Thomas Wingfold, Curate V3
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George MacDonald >> Thomas Wingfold, Curate V3
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CHAPTER XXVIII.
WHAT HELEN HEARD MORE
"A word you dropped the other day," said the curate, "set me
thinking of the note-worthy fact that belief in God and belief in
immortality cease together. But I do not see the logic of it. If we
are here without God, why may we not go on there without God? I
marvel that I have heard of no one taking up and advocating the
view. What a grand discovery it would be for some people--that not
only was there no God to interfere with them, and insist on their
becoming something worth being, but that they were immortal
notwithstanding! that death was only the passage of another birth
into a condition of enlarged capacity for such bliss as they enjoyed
here, but more exalted in degree, perhaps in kind, and altogether
preferable."
"I know one to whom the thought would not have been a new one," said
Polwarth. "Have you not come upon a passage in my brother's
manuscript involving the very idea?"
"Not yet. I read very slowly and pick up all the crumbs. I wish we
had had the book here. I should have so much liked to hear you read
from it again."
The gate-keeper rose and went to his cabinet.
"The wish is easily gratified," he said. "I made a copy of
it,--partly for security, partly that I might thoroughly enter into
my brother's thoughts."
"I wonder almost you lend the original then," said Wingfold.
"I certainly could not lend the copy to any man I could not trust
with the original," answered Polwarth. "But I never lent either
before."--He was turning over the leaves as he spoke.--"The
passage," he went on, "besides for its own worth, is precious to me
as showing how, through all his madness, his thoughts haunted the
gates of wisdom.--Ah! here it is!
"'About this time I had another strange vision, whether in the body
or out of the body, I cannot tell. I thought, as oftener than once
before, that at length I was dying. And it seemed to me that I did
die, and awake to the consciousness of a blessed freedom from the
coarser and more ponderous outer dress I had hitherto worn, being
now clad only in what had been up to this time an inner garment, and
was a far more closely fitting one. The first delight of which I was
aware was coolness--a coolness that hurt me not--the coolness as of
a dewy summer eve, in which a soft friendly wind is blowing; and the
coolness was that of perfect well-being, of the health that cometh
after fever, when a sound sleep hath divided it away and built a
rampart between; the coolness of undoubted truth, and of love that
has surmounted passion and is tenfold love.'
"He goes on to give further and fuller account of his
sensations,--ventures even on the anticipated futility of an attempt
to convey a notion of one of his new senses. I leave all that for
your own reading, Mr. Wingfold.
"'But where was I? That I could not tell. I am here was all I could
say; but then what more could I ever have said?--Gradually my sight
came to me, or the light of the country arose, I could not tell
which, and behold, I was in the midst of a paradise, gorgeous yet
gracious, to describe which I find no words in the halting tongues
of earth, and I know something of them all, most of them well. If I
say a purple sea was breaking in light on an emerald shore, the
moment the words are written, I see them coarse and crude as a boy's
first attempt at landscape; yet are there no better wherewith to
tell what first filled my eyes with heavenly delight.
"'The inhabitants were many, but nowhere were they crowded. There
was room in abundance, and wild places seemed to be held sacred for
solitude.'
"I am only picking up a sentence here and there, as I hasten to the
particular point," said Polwarth, looking down the page.
"'But the flowers! and the birds! and above all the beauty of the
people! And they dwelt in harmony. Yet on their foreheads lay as it
seemed a faint mist, or as it were the first of a cloud of coming
disquiet.
"'And I prayed him, Tell me, sir, whither shall I go to find God and
say unto him, Lo, here I am! And he answered and said to me, Sir, I
but dimly know what thou meanest. Say further. And I stood for an
hour, even as one astonied. Then said I, All my long life on the
world whence I came, I did look to find God when death should take
me. But lo, now--And with that my heart smote me, for in my former
life I had oftentimes fallen into unbelief and denied God: was this
now my punishment--that I should never find him? And my heart grew
cold in my body, and the blood curdled therein. Then the man
answered and said, It is true that in generations past, for so I
read in our ancient books, men did believe in one above them and in
them, who had wrought them to that they were, and was working them
to better still; but whether it be that we have now gained that
better, and there is nothing higher unto which we may look,
therefore no need of the high one, I know not, but truly we have
long ceased so to believe, and have learned that, as things are, so
they have been, and so they shall be. Then fell as it were a cold
stone into the core of my heart, and I questioned him no farther,
for I bore death in my heart, even as a woman carrieth her unborn
child. No God! I cried, and sped away into a solitude and shrieked
aloud, No God! Nay, but ere I believe it, I will search through all
creation, and cry aloud as I go. I will search until I find him, and
if I find him not,--. With that my soul would have fainted in me,
had I not spread forth my wings and rushed aloft to find him.
"'For the more lovely anything I saw, the more gracious in colour or
form, or the more marvellous in the law of its working, ever a fresh
pang shot to my heart: if that which I had heard should prove true,
then was there no Love such as seemed to me to dwell therein, the
soul of its beauty, and all the excellence thereof was but a
delusion of my own heart, greedy after a phantom perfection. No God!
no Love! no loveliness, save a ghastly semblance thereof! and the
more ghastly that it was so like loveliness, and yet was not to be
loved upon peril of prostitution of spirit. Then in truth was heaven
a fable, and hell an all-embracing fact! for my very being knew in
itself that if it would dwell in peace, the very atmosphere in which
it lived and moved and breathed must be love, living love, a one
divine presence, truth to itself, and love to me, and to all them
that needed love, down to the poorest that can but need it, and
knoweth it not when it cometh. I knew that if love was not all in
all, in fact as well as in imagination, my life was but a dreary
hollow made in the shape of a life, and therefore for ever hungry
and never to be satisfied. And again I spread wings--no longer as it
seemed of hope, but wings of despair, yet mighty, and flew. And I
learned thereafter that despair is but the hidden side of hope.'
"Here follow pages of his wanderings in quest of God. He tells how
and where he inquired and sought, searching into the near and minute
as earnestly as into the far and vast, watching at the very pores of
being, and sitting in the gates of the mighty halls of assembly--but
all in vain. No God was to be found.
"'And it seemed to me,' he says at last, 'that, as I had been the
wanderer of earth, so was I now doomed to be the wanderer of heaven.
On earth I wandered to find death, and men called me the everlasting
Jew; in heaven I wandered to find God, and what name would they give
me now?
"'At last my heart sank within me wholly, and I folded my wings, and
through years I also sank and sank, and alighted at length upon the
place appointed for my habitation--that namely wherein I found
myself first after death. And alighting there, I fell down weary and
slept.
"'And when I awoke I turned upon my side in the despair of a life
that was neither in my own power nor in that of one who was the
Father of me, which life therefore was an evil thing and a tyrant
unto me. And lo! there by my side I beheld a lily of the field such
as grew on the wayside in the old times betwixt Jerusalem and
Bethany. Never since my death had I seen such, and my heart awoke
within me, and I wept bitter tears that nothing should be true,
nothing be that which it had seemed in the times of old. And as I
wept I heard a sound as of the falling of many tears, and I looked,
and lo a shower as from a watering-pot falling upon the lily! And I
looked yet again, and I saw the watering-pot, and the hand that held
it; and he whose hand held the pot stood by me and looked at me as
he watered the lily. He was a man like the men of the world where
such lilies grow, and was poorly dressed, and seemed like a
gardener. And I looked up in his face, and lo--the eyes of the Lord
Jesus! and my heart swelled until it filled my whole body and my
head, and I gave a great cry, and for joy that turned into agony I
could not rise, neither could I speak, but I crept on my hands and
my knees to his feet, and there I fell down upon my face, and with
my hands I lifted one of his feet and did place it upon my head, and
then I found voice to cry, O master! and therewith the life departed
from me. And when I came to myself the master sat under the tree,
and I lay by his side, and he had lifted my head upon his knees. And
behold, the world was jubilant around me, for Love was Love and Lord
of all. The sea roared, and the fulness thereof was love; and the
purple and the gold and the blue and the green came straight from
the hidden red heart of the Lord Jesus. And I closed my eyes for
very bliss; nor had I yet bethought me of the time when first those
eyes looked upon me, for I seemed to have known them since first I
began to be. But now when for very bliss I closed my eyes, my sin
came back to me, and I remembered. And I rose up, and kneeled down
before him, and said, O Lord, I am Ahasuerus the Jew, the man who
would not let thee rest thy cross upon the stone before my workshop,
but drave thee from it.--Say no more of that, answered my Lord, for
truly I have myself rested in thy heart, cross and all, until the
thing thou diddest in thy ignorance is better than forgotten, for it
is remembered in love. Only see thou also make right excuse for my
brethren who, like thee then, know not now what they do. Come and I
will bring thee to the woman who died for thee in the burning fire.
And I said, O Lord, leave me not, for although I would now in my
turn right gladly die for her, yet would I not look upon that woman
again if the love of her would make me love thee one hair the less--
thou knowest. And the Lord smiled upon me and said, Fear not,
Ahasuerus; my love infolds and is the nest of all love. I fear not;
fear thou not either. And I arose and followed him. And every tree
and flower, yea every stone and cloud, with the whole earth and sea
and air, were full of God, even the living God--so that now I could
have died of pure content. And I followed my Lord.'"
The gate-keeper was silent, and so were they all. At length Rachel
rose softly, wiping the tears from her eyes, and left the room. But
she found no one in the closet. Helen was already hastening across
the park, weeping as she went.
CHAPTER XXIX.
THE CURATE'S RESOLVE.
The next day was Sunday.
Twelve months had not yet elapsed since the small events with which
my narrative opened. The change which had passed, not merely upon
the opinions, but in the heart and mind and very being of the
curate, had not then begun to appear even to himself, although its
roots were not only deep in him but deep beyond him, even in the
source of him; and now he was in a state of mind, a state of being,
rather, of whose nature at that time he had not, and could not have
had, the faintest fore-feeling, the most shadowy conception. It had
been a season of great trouble, but the gain had been infinitely
greater; for now were the bonds of the finite broken, he had burst
the shell of the mortal, and was of those over whom the second death
hath no power. The agony of the second birth was past, and he was a
child again--only a child, he knew, but a child of the kingdom; and
the world, and all that God cared about in it, was his, as no
miser's gold could ever belong to its hoarder, while the created
universe, yea and the uncreated also whence it sprang, lay open to
him in the boundless free-giving of the original Thought. "All
things are yours, and ye are Christ's, and Christ is God's:" he
understood the words even as he who said them understood them, and
as the wise of this world never will understand them until first
they become fools that they may be wise.
At the same time a great sorrow threatened him from the no less
mysterious region of his relations to humanity; but if that region
and its most inexplicable cares were beyond the rule of the Life
that dwelt in him, then was that Life no true God, and the whole
thing was false; for he loved Helen with a love that was no
invention or creation of his own, and if not his, then whose?
Certainly not of one who, when it threatened to overwhelm him, was
unable to uphold him under it! This thing also belonged to the God
of his being. A poor God must he be for men or women who did not
care about the awful things involved in the relation between them!
Therefore even in his worst anxieties about Helen,--I do not mean in
his worst seasons of despair at the thought of never gaining her
love--he had never yet indeed consciously regarded the winning of
her as a possibility--but at those times when he most plainly saw
her the submissive disciple of George Bascombe, and the two seemed
to his fancy to be straying away together "into a wide field, full
of dark mountains;" when he saw her, so capable of the noblest,
submitting her mind to the entrance of the poorest, meanest,
shabbiest theories of life, and taking for her guide one who could
lead her to no conscious well-being, or make provision for
sustainment when the time of suffering and anxiety should come, or
the time of health and strength be over when yet she must live on;
when he saw her adopting a system of things whose influence would
shrivel up instead of developing her faculties, crush her
imagination with such a mountain-weight as was never piled above
Titan, and dwarf the whole divine woman within her to the size and
condition of an Aztec--even then was he able to reason with himself:
"She belongs to God, not to me; and God loves her better than ever I
could love her. If she should set out with her blind guide, it will
be but a first day's journey she will go--through marshy places and
dry sands, across the far breadth of which, lo! the blue mountains
that shelter the high vales of sweetness and peace." And with this
he not only tried to comfort himself, but succeeded--I do not say to
contentment, but to quiet. Contentment, which, whatever its
immediate shape, to be contentment at all, must be the will of God,
lay beyond. Alas that men cannot believe there is such a thing as
"that good and acceptable and perfect will of God!" To those that do
believe it, it is the rejoicing of a conscious deliverance.
And now this Sunday, Wingfold entered the pulpit prepared at last to
utter his resolve. Happily nothing had been done to introduce the
confusing element of another will. The bishop had heard nothing of
the matter, and if anything had reached the rector, he had not
spoken. Not one of the congregation, not even Mrs. Ramshorn, had
hinted to him that he ought to resign. It had been left altogether
with himself. And now he would tell them the decision to which the
thought he had taken had conducted him. I will give a portion of his
sermon--enough to show us how he showed the congregation the state
of his mind in reference to the grand question, and the position he
took in relation to his hearers.
"It is time, my hearers," he said, "because it is now possible, to
bring to a close that uncertainty with regard to the continuance of
our relation to each other, which I was, in the spring-time of the
year, compelled by mental circumstance to occasion. I then forced
myself, for very dread of the honesty of an all-knowing God, to
break through every convention of the church and the pulpit, and
speak to you of my most private affairs. I told you that I was sure
of not one of those things concerning which it is taken for granted
that a clergyman must be satisfied; but that I would not at once
yield my office, lest in that act I should seem to declare unbelief
of many a thing which even then I desired to find true. In leaving
me undisturbed either by complaint, expostulation, or proffered
instruction, you, my hearers, have granted me the leisure of which I
stood in need. Meantime I have endeavoured to show you the best I
saw, while yet I dared not say I was sure of anything. I have thus
kept you, those at least who cared to follow my path, acquainted
with my mental history. And now I come to tell you the practical
result at which I have arrived.
"But when I say that I will not forsake my curacy, still less my
right and duty to teach whatever I seem to know, I must not therein
convey the impression that I have attained that conviction and
assurance the discovery of the absence of which was the cause of the
whole uncertain proceeding. All I now say is, that in the story of
Jesus I have beheld such grandeur--to me apparently altogether
beyond the reach of human invention, such a radiation of divine
loveliness and truth, such hope for man, soaring miles above every
possible pitfall of Fate; and have at the same time, from the
endeavour to obey the word recorded as his, experienced such a
conscious enlargement of mental faculty, such a deepening of moral
strength, such an enhancement of ideal, such an increase of faith,
hope, and charity towards all men, that I now declare with the
consent of my whole man--I cast in my lot with the servants of the
Crucified; I am content even to share their delusion, if delusion it
be, for it is the truth of the God of men to me; I will stand or
fall with the story of my Lord; I will take my chance--I speak not
in irreverence but in honesty--my chance of failure or success in
regard to whatever may follow in this life or the life to come, if
there be a life to come--on the words and will of the Lord Jesus
Christ, whom if, impressed as I am with the truth of his nature, the
absolute devotion of his life, and the essential might of his being,
I yet obey not, I shall not only deserve to perish, but in that very
refusal draw ruin upon my head. Before God I say it--I would rather
be crucified with that man, so it might be as a disciple and not as
a thief that creeps, intrudes, or climbs into the fold, than I would
reign with him over such a kingdom of grandeur as would have
satisfied the imagination and love-ambition of his mother. On such
grounds as these I hope I am justified in declaring myself a
disciple of the Son of Man, and in devoting my life and the renewed
energy and enlarged, yea infinite hope which he has given me, to his
brothers and sisters of my race, that if possible I may gain some to
be partakers of the blessedness of my hope. Henceforth I am, not IN
HOLY ORDERS, I reject the phrase, but UNDER holy orders, even the
orders of Christ Jesus, which is the law of liberty, the law whose
obedience alone can set a man free from in-burrowing slavery.
"And if any man yet say that, because of my lack of absolute
assurance, I have no right to the sacred post,--Let him, I answer,
who has been assailed by such doubts as mine, and from the citadel
of his faith sees no more one lingering shadow of a foe--let him
cast at me the first stone! Vain challenge! for such a one will
never cast a stone at man or woman. But let not him whose belief is
but the absence of doubt, who has never loved enough that which he
thinks he believes to have felt a single fear lest it should not be
true--let not that man, I say, cast at me pebble from the brook, or
cloven rock from the mount of the law, for either will fall hurtless
at my feet. Friends, I have for the last time spoken of myself in
this place. Ye have borne with me in my trials, and I thank you.
Those who have not only borne but suffered, and do now rejoice with
me, I thank tenfold. I have done--
"Save for one word to the Christians of this congregation:
"The waves of infidelity are coming in with a strong wind and a
flowing tide. Who is to blame? God it cannot be, and for
unbelievers, they are as they were. It is the Christians who are to
blame. I do not mean those who are called Christians, but those who
call and count themselves Christians. I tell you, and I speak to
each one of whom it is true, that you hold and present such a
withered, starved, miserable, death's-head idea of Christianity;
that you are yourselves such poverty-stricken believers, if
believers you are at all; that the notion you present to the world
as your ideal, is so commonplace, so false to the grand, gracious,
mighty-hearted Jesus--that YOU are the cause why the truth hangs its
head in patience, and rides not forth on the white horse, conquering
and to conquer. You dull its lustre in the eyes of men; you deform
its fair proportions; you represent not that which it is, but that
which it is not, yet call yourselves by its name; you are not the
salt of the earth, but a salt that has lost its savour, for ye seek
all things else first, and to that seeking the kingdom of God and
his righteousness shall never be added. Until you repent and believe
afresh, believe in a nobler Christ, namely the Christ revealed by
himself, and not the muffled form of something vaguely human and
certainly not all divine, which the false interpretations of men
have substituted for him, you will be, as, I repeat, you are, the
main reason why faith is so scanty in the earth, and the enemy comes
in like a flood. For the sake of the progress of the truth, and that
into nobler minds than yours, it were better you joined the ranks of
the enemy, and declared what I fear with many of you is the fact,
that you believe not at all. But whether in some sense you believe
or not, the fact remains, that, while you are not of those
Christians who obey the word of the master, DOING the things he says
to them, you are of those Christians, if you WILL be called by the
name, to whom he will say, I never knew you: go forth into the outer
darkness. Then at least will the church be rid of you, and the
honest doubter will have room to breathe the divine air of the
presence of Jesus.
"But oh what unspeakable bliss of heart and soul and mind and sense
remains for him who like St. Paul is crucified with Christ, who
lives no more from his own self, but is inspired and informed and
possessed with the same faith towards the Father in which Jesus
lived and wrought the will of the Father! If the words attributed to
Jesus are indeed the words of him whom Jesus declared himself, then
truly is the fate of mankind a glorious one,--and that, first and
last, because men have a God supremely grand, all-perfect in
God-head; for that is, and that alone can be, the absolute bliss of
the created."
CHAPTER XXX.
HELEN AWAKE.
That Sunday-dinner was a very quiet meal. An old friend of Mrs.
Ramshorn, a lady-ecclesiastic like herself, dined with them; what
the two may have said to each other in secret conclave, I cannot
tell, but not a word of remark upon Mr. Wingfold or his sermon was
heard at table.
As she was leaving the room, Bascombe whispered Helen to put on
something and come to him in the garden. Helen glanced at the window
as if doubtful. It was cold, but the sun was shining; the weather
had nothing to do with it; she had but taken a moment to think. She
pressed her lips together--and consented. George saw she would
rather not go, but he set it down to a sisterly unwillingness to
enjoy herself when her brother could no longer behold the sun, and
such mere sentiment must not be encouraged.
When the cypresses and box-trees had come betwixt them and the
house, he offered his arm, but Helen preferred being free. She did
not refuse to go into the summer-house with him; but she took her
place on the opposite side of the little table. George however spied
no hint of approaching doom.
"I am sorry to have to alter my opinion of that curate," he said as
he seated himself. "There was so much in him that I took to promise
well. But old habit, the necessities of existence, and the fear of
society have been too much for him--as they will always be for most
men. He has succumbed at last, and I am sorry! I did think he was
going to turn out an honest man!"
"And you have come to the certain conclusion that he is not an
honest man, George?"
"Assuredly."
"Why?"
"Because he goes on to teach what he confesses he is not sure
about."
"He professes to be sure that it is better than anything he is sure
about.--You teach me there is no God: are you absolutely certain
there is not?"
"Yes; absolutely certain."
"On what grounds?"
"On grounds I have set forth to you twenty times, Helen, dear,"
answered George a little impatiently. "I am not inclined to talk
about them now.--I can no more believe in a god than in a dragon."
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