Герберт Джордж Уэллс
The Soul of a Bishop
“Man changes,” he said, “from day to day and from age to age. The science of the West has taught us that. Man changes and war changes and all things change. China has been the land of flowery peace, and she may yet give peace to all the world. She has put aside that puppet Emperor at Peking, she turns her face to the new learning of the West as a man lays aside his heavy robes, in order that her task may be achieved.”
The older man spoke, his manner was more than a little incredulous, and yet not altogether contemptuous. “You believe that someday there will be no more war in the world, that a time will come when men will no longer plot and plan against the welfare of men?”
“Even that last,” said the younger man. “Did any of us dream twenty-five years ago that here in China we should live to see a republic? The age of the republics draws near, when men in every country of the world will look straight up to the rule of Right and the empire of Heaven.”
(“And God will be King of the World,” said the Angel. “Is not that faith exactly the faith that is coming to you?”)
The two other Chinamen questioned their companion, but without hostility.
“This war,” said the Chinaman, “will end in a great harvesting of kings.”
“But Japan – ” the older man began.
The bishop would have liked to hear more of that conversation, but the dark hand of the Angel motioned him to another part of the world. “Listen to this,” said the Angel.
He pointed the bishop to where the armies of Britain and Turkey lay in the heat of Mesopotamia. Along the sandy bank of a wide, slow-flowing river rode two horsemen, an Englishman and a Turk. They were returning from the Turkish lines, whither the Englishman had been with a flag of truce. When Englishmen and Turks are thrown together they soon become friends, and in this case matters had been facilitated by the Englishman’s command of the Turkish language. He was quite an exceptional Englishman. The Turk had just been remarking cheerfully that it wouldn’t please the Germans if they were to discover how amiably he and his charge had got on. “It’s a pity we ever ceased to be friends,” he said.
“You Englishmen aren’t like our Christians,” he went on.
The Englishmen wanted to know why.
“You haven’t priests in robes. You don’t chant and worship crosses and pictures, and quarrel among yourselves.”
“We worship the same God as you do,” said the Englishman.
“Then why do we fight?”
“That’s what we want to know.”
“Why do you call yourselves Christians? And take part against us? All who worship the One God are brothers.”
“They ought to be,” said the Englishman, and thought. He was struck by what seemed to him an amazingly novel idea.
“If it weren’t for religions all men would serve God together,” he said. “And then there would be no wars – only now and then perhaps just a little honest fighting…”
“And see here,” said the Angel. “Here close behind this frightful battle, where the German phalanx of guns pounds its way through the Russian hosts. Here is a young German talking to two wounded Russian prisoners, who have stopped to rest by the roadside. He is a German of East Prussia; he knows and thinks a little Russian. And they too are saying, all three of them, that the war is not God’s will, but the confusion of mankind.
“Here,” he said, and the shadow of his hand hovered over the burning-ghats of Benares, where a Brahmin of the new persuasion watched the straight spires of funereal smoke ascend into the glow of the late afternoon, while he talked to an English painter, his friend, of the blind intolerance of race and caste and custom in India.
“Or here.”
The Angel pointed to a group of people who had gathered upon a little beach at the head of a Norwegian fiord. There were three lads, an old man and two women, and they stood about the body of a drowned German sailor which had been washed up that day. For a time they had talked in whispers, but now suddenly the old man spoke aloud.
“This is the fourth that has come ashore,” he said. “Poor drowned souls! Because men will not serve God.”
“But folks go to church and pray enough,” said one of the women.
“They do not serve God,” said the old man. “They just pray to him as one nods to a beggar. They do not serve God who is their King. They set up their false kings and emperors, and so all Europe is covered with dead, and the seas wash up these dead to us. Why does the world suffer these things? Why did we Norwegians, who are a free-spirited people, permit the Germans and the Swedes and the English to set up a king over us? Because we lack faith. Kings mean secret counsels, and secret counsels bring war. Sooner or later war will come to us also if we give the soul of our nation in trust to a king… But things will not always be thus with men. God will not suffer them for ever. A day comes, and it is no distant day, when God himself will rule the earth, and when men will do, not what the king wishes nor what is expedient nor what is customary, but what is manifestly right.”…
“But men are saying that now in a thousand places,” said the Angel. “Here is something that goes a little beyond that.”
His pointing hand went southward until they saw the Africanders riding down to Windhuk. Two men, Boer farmers both, rode side by side and talked of the German officer they brought prisoner with them. He had put sheep-dip in the wells of drinking-water; his life was fairly forfeit, and he was not to be killed. “We want no more hate in South Africa,” they agreed. “Dutch and English and German must live here now side by side. Men cannot always be killing.”
“And see his thoughts,” said the Angel.
The German’s mind was one amazement. He had been sure of being shot, he had meant to make a good end, fierce and scornful, a relentless fighter to the last; and these men who might have shot him like a man were going to spare him like a dog. His mind was a tumbled muddle of old and new ideas. He had been brought up in an atmosphere of the foulest and fiercest militarism; he had been trained to relentlessness, ruthlessness and so forth; war was war and the bitterer the better, frightfulness was your way to victory over every enemy. But these people had found a better way. Here were Dutch and English side by side; sixteen years ago they had been at war together and now they wore the same uniform and rode together, and laughed at him for a queer fellow because he was for spitting at them and defying them, and folding his arms and looking level at the executioners’ rifles. There were to be no executioners’ rifles… If it was so with Dutch and English, why shouldn’t it be so presently with French and Germans? Why someday shouldn’t French, German, Dutch and English, Russian and Pole, ride together under this new star of mankind, the Southern Cross, to catch whatever last mischief-maker was left to poison the wells of goodwill?
His mind resisted and struggled against these ideas. “Austere,” he whispered. “The ennobling tests of war.” A trooner rode up alongside, and offered him a drink of water
“Just a mouthful,” he said apologetically. “We’ve had to go rather short.”…
“There’s another brain busy here with the same idea,” the Angel interrupted. And the bishop found himself looking into the bedroom of a young German attache in Washington, sleepless in the small hours.
“Ach!” cried the young man, and sat up in bed and ran his hands through his fair hair.
He had been working late upon this detestable business of the Lusitania; the news of her sinking had come to hand two days before, and all America was aflame with it. It might mean war. His task had been to pour out explanations and justifications to the press; to show that it was an act of necessity, to pretend a conviction that the great ship was loaded with munitions, to fight down the hostility and anger that blazed across a continent. He had worked to his limit. He had taken cup after cup of coffee, and had come to bed worked out not two hours ago. Now here he was awake after a nightmare of drowning women and children, trying to comfort his soul by recalling his own arguments. Never once since the war began had he doubted the rightness of the German cause. It seemed only a proof of his nervous exhaustion that he could doubt it now. Germany was the best organized, most cultivated, scientific and liberal nation the earth had ever seen, it was for the good of mankind that she should be the dominant power in the world; his patriotism had had the passion of a mission. The English were indolent, the French decadent, the Russians barbaric, the Americans basely democratic; the rest of the world was the “White man’s Burthen”; the clear destiny of mankind was subservience to the good Prussian eagle. Nevertheless – those wet draggled bodies that swirled down in the eddies of the sinking Titan – Ach! He wished it could have been otherwise. He nursed his knees and prayed that there need not be much more of these things before the spirit of the enemy was broken and the great Peace of Germany came upon the world.
And suddenly he stopped short in his prayer.
Suddenly out of the nothingness and darkness about him came the conviction that God did not listen to his prayers…
Was there any other way?
It was the most awful doubt he had ever had, for it smote at the training of all his life. “Could it be possible that after all our old German God is not the proper style and title of the true God? Is our old German God perhaps only the last of a long succession of bloodstained tribal effigies – and not God at all?”
For a long time it seemed that the bishop watched the thoughts that gathered in the young attache’s mind. Until suddenly he broke into a quotation, into that last cry of the dying Goethe, for “Light. More Light!”…
“Leave him at that,” said the Angel. “I want you to hear these two young women.”
The hand came back to England and pointed to where Southend at the mouth of the Thames was all agog with the excitement of an overnight Zeppelin raid. People had got up hours before their usual time in order to look at the wrecked houses before they went up to their work in town. Everybody seemed abroad. Two nurses, not very well trained as nurses go nor very well-educated women, were snatching a little sea air upon the front after an eventful night. They were too excited still to sleep. They were talking of the horror of the moment when they saw the nasty thing “up there,” and felt helpless as it dropped its bombs. They had both hated it.
“There didn’t ought to be such things,” said one.
“They don’t seem needed,” said her companion.
“Men won’t always go on like this – making wars and all such wickedness.”
“It’s ‘ow to stop them?”
“Science is going to stop them.”
“Science?”
“Yes, science. My young brother – oh, he’s a clever one – he says such things! He says that it’s science that they won’t always go on like this. There’s more sense coming into the world and more – my young brother says so. Says it stands to reason; it’s Evolution. It’s science that men are all brothers; you can prove it. It’s science that there oughtn’t to be war. Science is ending war now by making it horrible like this, and making it so that no one is safe. Showing it up. Only when nobody is safe will everybody want to set up peace, he says. He says it’s proved there could easily be peace all over the world now if it wasn’t for flags and kings and capitalists and priests. They still manage to keep safe and out of it. He says the world ought to be just one state. The World State, he says it ought to be.”
(“Under God,” said the bishop, “under God.”)
“He says science ought to be King of the whole world.”
“Call it Science if you will,” said the bishop. “God is wisdom.”
“Out of the mouths of babes and elementary science students,” said the Angel. “The very children in the board schools are turning against this narrowness and nonsense and mischief of nations and creeds and kings. You see it at a thousand points, at ten thousand points, look, the world is all flashing and flickering; it is like a spinthariscope; it is aquiver with the light that is coming to mankind. It is on the verge of blazing even now.”
“Into a light.”
“Into the one Kingdom of God. See here! See here! And here! This brave little French priest in a helmet of steel who is daring to think for the first time in his life; this gentle-mannered emir from Morocco looking at the grave-diggers on the battlefield; this mother who has lost her son…
“You see they all turn in one direction, although none of them seem to dream yet that they are all turning in the same direction. They turn, every one, to the rule of righteousness, which is the rule of God. They turn to that communism of effort in the world which alone permits men to serve God in state and city and their economic lives… They are all coming to the verge of the same salvation, the salvation of one human brotherhood under the rule of one Righteousness, one Divine will… Is that the salvation your church offers?”
(8)
“And now that we have seen how religion grows and spreads in men’s hearts, now that the fields are white with harvest, I want you to look also and see what the teachers of religion are doing,” said the Angel.
He smiled. His presence became more definite, and the earthly globe about them and the sun and the stars grew less distinct and less immediately there. The silence invited the bishop to speak.
“In the light of this vision, I see my church plainly for the little thing it is,” he said.
He wanted to be perfectly clear with the Angel and himself.
“This church of which I am a bishop is just a part of our poor human struggle, small and pitiful as one thinks of it here in the light of the advent of God’s Kingdom, but very great, very great indeed, ancient and high and venerable, in comparison with me. But mostly it is human. It is most human. For my story is the church’s story, and the church’s story is mine. Here I could almost believe myself the church itself. The world saw a light, the nations that were sitting in darkness saw a great light. Even as I saw God. And then the church began to forget and lose itself among secondary things. As I have done… It tried to express the truth and lost itself in a maze of theology. It tried to bring order into the world and sold its faith to Constantine. These men who had professed the Invisible King of the World, shirked his service. It is a most terrible disaster that Christianity has sold itself to emperors and kings. They forged a saying of the Master’s that we should render unto Ceasar the things that are Ceasar’s and unto God the things that are God’s…
“Who is this Ceasar to set himself up to share mankind with God? Nothing that is Ceasar’s can be any the less God’s. But Constantine Caesar sat in the midst of the council, his guards were all about it, and the poor fanatics and trimmers and schemers disputed nervously with their eyes on him, disputed about homoousian and homoiousian, and grimaced and pretended to be very very fierce and exact to hide how much they were frightened and how little they knew, and because they did not dare to lay violent hands upon that usurper of the empire of the world…
“And from that day forth the Christian churches have been damned and lost. Kept churches. Lackey churches. Roman, Russian, Anglican; it matters not. My church indeed was twice sold, for it doubled the sin of Nicaea and gave itself over to Henry and Elizabeth while it shammed a dispute about the sacraments. No one cared really about transubstantiation any more than the earlier betrayers cared about consubstantiality; that dispute did but serve to mask the betrayal.”
He turned to the listening Angel. “What can you show me of my church that I do not know? Why! we Anglican bishops get our sees as footmen get a job. For months Victoria, that old German Frau, delayed me – because of some tittle-tattle… The things we are! Snape, who afterwards became Bishop of Burnham, used to waylay the Prince Consort when he was riding in Hyde Park and give him, he boasts, ‘a good loud cheer,’ and then he would run very fast across the park so as to catch him as he came round, and do it again… It is to that sort of thing we bearers of the light have sunken…
“I have always despised that poor toady,” the bishop went on. “And yet here am I, and God has called me and shown me the light of his countenance, and for a month I have faltered. That is the mystery of the human heart, that it can and does sin against the light. What right have I, who have seen the light – and failed, what right have I – to despise any other human being? I seem to have been held back by a sort of paralysis.
“Men are so small, so small still, that they cannot keep hold of the vision of God. That is why I want to see God again… But if it were not for this strange drug that seems for a little while to lift my mind above the confusion and personal entanglements of every day, I doubt if even now I could be here. I am here, passionate to hold this moment and keep the light. As this inspiration passes, I shall go back, I know, to my home and my place and my limitations. The littleness of men! The forgetfulness of men! I want to know what my chief duty is, to have it plain, in terms so plain that I can never forget.
“See in this world,” he said, turning to the globe, “while Chinese merchants and Turkish troopers, school-board boys and Norwegian fishermen, half-trained nurses and Boer farmers are full of the spirit of God, see how the priests of the churches of Nicaea spend their time.”
And now it was the bishop whose dark hands ran over the great silver globe, and it was the Angel who stood over him and listened, as a teacher might stand over a child who is learning a lesson. The bishop’s hand rested for a second on a cardinal who was planning a political intrigue to produce a reaction in France, then for a moment on a Pomeranian pastor who was going out to his well-tilled fields with his Sunday sermon, full of fierce hatred of England, still echoing in his head. Then he paused at a Mollah preaching the Jehad, in doubt whether he too wasn’t a German pastor, and then at an Anglican clergyman still lying abed and thinking out a great mission of Repentance and Hope that should restore the authority of the established church – by incoherent missioning – without any definite sin indicated for repentance nor any clear hope for anything in particular arising out of such activities. The bishop’s hand went seeking to and fro, but nowhere could he find any religious teacher, any religious body rousing itself to meet the new dawn of faith in the world. Some few men indeed seemed thoughtful, but within the limitation of their vows. Everywhere it was church and creed and nation and king and property and partisanship, and nowhere was it the True God that the priests and teachers were upholding. It was always the common unhampered man through whom the light of God was breaking; it was always the creed and the organization of the religious professionals that stood in the way to God…
“God is putting the priests aside,” he cried, “and reaching out to common men. The churches do not serve God. They stand between man and God. They are like great barricades on the way to God.”
The bishop’s hand brushed over Archbishop Pontifex, who was just coming down to breakfast in his palace. This pompous old man was dressed in a purple garment that set off his tall figure very finely, and he was holding out his episcopal ring for his guests to kiss, that being the customary morning greeting of Archbishop Pontifex. The thought of that ring-kissing had made much hard work at lower levels “worth while” to Archbishop Pontifex. And seventy miles away from him old Likeman breakfasted in bed on Benger’s food, and searched his Greek Testament for tags to put to his letters. And here was the familiar palace at Princhester, and in an armchair in his bed-room sat Bishop Scrope insensible and motionless, in a trance in which he was dreaming of the coming of God.
“I see my futility. I see my vanity. But what am I to do?” he said, turning to the darkness that now wrapped about the Angel again, fold upon fold. “The implications of yesterday bind me for the morrow. This is my world. This is what I am and what I am in. How can I save myself? How can I turn from these habits and customs and obligations to the service of the one true God? When I see myself, then I understand how it is with the others. All we priests and teachers are men caught in nets. I would serve God. Easily said! But how am I to serve God? How am I to help and forward His coming, to make myself part of His coming?”
He perceived that he was returning into himself, and that the vision of the sphere and of the starry spaces was fading into non-existence.
He struggled against this return. He felt that his demand was still unanswered. His wife’s face had suddenly come very close to him, and he realized she intervened between him and that solution.
What was she doing here?
(9)
The great Angel seemed still to be near at hand, limitless space was all about him, and yet the bishop perceived that he was now sitting in the arm-chair in his bedroom in the palace of Princhester. He was both there and not there. It seemed now as if he had two distinct yet kindred selves, and that the former watched the latter. The latter was now awakening to the things about him; the former marked his gestures and listened with an entire detachment to the words he was saying. These words he was saying to Lady Ella: “God is coming to rule the world, I tell you. We must leave the church.”
Close to him sat Lady Ella, watching him with an expression in which dismay and resolution mingled. Upon the other side of him, upon a little occasional table, was a tray with breakfast things. He was no longer the watcher now, but the watched.
Lady Ella bent towards him as he spoke. She seemed to struggle with and dismiss his astonishing statement.
“Edward,” she said, “you have been taking a drug.” He looked round at his night table to see the little phial. It had gone. Then he saw that Lady Ella held it very firmly in her hand.
“Dunk came to me in great distress. He said you were insensible and breathing heavily. I came. I realized. I told him to say nothing to any one, but to fetch me a tray with your breakfast. I have kept all the other servants away and I have waited here by you… Dunk I think is safe… You have been muttering and moving your head from side to side…”
The bishop’s mind was confused. He felt as though God must be standing just outside the room. “I have failed in my duty,” he said. “But I am very near to God.” He laid his hand on her arm. “You know, Ella, He is very close to us…”
She looked perplexed.
He sat up in his chair.
“For some months now,” he said, “there have been new forces at work in my mind. I have been invaded by strange doubts and still stranger realizations. This old church of ours is an empty mask. God is not specially concerned in it.”
“Edward!” she cried, “what are you saying?”
“I have been hesitating to tell you. But I see now I must tell you plainly. Our church is a cast hull. It is like the empty skin of a snake. God has gone out of it.”
She rose to her feet. She was so horrified that she staggered backward, pushing her chair behind her. “But you are mad,” she said.
He was astonished at her distress. He stood up also.
“My dear,” he said, “I can assure you I am not mad. I should have prepared you, I know…”
She looked at him wild-eyed. Then she glanced at the phial, gripped in her hand.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, and going swiftly to the window emptied out the contents of the little bottle. He realized what she was doing too late to prevent her.
“Don’t waste that!” he cried, and stepping forward caught hold of her wrist. The phial fell from her white fingers, and crashed upon the rough paved garden path below.
“My dear,” he cried, “my dear. You do not understand.”
They stood face to face. “It was a tonic,” he said. “I have been ill. I need it.”
“It is a drug,” she answered. “You have been uttering blasphemies.”
He dropped her arm and walked half-way across the room. Then he turned and faced her.
“They are not blasphemies,” he said. “But I ought not to have surprised you and shocked you as I have done. I want to tell you of changes that have happened to my mind.”
“Now!” she exclaimed, and then: “I will not hear them now. Until you are better. Until these fumes – ”
Her manner changed. “Oh, Edward!” she cried, “why have you done this? Why have you taken things secretly? I know you have been sleepless, but I have been so ready to help you. I have been willing – you know I have been willing – for any help. My life is all to be of use to you…”
“Is there any reason,” she pleaded, “why you should have hidden things from me?”
He stood remorseful and distressed. “I should have talked to you,” he said lamely.
“Edward,” she said, laying her hands on his shoulders, “will you do one thing for me? Will you try to eat a little breakfast? And stay here? I will go down to Mr. Whippham and arrange whatever is urgent with him. Perhaps if you rest – There is nothing really imperative until the confirmation in the afternoon… I do not understand all this. For some time – I have felt it was going on. But of that we can talk. The thing now is that people should not know, that nothing should be seen… Suppose for instance that horrible White Blackbird were to hear of it… I implore you. If you rest here – And if I were to send for that young doctor who attended Miriam.”
“I don’t want a doctor,” said the bishop.
“But you ought to have a doctor.”
“I won’t have a doctor,” said the bishop.
It was with a perplexed but powerless dissent that the externalized perceptions of the bishop witnessed his agreement with the rest of Lady Ella’s proposals so soon as this point about the doctor was conceded.
(10)
For the rest of that day until his breakdown in the cathedral the sense of being in two places at the same time haunted the bishop’s mind. He stood beside the Angel in the great space amidst the stars, and at the same time he was back in his ordinary life, he was in his palace at Princhester, first resting in his bedroom and talking to his wife and presently taking up the routines of his duties again in his study downstairs.
His chief task was to finish his two addresses for the confirmation services of the day. He read over his notes, and threw them aside and remained for a time thinking deeply. The Greek tags at the end of Likeman’s letter came into his thoughts; they assumed a quality of peculiar relevance to this present occasion. He repeated the words: “Epitelesei. Epiphausei.”
He took his little Testament to verify them. After some slight trouble he located the two texts. The first, from Philippians, ran in the old version, “He that hath begun a good work in you will perform it”; the second was expressed thus: “Christ shall give thee light.” He was dissatisfied with these renderings and resorted to the revised version, which gave “perfect” instead of “perform,” and “shall shine upon you” for “give thee light.” He reflected profoundly for a time.
Then suddenly his addresses began to take shape in his mind, and these little points lost any significance. He began to write rapidly, and as he wrote he felt the Angel stood by his right hand and read and approved what he was writing. There were moments when his mind seemed to be working entirely beyond his control. He had a transitory questioning whether this curious intellectual automatism was not perhaps what people meant by “inspiration.”
(11)
The bishop had always been sensitive to the secret fount of pathos that is hidden in the spectacle of youth. Long years ago when he and Lady Ella had been in Florence he had been moved to tears by the beauty of the fresh-faced eager Tobit who runs beside the great angel in the picture of Botticelli. And suddenly and almost as uncontrollably, that feeling returned at the sight of the young congregation below him, of all these scores of neophytes who were gathered to make a public acknowledgment of God. The war has invested all youth now with the shadow of tragedy; before it came many of us were a little envious of youth and a little too assured of its certainty of happiness. All that has changed. Fear and a certain tender solicitude mingle in our regard for every child; not a lad we pass in the street but may presently be called to face such pain and stress and danger as no ancient hero ever knew. The patronage, the insolent condescension of age, has vanished out of the world. It is dreadful to look upon the young.
He stood surveying the faces of the young people as the rector read the Preface to the confirmation service. How simple they were, how innocent! Some were a little flushed by the excitement of the occasion; some a little pallid. But they were all such tender faces, so soft in outline, so fresh and delicate in texture and colour. They had soft credulous mouths. Some glanced sideways at one another; some listened with a forced intentness. The expression of one good-looking boy, sitting in a corner scat, struck the bishop as being curiously defiant. He stood very erect, he blinked his eyes as though they smarted, his lips were compressed bitterly. And then it seemed to the bishop that the Angel stood beside him and gave him understanding.
“He is here,” the bishop knew, “because he could not avoid coming. He tried to excuse himself. His mother wept. What could he do? But the church’s teaching nowadays fails even to grip the minds of boys.”
The rector came to the end of his Preface: “They will evermore endeavour themselves faithfully to observe such things as they by their own confession have assented unto.”
“Like a smart solicitor pinning them down,” said the bishop to himself, and then roused himself, unrolled the little paper in his hand, leant forward, and straightway began his first address.
Nowadays it is possible to say very unorthodox things indeed in an Anglican pulpit unchallenged. There remains no alert doctrinal criticism in the church congregations. It was possible, therefore, for the bishop to say all that follows without either hindrance or disturbance. The only opposition, indeed, came from within, from a sense of dreamlike incongruity between the place and the occasion and the things that he found himself delivering.
