Chapter 5

And even if the disasters of the body have been in a sense our own fault; if we have lived prodigally and carelessly, either yielding to base desires or recklessly overworking and overstraining the mortal frame, for however high a motive, we can still triumph if we never yield for a moment to regret or remorse, but accept the conditions humbly and quietly, using such strength as we have to the uttermost. For here lies one of our strongest delusions, our belief in our own effectiveness. God's concern with each of us is direct and individual; the influences and personalities he brings us into contact with are all of his designing; and we may be sure of this, that God will make us just as effective as he intends, and that we are often more effective in silence and dejection than we are in activity and courage. We mourn faithlessly over lives cut short, activity suspended, promise unfulfilled; but we may be sure that in every case God is dealing faithfully with each soul, and using it as an instrument as far as it is fitted to be used; and thus for an active man disabled by illness to mourn over his wasted power is a grievous mistake, and no less a mistake to mourn over the unprofitableness of our lives, for they have been as profitable as God willed them to be. We can only be profitable to those for contact with whom God has prepared both them and us; and thus our duty in the matter is not to indulge in any anticipations of what our body may be able to do or unable to do, but simply to undertake what seems our plain duty; and then we shall find that the body can often do more than we could have imagined, and especially if it be directed by a tranquil mind; and if it fails us, that very failure is but the pressure of God's hand upon our shoulder, saying, "Continue in weakness and be not dismayed." If it is an error to increase our own limitations, it is equally an error not to give heed to them and to profit by them; and, after all, the body is more apt to rebel in carrying out the duties we dislike than in enjoying the pleasures on which we have set our mind. The real reason of our faithlessness is that we are so apt to look upon the one life in which we find ourselves as our only chance of expression and effectuation. If it were so, it would matter little what we did or said, if the soul is to be extinguished as a blown-out flame when the body is mingled with the dust.

I stood once upon the deck of a ship watching a shoal of porpoises following us and racing round us: every now and then the brown, sleek, shining bodies of the great creatures rose from the blue waves and entered them again with a soft plunge. Our life is like that: we rise for an instant into the light of life, we fall again beneath the waves; but all the while the soul pursues her real track unseen and unsuspected, as the gliding sea-beast cuts the green ocean twilight, or wanders among rocks and hidden slopes fringed with the branching ribbons, the delicate tangles of brine-fed groves.

VIII

Religion, as it is often taught and practised, has a dangerous tendency to become a merely mechanical and conventional thing. Worse still, it may even become a delusion, either when it is made an end in itself, or when it is regarded as a solution of all mysteries. The religious life is a vocation for some, just as the artistic life is a vocation for others, but it is not to be hoped or even desired that all should embrace and follow the religious vocation; it is just one of the paths to God, neither more nor less; and the mistake that the technically religious make is to regard it as a kind of life that is or ought to be universal. One who has the vocation is right to follow it, but he is not right to force it upon others, any more than an artist would be right in forcing the artistic life on others. It is too commonly held by the religious that formal worship is a necessity for all; they compare the relation of worship to the spiritual life to the relation of eating and drinking to the physical life. But this is not true of all human beings. Public liturgical worship is a kind of art, a very delicate and beautiful art; and just as the appeal of what is spiritual comes to some through worship, it comes to others through art, or poetry, or affection, or even through some kinds of action. There is no hint that Christ laid any stress on liturgical or public worship at all; he attended the synagogue, and went up to Jerusalem to the sacrifices; but he nowhere laid it down as a duty, or reproached those who did not practise it. He spoke vehemently of the practice of prayer, but recommended that it should be made as secret as possible; he chose a social meal for his chief rite, and the act of washing as his secondary rite. He did indeed warn his followers very sternly against the dangers of formalism; he never warned them against the danger of neglecting rites and ceremonies. On the other hand, it may be confidently stated that when religious worship has become a customary social act, a man who sympathises with the religious idea is right to show public sympathy with it; he ought to weigh very carefully his motives for abstaining. If it is indolence, or a fear of being thought precise, or a desire to be thought independent, or a contempt for sentiment that keeps him back, he is probably in the wrong; nothing but a genuine and deep-seated horror of formalism justifies him in protesting against a practice which is to many an avenue of the spiritual life. A lack of sympathy with certain liturgical expressions, a fear of being hypocritical, of being believed to hold the orthodox position in its entirety, justifies a man in not entering the ministry of the Church, even if he desires on general grounds to do so, but these are paltry motives for cutting oneself off from communion with believers. It is clear that Christ himself thought many of the orthodox practices of the exponents of the popular religion wrong, but he did not for that reason abjure attendance upon accustomed rites; and it is far more important to show sympathy with an idea, even if one does not agree with all the details, than to seem, by protesting against erroneous detail, to be out of sympathy with the idea. The mistake is when a man drifts into thinking of ceremonial worship as a practice specially and uniquely dear to God; every practice by which the spiritual principle is asserted above the material principle is dear to God, and a man who reads a beautiful poem and is thrilled with a desire for purity, goodness, and love thereby, is a truer worshipper of the Spirit than a man who mutters responses in a prescribed posture without deriving any inspiration from them.

The essence of religion is to desire to draw near to God, to receive the Spirit of God. It does not in the least degree matter how the individual expresses that essential truth. He may love some consecrated rite as being pure and beautiful, or even because other hearts have loved it,--the rite is permitted, not commanded by God--he may express God by terms of co-equality and consubstantiality, and even desire to proclaim such expressions, in concert with like-minded persons, to the harmonies of an organ, so long as it uplifts him in spirit; but such a man falls into a grievous error when he vilifies or condemns others for not seeing as he does, or enunciates that thus and thus only can a man apprehend God. The more firmly that a Church holds the necessity of what is unessential, the more it diverges from the Spirit of Christ.

It is by the essentials that we live and make progress. The man who apprehends such a statement of doctrine as the Athanasian creed affords, as a sweet and gracious mystery, thereby draws nearer to God. But if he goes further and says, "The essence of my finding inspiration in any particular creed is that I should believe it to be absolutely and literally true, and that all outside it are thieves and robbers, or at the best ignorant and misguided persons," then he stumbles at the very outset. His own belief is probably true in the sense that the truth doubtless transcends and embraces all spiritual light hopefully discerned; but the moment that a man condemns those who do not exactly agree with himself, he sins against the Spirit. Is it not a ghastly and inconceivable thought that Christ should have authorised that men should be brought to the light by persecution? Or that any of his words could be so foully distorted as to lend the least excuse to such a principle of action? It matters not what kind of persecution is employed, whether it be mental or physical. The essence is that men should so apprehend God as to desire to draw nearer to him, and that they should be goaded or coerced or terrified into submission is intolerable.

The true worshipper is the man who at no specified place or time, but as naturally as he breathes or sleeps, opens his heart to God and prays for holy influences to guard and guide him. There are some who have a quickened sense of fellowship and unity, when such prayers and aspirations are uttered in concert; but the error is to desire merely the bodily presence of one's fellow-creatures for such a purpose, rather than their mental and spiritual acquiescence. The result of such a desire is that it is often taught, or at all events believed, that there is a kind of merit in the attendance at public worship. The only merit of it lies in the case of those who sacrifice a personal disinclination to the desire to testify sympathy for the religious life. It is no more meritorious for those who personally enjoy it, than it is for a lover of pictures to go to a picture-gallery, for thus the hunger of the spirit is satisfied.

It would be better, perhaps, if it were frankly realised and recognised that it is a special taste, a peculiar vocation. It would be better if those who loved liturgical worship desired only the companionship of like-minded people; better still if it were recognised that there is no necessary connection between liturgical worship and morality at all, except in so far that all pure spiritual instincts are on the side of morality. But so far from holding it to be a duty for a man to protest against the importance attached to worship by liturgically-minded people, I should hold it to be a duty for all spiritually-minded men to show as much active sympathy as they can for a practice which is to many persons a unique and special channel of spiritual grace.

It is not the business of those who are enlightened to protest against conventional things, unless those conventions obscure and distort the truth. It is rather their duty to fall in with the existing framework of life, and live as simply and faithfully inside it as they can. To myself the plainest service is beautiful and uplifting, if it obviously evokes the spiritual ardour of the worshippers; and, on the other hand, a service in some majestic church, consecrated by age and tradition and association, and enriched by sacred art and heart-thrilling music, appeals as purely and graciously as anything in the world to my spiritual instinct. But I would frankly realise that to some such ceremonies appear merely as unmeaning and uninspiring; and the presence of such people is a mere discord in the harmony of sweetness.

The one essential thing is that we should desire to draw near to God, that we should faithfully determine by what way and in what manner we can approach him best, and that we should pursue that path as faithfully and as quietly as we can.

IX

It is Good Friday to-day. This morning I wandered through a clean, rain-washed world; among budding hedges, making for the great Cathedral towers that loom across the flat. It was noon when I passed through the little streets. Entering the great western portals, I found the huge Cathedral all lit by shafts of golden sunshine. There was a little company of worshippers under the central lantern; and a grave and dignified priest, with a tender sympathy of mien, solemnly vested, was leading the little throng through the scenes of the Passion. I sate for a long time among the congregation; and what can I say of the message there delivered? It was subtle and serious enough, full of refinement and sweetness, but it seemed to me to have little or nothing to do with life. I will not here go into the whole of the teaching that I heard--but it was for me all vitiated by one thought. The preacher seemed to desire us to feel that the sad and wasted form of the Redeemer, hanging in his last agony on the cross among the mocking crowd, was conscious at once of his humanity and his Divinity. But the thought is meaningless and inconceivable to me. If he was conscious then of his august origin and destiny, if he knew that, to use a material metaphor enough, he would shortly pass through lines of kneeling angels amid triumphant pealing music to the very Throne and Heart of God, the sufferings of his Passion can have been as nothing. There is no touch of example or help for me in the scene. Even the despairing cry, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" becomes a piece of unworthy drama; and yet if one presses the words of Jesus, and remembers that he had said but a few short hours before that he had but to speak the word, and legions of angels were at hand to succour him, it is impossible to resist the feeling that he knew who he was and whither he was bound. I do not say that the thesis is untrue; I only say that if he knew the truth, then there is no medicine in his sufferings for human despair.

The preacher seemed to feel the difficulty dimly, for he fell back upon the thought that the agony was caused by Christ's bearing the load of the world's sin. But here again I felt that, after all, sin must have been in a sense permitted by God. If God is omnipotent and all-embracing, no amount of freewill in man could enable him to choose what was not there already in the Mind of God.

And then, too, the lesson of science is that man is slowly struggling upwards out of his bestial inheritance into purity and light; and thus if a man can inherit evil from evil progenitors by the law of God, he is not a free agent in the matter; and it thus becomes a piece of sad impiety, or worse, to say that it was inconceivable agony to God to bear the sins which his own awful law perpetuated.

And to go deeper, what did the sacrifice effect? It effected no instant change in the disposition of man; it appears to me to be a dark profanity to believe that the human death of Christ effected any change in the purpose and Love of God to the world. That God should come himself on earth to die, in order that he might thereafter regard the human race more mercifully, seems to me, if it were true, to be a helpless piece of metaphysical jugglery. If that were true of God, there is nothing that I could not believe of him.

And so the words of the preacher, a man, as I knew, of faithful energy and unbroken prosperity of virtue, brought me no more hint of the truth than did the voice of a hidden dove which cooed contentedly in the stillness in some sun-warmed window of the clerestory. Dove and preacher alike had lived secure and contented lives under the shadow of the great Church, and equally, no doubt, if unconsciously, approved of the system which made such tranquil lives possible.

Once, it seemed to me, the human accent broke urgently through, when the preacher spoke of dark hours of spiritual dryness, when the soul seemed shut out from God--"When we know," he said in heart-felt tones, "that the Love of God is all about us, but we cannot enter into it; it seems to be outside of us." Had he indeed suffered thus, this courteous, kindly priest? I felt that he had, and that he was one of the sorrowful fellowship.

One word he said that dwells with me, that "Faith overleaps all visible horizons." That was a golden thought; so that as I walked back in the cool of the afternoon, and saw the prodigious plain stretch on all hands, and thought how strangely my own tiny life was limited and bound, I felt that the message of Christ was a mysterious trust, an undefined hope; not a mechanical process of forgiveness and atonement, but an assurance that there is something in the world which calls lovingly to the soul, and that while we stretch out yearning hands and desirous hearts to that, we are indeed very near to the unknown Mind of God.

X

I have often wondered how it has come about that Job has become proverbial for patience. I suppose that it has arisen out of the verse in the Epistle of St. James about the patience of Job; but, like the passage in the Book of Numbers which attributes an extreme meekness to Moses, it seems to me to be either a very infelicitous description, or else a case where both adjectives have shifted their meaning. Moses is notable for an almost fiery vehemence of character, and the punishment that was laid upon him was the outcome of a display of intemperate wrath. Just as we associate meekness with the worm that never turns, so the typically patient animal is the ass who is too phlegmatic to resent the most unjust chastisement, and ready to accommodate itself to the most overtaxing burdens. But Job is the very opposite of this; he endures, because there is no way out; but he never for a moment acquiesces in the justice of his affliction, and his complaints are both specific and protracted. He does not even display any very conspicuous fortitude under his afflictions. He is not indomitable so much as persistent. He is rather stubbornly self-righteous. It could not, of course, be otherwise, for the essence of the situation is that the sufferer should be aware that his deeds do not deserve punishment, and that the sufferings he endures should be permitted in order that his faith in God as well as his faith in his own integrity should be tested.

The truth is that the word patience is used in English in a double sense; it is applied to a sort of unreasoning stupidity, which accepts suffering and pain without adding to it by imaginative comparison; such patience knows nothing of the pain of which Dante speaks, the pain of contrasting present unhappiness with past delight; and similarly, it does not suffer the pangs of anticipation, the terrors of which Lord Beaconsfield spoke, when he said that the worst calamities in his life were the calamities which never happened. Nine-tenths of the misery of suffering lies in the power of forecasting its continuance and its increase, and the lesser patience of which I have spoken is the patience which, by no effort of reason, but by pure instinct, hears the burden of the moment in the spirit of the proverb that "sufficient for the day is the evil thereof."

But there is a nobler and a purer quality of patience which is perhaps one of the highest and most hopeful attributes of humanity, because it is nurtured in so strong a soil, and watered with the dew of tears; this is a certain tranquil, courageous, and unembittered sweetness in the presence of an irreparable calamity, which is in its very essence divine, and preaches more forcibly the far-reaching permanence of the spiritual clement in mankind than a thousand rhapsodies and panegyrics extolling human ingenuity and human greatness. Mankind has a deeply rooted and childlike instinct that apology and repentance ought to be met with the suspension of pains and penalties, and the hardest lesson in the world to learn is that guilt may be forgiven, but that the consequences of guilt may yet have to be endured. When we have really learnt that, we are indeed perfected. St. Peter in one of his epistles says that it is less creditable to be patient when one is buffeted for one's faults than when one suffers for one's virtues. I fear that I cannot agree with this. One may be convinced of the justice of a sentence, but the more one is convinced of it, the more does one regret the course of conduct that made the sentence necessary. The sinner who suffers for his sin bears not only the pain of the punishment but also the sense of shame and self-condemnation. The good man who suffers for his goodness does indeed have to bear the burden of an awful mystery, a doubt whether God is indeed on the side of the righteous; but he is not crushed beneath the additional burden of self-contempt, he has not the humiliating sense of folly and weakness which the transgressor has to bear; and thus it so often happens that the well-meaning transgressor is slow to learn the lesson of patience, because he takes refuge in a vague sort of metaphysics, and attributes to heredity and environment what is really the outcome of his own wilfulness and perversity.

But the true patience, whatever the cause of its sufferings, brings with it a blessed sense of the faithful sternness, the fruitful lovingness of God, who will not let even the feeblest of sinners be satisfied with less than he can attain, in whose hands the punishment, like fire, runs swiftly and agonisingly to and fro, consuming the baser elements of passion and desire.

XI

I am quite sure that I like solitude. There is no pleasure in the world like waking up in the morning and feeling that absolutely the whole day is at one's disposal; that one can work when one likes, go out when it is fine, have one's meals when one prefers, even when one is hungry. There is no one near enough to drop in, in this blissful corner of the world, and a caller is a rare bird. I have too much to do ever to be bored, and indeed the day is seldom long enough for all I have designed. Best of all, my work, though abundant, is seldom pressing. I have hardly ever anything to do that must be done that moment. With some people that would end in putting off everything till the last moment, but that is not the case with me. The greatest luxury I know is to have accumulated stores of work on which one can draw; and my tendency is, if ever a piece of work is entrusted to me, to do it at once. I have few gregarious instincts, I suppose. I like eating alone, reading alone, and walking alone. There is also a good deal to be said for learning to enjoy solitude, for it is the one luxury that a man without any close home ties can command. An independent bachelor is sure, whether he likes it or not, to have, as life goes on, more and more enforced solitude--that is, if he detests living in a town. I have not even nephews and nieces whom it would be natural to see something of; and thus it is a wise economy to practise for solitude.

From the point of view of work, too, it is undeniably delightful. I need never suspend a train of thought; I can write till I have finished a subject. There is never the abominable necessity of stopping in the middle of a sentence, with the prospect of having laboriously to recapture the mood; and it is the same with reading. If I am interested in a book, I can read on till I am satiated. Never before in my life have I had the chance of reading, as Theocrite praised God, "morning, evening, noon, and night." But now, if I get really absorbed in a volume, I can let the whole story, tragedy or comedy, open before me, take its course, and draw to a close. The result is that I find I can apprehend a book in a way that I have never apprehended one before, in its entirety; one can enter wholly and completely into the mind of an author, into the progress of a biography; so that to read a book now is like sitting out a play.