chiswick house, I began to go to the Oratory for instruction.

This is all twenty years ago now, but I do not feel that I need give any description of the Oratory and its ways, for whoever goes there now will find it almost exactly the same as it was then—and has been, I suppose, from a very much earlier time. I could not, of course, penetrate beyond the enclosure: no one of my sex, I was told, had ever done so except once when “Buffalo Bill’s” Indians came to tea—there were still Red Indians in existence down to my own day, and some of these used to be shown off as a circus turn in England, most of them Catholics. At the last moment it was discovered that the good Fathers could not distinguish braves from squaws, and some of the latter had already been admitted into the garden by mistake! “But that was before my time,” said the old priest who had instructed me. The long brown house, with its old-fashioned carriage-sweep, watching unwinking the ceaseless grinding flow of the Brompton Road platform; the stone façade of the church, thrust out like a rock for the daily tide to eddy round, half trapped, half free; the Fathers themselves, still, for all their man-of-the-modern-worldliness, dressed in the very manner of St. Philip, and taking their supper at a quarter to seven after the manner of Father Faber; the interior of the church, housing indeed Saints whom Father Faber had never heard of, yet still the same in its outlines—the same red hangings, the same cope on the Lady statue, spoils of some old South American emperor, the same Corpo Santo, grimed now with London dust till it might have passed for St. Philip himself—all spoke to me of a changelessness which was not dullness, a peacefulness which was not stagnation. Oh yes, I know there are plenty of Congregations which have their roots deeper in the history of the Church, their place in the story of England yet longer and yet more honourable: but it is the Oratory, with the life of the sixteenth century thrown on to the screen of the nineteenth century, and there fixed as if for all time, that stood and stands to me for type of the eternal tradition.

Am I confusing the merely interminable with the eternal? No, it was at High Mass at the Oratory that I realized what eternity meant. The frivolous might find them simply interminable, those long Mozart masses that the Protestants go to hear. But if you are in the right spirit to catch the message of the place, then you find eternity. The three ministers, dwarfed by the height of the building, seem like ants crawling about in the presence of Something immeasurably greater than themselves: the Kyrie and the _Miserere nobis_ of the Gloria sound like what they are, tributes of abject servility to a King whose audience no unclean thing may approach; the spaciousness of the whole setting, music, and building, and ceremonies, stands for a poor sacrament of that Infinitude towards which all this self-annihilating homage is directed: you see the work of man’s hands as the little doll’s house it is. In one breathless moment of the Credo the heart seems to stop still, and all becomes an eternal moment, that silence which is kept before the throne of God.

I do not know why I should have said all this, or centred it all about the Oratory, if it be not that Miss Linthorpe’s warning was right, and there comes a time when you grow old, and drop out of your generation, and the mind, satiated with the ceaseless pageant of the interminable, craves for some outward expression of the eternal. Anyhow, my conversion was neither a hysterical nor a sensational one. I kept very quiet about it beforehand—why, I do not know, unless it be from some vague, inherited instinct. It is true that at the time of which I type it is doubtful whether one-fifth of the population of England was Catholic, and that the act of being received into the Church was not quite the everyday thing it is to us. But already things were very different from my young days, when the Catholic Church was still regarded as something desperate and melodramatic, a conspiracy against the public peace. I remember, for example, when I was about ten years old how the news reached us that a family friend had made his submission, and Lady Trecastle, who was staying with us, talked about it in a hushed, shocked voice as if it were a thing one could hardly mention in front of children, although Lady Trecastle herself had no religious beliefs and never went near a church if she could help it. The day of all that was long over, yet somehow I felt shy and awkward about my religious intentions, and mentioned them to nobody—concealed them, I am afraid, rather deliberately, from Juliet Savage, whose keen criticism I confess that I dreaded.

Actually it was in coming away from the ceremony of my reception that I met her in the street. “Come and have luncheon somewhere,” she said, “I’ve got something to tell you.” When we were comfortably ensconced at _Les Rossignols_, she turned to me and said, “Opal, my dear, I’ve just become a Catholic.” I said in a stupefied way, “So have I.” Then we giggled idiotically for a little; and cross-questioning proved that she also had written to Bishop Dives, and had been sent identically the same sermon-record! She then ordered a rather good Volnay, and when it appeared, leaning over coquettishly in its basket, she said, “Let us hope that this is drinkable, if not actually drinkworthy. Personally, I’ve got a droughtage on me which will demand a good deal of drinkage.”