Герберт Джордж Уэллс
The Soul of a Bishop
He paused and looked at them. They were all listening to him now. But he was still haunted by a dread of preaching in his own family. He dropped to the conversational note again.
“You see what I had in mind. I saw I must come out of this, and preach the kingdom of God. That was my idea. I don’t want to force it upon you, but I want you to understand why I acted as I did. But let me come to the particular thing that has happened to-day. I did not think when I made my final decision to leave the church that it meant such poverty as this we are living in – permanently. That is what I want to make clear to you. I thought there would be a temporary dip into dinginess, but that was all. There was a plan; at the time it seemed a right and reasonable plan; for setting up a chapel in London, a very plain and simple undenominational chapel, for the simple preaching of the world kingdom of God. There was some one who seemed prepared to meet all the immediate demands for such a chapel.”
“Was it Lady Sunderbund?” asked Clementina.
Scrope was pulled up abruptly. “Yes,” he said. “It seemed at first a quite hopeful project.”
“We’d have hated that,” said Clementina, with a glance as if for assent, at her mother. “We should all have hated that.”
“Anyhow it has fallen through.”
“We don’t mind that,” said Clementina, and Daphne echoed her words.
“I don’t see that there is any necessity to import this note of – hostility to Lady Sunderbund into this matter.” He addressed himself rather more definitely to Lady Ella. “She’s a woman of a very extraordinary character, highly emotional, energetic, generous to an extraordinary extent…”
Daphne made a little noise like a comment.
A faint acerbity in her father’s voice responded.
“Anyhow you make a mistake if you think that the personality of Lady Sunderbund has very much to do with this thing now. Her quality may have brought out certain aspects of the situation rather more sharply than they might have been brought out under other circumstances, but if this chapel enterprise had been suggested by quite a different sort of person, by a man, or by a committee, in the end I think I should have come to the same conclusion. Leave Lady Sunderbund out. Any chapel was impossible. It is just this specialization that has been the trouble with religion. It is just this tendency to make it the business of a special sort of man, in a special sort of building, on a special day – Every man, every building, every day belongs equally to God. That is my conviction. I think that the only possible existing sort of religions meeting is something after the fashion of the Quaker meeting. In that there is no professional religious man at all; not a trace of the sacrifices to the ancient gods… And no room for a professional religions man…” He felt his argument did a little escape him. He snatched, “That is what I want to make clear to you. God is not a speciality; he is a universal interest.”
He stopped. Both Daphne and Clementina seemed disposed to say something and did not say anything.
Miriam was the first to speak. “Daddy,” she said, “I know I’m stupid. But are we still Christians?”
“I want you to think for yourselves.”
“But I mean,” said Miriam, “are we – something like Quakers – a sort of very broad Christians?”
“You are what you choose to be. If you want to keep in the church, then you must keep in the church. If you feel that the Christian doctrine is alive, then it is alive so far as you are concerned.”
“But the creeds?” asked Clementina.
He shook his head. “So far as Christianity is defined by its creeds, I am not a Christian. If we are going to call any sort of religious feeling that has a respect for Jesus, Christianity, then no doubt I am a Christian. But so was Mohammed at that rate. Let me tell you what I believe. I believe in God, I believe in the immediate presence of God in every human life, I believe that our lives have to serve the Kingdom of God…”
“That practically is what Mr. Chasters calls ‘The Core of Truth in Christianity.’”
“You have been reading him?”
“Eleanor lent me the book. But Mr. Chasters keeps his living.”
“I am not Chasters,” said Scrope stiffly, and then relenting: “What he does may be right for him. But I could not do as he does.”
Lady Ella had said no word for some time.
“I would be ashamed,” she said quietly, “if you had not done as you have done. I don’t mind – The girls don’t mind – all this… Not when we understand – as we do now.”
That was the limit of her eloquence.
“Not now that we understand, Daddy,” said Clementina, and a faint flavour of Lady Sunderbund seemed to pass and vanish.
There was a queer little pause. He stood rather distressed and perplexed, because the talk had not gone quite as he had intended it to go. It had deteriorated towards personal issues. Phoebe broke the awkwardness by jumping up and coming to her father. “Dear Daddy,” she said, and kissed him.
“We didn’t understand properly,” said Clementina, in the tone of one who explains away much – that had never been spoken…
“Daddy,” said Miriam with an inspiration, “may I play something to you presently?”
“But the fire!” interjected Lady Ella, disposing of that idea.
“I want you to know, all of you, the faith I have,” he said.
Daphne had remained seated at the table.
“Are we never to go to church again?” she asked, as if at a loss.
(17)
Scrope went back into his little study. He felt shy and awkward with his daughters now. He felt it would be difficult to get back to usualness with them. To-night it would be impossible. To-morrow he must come down to breakfast as though their talk had never occurred… In his rehearsal of this deliverance during his walk home he had spoken much more plainly of his sense of the coming of God to rule the world and end the long age of the warring nations and competing traders, and he had intended to speak with equal plainness of the passionate subordination of the individual life to this great common purpose of God and man, an aspect he had scarcely mentioned at all. But in that little room, in the presence of those dear familiar people, those great horizons of life had vanished. The room with its folding doors had fixed the scale. The wallpaper had smothered the Kingdom of God; he had been, he felt, domestic; it had been an after-supper talk. He had been put out, too, by the mention of Lady Sunderbund and the case of Chasters…
In his study he consoled himself for this diminution of his intention. It had taken him five years, he reflected, to get to his present real sense of God’s presence and to his personal subordination to God’s purpose. It had been a little absurd, he perceived, to expect these girls to leap at once to a complete understanding of the halting hints, the allusive indications of the thoughts that now possessed his soul. He tried like some maiden speaker to recall exactly what it was he had said and what it was he had forgotten to say… This was merely a beginning, merely a beginning.
After the girls had gone to bed, Lady Ella came to him and she was glowing and tender; she was in love again as she had not been since the shadow had first fallen between them. “I was so glad you spoke to them,” she said. “They had been puzzled. But they are dear loyal girls.”
He tried to tell her rather more plainly what he felt about the whole question of religion in their lives, but eloquence had departed from him.
“You see, Ella, life cannot get out of tragedy – and sordid tragedy – until we bring about the Kingdom of God. It’s no unreality that has made me come out of the church.”
“No, dear. No,” she said soothingly and reassuringly. “With all these mere boys going to the most dreadful deaths in the trenches, with death, hardship and separation running amok in the world – ”
“One has to do something,” she agreed.
“I know, dear,” he said, “that all this year of doubt and change has been a dreadful year for you.”
“It was stupid of me,” she said, “but I have been so unhappy. It’s over now – but I was wretched. And there was nothing I could say… I prayed… It isn’t the poverty I feared ever, but the disgrace. Now – I’m happy. I’m happy again.
“But how far do you come with me?”
“I’m with you.”
“But,” he said, “you are still a churchwoman?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t mind.”
He stared at her.
“But I thought always that was what hurt you most, my breach with the church.”
“Things are so different now,” she said.
Her heart dissolved within her into tender possessiveness. There came flooding into her mind the old phrases of an ancient story: “Whither thou goest I will go… thy people shall be my people and thy God my God… The Lord do so to me and more also if aught but death part thee and me.”
Just those words would Lady Ella have said to her husband now, but she was capable of no such rhetoric.
“Whither thou goest,” she whispered almost inaudibly, and she could get no further. “My dear,” she said.
(18)
At two o’clock the next morning Scrope was still up. He was sitting over the snoring gas fire in his study. He did not want to go to bed. His mind was too excited, he knew, for any hope of sleep. In the last twelve hours, since he had gone out across the park to his momentous talk with Lady Sunderbund, it seemed to him that his life had passed through its cardinal crisis and come to its crown and decision. The spiritual voyage that had begun five years ago amidst a stormy succession of theological nightmares had reached harbour at last. He was established now in the sure conviction of God’s reality, and of his advent to unify the lives of men and to save mankind. Some unobserved process in his mind had perfected that conviction, behind the cloudy veil of his vacillations and moods. Surely that work was finished now, and the day’s experience had drawn the veil and discovered God established for ever.
He contrasted this simple and overruling knowledge of God as the supreme fact in a practical world with that vague and ineffective subject for sentiment who had been the “God” of his Anglican days. Some theologian once spoke of God as “the friend behind phenomena”; that Anglican deity had been rather a vague flummery behind court and society, wealth, “respectability,” and the comfortable life. And even while he had lived in lipservice to that complaisant compromise, this true God had been here, this God he now certainly professed, waiting for his allegiance, waiting to take up the kingship of this distraught and bloodstained earth. The finding of God is but the stripping of bandages from the eyes. Seek and ye shall find…
He whispered four words very softly: “The Kingdom of God!”
He was quite sure he had that now, quite sure.
The Kingdom of God!
That now was the form into which all his life must fall. He recalled his vision of the silver sphere and of ten thousand diverse minds about the world all making their ways to the same one conclusion. Here at last was a king and emperor for mankind for whom one need have neither contempt nor resentment; here was an aim for which man might forge the steel and wield the scalpel, write and paint and till and teach. Upon this conception he must model all his life. Upon this basis he must found friendships and co-operations. All the great religions, Christianity, Islam, in the days of their power and honesty, had proclaimed the advent of this kingdom of God. It had been their common inspiration. A religion surrenders when it abandons the promise of its Millennium. He had recovered that ancient and immortal hope. All men must achieve it, and with their achievement the rule of God begins. He muttered his faith. It made it more definite to put it into words and utter it. “It comes. It surely comes. To-morrow I begin. I will do no work that goes not Godward. Always now it shall be the truth as near as I can put it. Always now it shall be the service of the commonweal as well as I can do it. I will live for the ending of all false kingship and priestcraft, for the eternal growth of the spirit of man…”
He was, he knew clearly, only one common soldier in a great army that was finding its way to enlistment round and about the earth. He was not alone. While the kings of this world fought for dominion these others gathered and found themselves and one another, these others of the faith that grows plain, these men who have resolved to end the bloodstained chronicles of the Dynasts and the miseries of a world that trades in life, for ever. They were many men, speaking divers tongues. He was but one who obeyed the worldwide impulse. He could smile at the artless vanity that had blinded him to the import of his earlier visions, that had made him imagine himself a sole discoverer, a new Prophet, that had brought him so near to founding a new sect. Every soldier in the new host was a recruiting sergeant according to his opportunity… And none was leader. Only God was leader…
“The achievement of the Kingdom of God;” this was his calling. Henceforth this was his business in life…
For a time he indulged in vague dreams of that kingdom of God on earth of which he would be one of the makers; it was a dream of a shadowy splendour of cities, of great scientific achievements, of a universal beauty, of beautiful people living in the light of God, of a splendid adventure, thrusting out at last among the stars. But neither his natural bent nor his mental training inclined him to mechanical or administrative explicitness. Much more was his dream a vision of men inwardly ennobled and united in spirit. He saw history growing reasonable and life visibly noble as mankind realized the divine aim. All the outward peace and order, the joy of physical existence finely conceived, the mounting power and widening aim were but the expression and verification of the growth of God within. Then we would bear children for finer ends than the blood and mud of battlefields. Life would tower up like a great flame. By faith we reached forward to that. The vision grew more splendid as it grew more metaphorical. And the price one paid for that; one gave sham dignities, false honour, a Levitical righteousness, immediate peace, one bartered kings and churches for God… He looked at the mean, poverty-struck room, he marked the dinginess and tawdriness of its detail and all the sordid evidences of ungracious bargaining and grudging service in its appointments. For all his life now he would have to live in such rooms. He who had been one of the lucky ones… Well, men were living in dug-outs and dying gaily in muddy trenches, they had given limbs and lives, eyes and the joy of movement, prosperity and pride, for a smaller cause and a feebler assurance than this that he had found…
(19)
Presently his thoughts were brought back to his family by the sounds of Eleanor’s return. He heard her key in the outer door; he heard her move about in the hall and then slip lightly up to bed. He did not go out to speak to her, and she did not note the light under his door.
He would talk to her later when this discovery of her own emotions no longer dominated her mind. He recalled her departing figure and how she had walked, touching and looking up to her young mate, and he a little leaning to her…
“God bless them and save them,” he said…
He thought of her sisters. They had said but little to his clumsy explanations. He thought of the years and experience that they must needs pass through before they could think the fulness of his present thoughts, and so he tempered his disappointment. They were a gallant group, he felt. He had to thank Ella and good fortune that so they were. There was Clementina with her odd quick combatant sharpness, a harder being than Eleanor, but nevertheless a fine-spirited and even more independent. There was Miriam, indefatigably kind. Phoebe too had a real passion of the intellect and Daphne an innate disposition to service. But it was strange how they had taken his proclamation of a conclusive breach with the church as though it was a command they must, at least outwardly, obey. He had expected them to be more deeply shocked; he had thought he would have to argue against objections and convert them to his views. Their acquiescence was strange. They were content he should think all this great issue out and give his results to them. And his wife, well as he knew her, had surprised him. He thought of her words: “Whither thou goest – ”
He was dissatisfied with this unconditional agreement. Why could not his wife meet God as he had met God? Why must Miriam put the fantastic question – as though it was not for her to decide: “Are we still Christians?” And pursuing this thought, why couldn’t Lady Sunderbund set up in religion for herself without going about the world seeking for a priest and prophet. Were women Undines who must get their souls from mortal men? And who was it tempted men to set themselves up as priests? It was the wife, the disciple, the lover, who was the last, the most fatal pitfall on the way to God.
He began to pray, still sitting as he prayed.
“Oh God!” he prayed. “Thou who has shown thyself to me, let me never forget thee again. Save me from forgetfulness. And show thyself to those I love; show thyself to all mankind. Use me, O God, use me; but keep my soul alive. Save me from the presumption of the trusted servant; save me from the vanity of authority…
“And let thy light shine upon all those who are so dear to me… Save them from me. Take their dear loyalty…”
He paused. A flushed, childishly miserable face that stared indignantly through glittering tears, rose before his eyes. He forgot that he had been addressing God.
“How can I help you, you silly thing?” he said. “I would give my own soul to know that God had given his peace to you. I could not do as you wished. And I have hurt you!.. You hurt yourself… But all the time you would have hampered me and tempted me – and wasted yourself. It was impossible… And yet you are so fine!”
He was struck by another aspect.
“Ella was happy – partly because Lady Sunderbund was hurt and left desolated…”
“Both of them are still living upon nothings. Living for nothings. A phantom way of living…”
He stared blankly at the humming blue gas jets amidst the incandescent asbestos for a space.
“Make them understand,” he pleaded, as though he spoke confidentially of some desirable and reasonable thing to a friend who sat beside him. “You see it is so hard for them until they understand. It is easy enough when one understands. Easy – ” He reflected for some moments – “It is as if they could not exist – except in relationship to other definite people. I want them to exist – as now I exist – in relationship to God. Knowing God…”
But now he was talking to himself again.
“So far as one can know God,” he said presently.
For a while he remained frowning at the fire. Then he bent forward, turned out the gas, arose with the air of a man who relinquishes a difficult task. “One is limited,” he said. “All one’s ideas must fall within one’s limitations. Faith is a sort of tour de force. A feat of the imagination. For such things as we are. Naturally – naturally… One perceives it clearly only in rare moments… That alters nothing…”
