Beside Still Waters

Hugh, in his leisure, determined to try if he could set his mind at rest upon one point, a question that had always exercised a certain attraction over him. This was to make himself acquainted with some technical philosophy, or at any rate to try and see what the philosophers were doing. He had not, he was aware, a mind suited for the pursuit of metaphysics; he had little logical faculty and little power of deduction; he tended to view a question at bright and radiant points; he could not systematise or arrange it. He did not expect to be able to penetrate the mystery, or to advance step by step nearer to the dim and ultimate causes of things; but he thought he would like to look into the philosophers' workshop, as a man might visit a factory. He expected to see a great many processes going on the nature of which he did not hope to discern, and the object of which would be made still more obscure by the desperately intelligent explanations of some obliging workman, who would glibly use technical words to which he would himself be able to attach no sort of meaning.

But after a few excursions into modern philosophy, in which he seemed, as Tennyson said, to be wading as in a sea of glue, he went back to the earliest philosophers and read Aristotle and Plato. He soon conceived a great horror of Aristotle, of his subtle and ingenious analysis, which often seemed to him to be an attempt to define the undefinable, and never to touch the point of the matter at all; he thought that Aristotle was often occupied in the scientific treatment of essentially poetical ideas, and in the attempt to classify rather than to explain. Yet there were moments, it seemed to him, when Aristotle, writing with a kind of grim contempt for the vagueness of Plato, was carried off his feet by the Platonic enthusiasm; and so Hugh turned to Plato, which he had scrambled through as an undergraduate long years before. How incomparably beautiful it was! It revealed to Hugh what he had before only dimly suspected, that the poet, the moralist, the priest, the philosopher, and even the man of science, were all in reality engaged in the same task – penetrating the vast and bewildering riddle of the world. In Plato he found the philosophical method suffused by a burning poetical imagination; and he thought that Plato solved far more metaphysical riddles by a species of swift intuition than ever could be done by the closest analysis. He realised that Plato's theory was of a great, central, motionless entity, which acted not by expulsive energy but by a sort of magnetic attraction; and that all the dreams, the hopes, the activities of human minds were not the ripples of some central outward-speeding force, but the irresistible inner motion, as to the loadstone or the vortex, which made itself felt through the whole universe, material and immaterial alike. The intense desire to know, to solve, to improve, to gain a tranquil balance of thought, was nothing more, Hugh perceived, than this inward-drawing impulse, calling rather than coercing men to aspire to its own supreme serenity; all our ideas of what was pure and beautiful and true, then, were the same vast centripetal force, moving silently inward; all our sorrows, our mistakes, our sufferings, were but the checking of that overpowering influence; and any rest was impossible till we had drawn nearer to the central peace. This seemed to Hugh to be not a theory but an intensely inspiring and practical thought. How light-hearted, how brave a secret! Instead of desiring that all should be made plain at once, one could rejoice in the thought that one was certainly speeding homewards; and experience was no longer a blind conflict of forces, but a joyful nearing of the central sum of things. At all events, what a blitheness, what a zest it gave to the genius of Plato himself! With what eager inquisitiveness, in a sort of childlike gaiety, he hurried hither and thither, catching at every point some bright indication of the delightful mystery. Plato seemed to differ from the serious and preoccupied philosophers in this, that while they were lost in a grave and anxious scrutiny of phenomena, he was rather penetrated by the cheerfulness, the romance of the whole business. The intense personal emotions, which to the analytical philosophers seemed mere distracting elements, experiences to be forgotten, crushed, and left behind, were to Plato supreme manifestations of the one desire. One desired in others what one desired in God; the sense of admiration, the longing for sympathy, the desire that no close embrace, no passionate glance could satisfy, these were but deep yearnings after the perfect sympathy, the perfect understanding of God. And thus when Plato appeared most to be trifling with a subject, to be turning it over and over as a man may turn about a crystal in his hands, watching the lights blend and flash and separate on the polished facets, he was really drawing nearer to the truth, absorbing its delicious radiance and sweetness. Those sunny mornings, spent in strolling and talking, in colonnade or garden, in that imperishable Athens, seemed to Hugh like the talk of saints in some celestial city. Saints not of heavy and pious rectitude, conventional in posture and dreary in mind, but souls to whom love and laughter, pathos and sorrow, were alike sweet. Instead of approaching life with a sense of its gravity, its heinousness, its complexity, timid of joy and emotion and delight, practising sadness and solemnity, Plato and his followers began at the other end, and with an irrepressible optimism believed that joy was conquering and not being conquered, that light was in the ascendant, rippling outwards and onwards. And then the supreme figure of all, whether imaginary or not mattered little, Socrates himself, with what a joyful soberness and gravity did he move forward through experience, never losing his balance, but serenely judging all, till the moment came for him to enter behind the dark veil of death; and this he did with the same imperturbable good-humour, neither lingering or hasting, but with a tranquil confidence that life was beginning rather than ending.

And then Hugh saw in a flash that the essence of the Gospel itself was like that. When he read the sacred record in the light of Plato, it seemed to him as if it must in some subtle way be pervaded by the same bright intuitions as those which lit up the Greek mind. It seemed to Hugh a strange and bewildering thing that the pure message of simplicity and love, with its tender waiting upon God, its delight in flowers and hills, its love of great ideas, its rich poetry, its perfect art, had taken on the gloomy metaphysical tinge that St. Paul, with all his genius, had contrived to communicate to it. Surely it was intolerable to believe that all those subtle notions of sacrificial satisfaction, of justification, of substitution, had ever crossed the Saviour's mind at all. In a sense He fulfilled the law and the prophets, for they had laid down, in grief and doubt, a harsh code of morality, because they saw no other way of leavening the conscience of the world. But the Saviour, at least in the simple records, had not trafficked in such thoughts; he had but shown the significance of the primary emotions, had taught humanity that it was free as air, dear to the heart of God, heir of a goodly inheritance of love and care. St. Paul was a man of burning ardour, but had he not made the mistake of trying to lend too intellectual, too erudite, too complicated a colour to it all? The essence of the Gospel seemed to be that man should not be bound by the tradition of men; but St. Paul had been so intent upon drawing in those to whom tradition was dear, that in trying to harmonise the new with the old, he had made concessions and developed doctrines that had detrimentally affected Christianity ever since, and gone near to cast it in a different mould. Of course there was a certain continuity in religion, a development. But St. Paul was so deeply imbued with Rabbinical methods and Jewish tradition, that in his splendid attempt to show that Christianity was the fulfilment of the law, he had deeply infected the pure stream with Jewish ideas. The essence of Christianity was meant to be a tabula rasa. Christ bade men trust their deepest and widest intuitions, their sense of dependence upon God, their consciousness of divine origin. In this respect the teaching of Christ had more in common with the teaching of Plato, than the doctrine of St. Paul with the doctrine of Christ. Christ was concerned with the future, St. Paul with the past; Christ was concerned with religious instinct, St. Paul with religious development. The strength of the gospel of Christ was that it depended rather on the poetical and emotional consciousness of religion, and thus made its appeal to the majority of the human race. Plato, on the other hand, was too intellectual, and a perception of his doctrine was hardly possible except to a man of subtle and penetrating ability. Hugh wondered if it would be possible to put the doctrine of Plato in such a light that it would appeal to simple people; he thought that it would be possible; and here he was struck by the fact that Plato, like Christ, employed the device of the parable largely as a means of interpreting religious ideas. The teaching of the Gospel and the teaching of Plato were alike deeply idealistic. They both depended upon the simple idea that men could conceive of themselves as better than they actually were, and upon the fact that such a conception is the strongest motive force in the world in the direction of self-improvement. The mystery of conversion is nothing more than the conscious apprehension of the fact that one's life is meant to be noble and beautiful, and that one has the power to make it nobler and more beautiful than it is.

It seemed to Hugh, reflecting on the development of Christianity, that perhaps it was not too much to say that the Pauline influence had been to a great extent a misfortune; it was true that in a sense he had resisted the Jewish tyranny, and moreover that his writings were full of splendid aphorisms, inspiring thoughts, generous ideals. But he had formalised Christianity for all that; he had linked it closely to the Judaic system; he was ultimately responsible for Puritanism; that is to say, it was his influence more than any other that had given the Jewish scriptures their weight in the Christian scheme. It seemed to Hugh to be a terrible calamity that had reserved, so to speak, a place in the chariot of Christ for the Jewish dispensation; it was the firm belief in the vital inspiration of the Jewish scriptures that had produced that harsh and grim type of Christianity so dear to the Puritan heart. With the exception of certain of the Psalms, certain portions of Job and of the prophets, there seemed to Hugh to be little in the Old Testament that did not merely hamper and encumber the religion of Christ. What endless and inextricable difficulties arose from trying to harmonise the conception of the Father as preached by Christ, with the conception of the vindictive, wrathful, national, local Deity of the Old Testament. How little countenance did Christ ever give to that idea! He did not even think of the Temple as a house of sacrifice, but as a house of prayer! How seldom he alluded to the national history! How human and temporary a character He gave to the law of Moses! How constantly He appealed to personal rather than to national aspirations! How he seemed to insist upon the fact that every man must make his religion out of the simplest elements of moral consciousness! How often he appealed to the poetry of symbols rather than to the effectiveness of ceremony! How little claim he laid, at least in the Synoptic Gospels, to any divinity, and then rather in virtue of his perfect humanity! He called himself the Son of Man; in the only recorded prayer He gave to His disciples, there was no hint that prayer should be directed to Himself; it was all centred upon the Father.

Here again the Aristotelian method, the delight in analysis, the natural human desire to make truth precise and complete, had intruded itself. What was the Athanasian creed but an Aristotelian formula, making a hard dogma out of a dim mystery? The outcome of it all for Hugh was the resolution that for himself, at all events, his business was to disregard the temptation to formularise his position. With one's limited vision, one's finite inability to touch a thought at more than one point at a time, one must give up all hope of attaining to a perfected philosophical system. The end was dark, the solution incomprehensible. He must rather live as far as possible in a high and lofty emotion, beholding the truth by hints and glimpses, pursuing as far as possible all uplifting intuitions, all free and generous desires. It was useless to walk in a prescribed path, to frame one's life on the model of another's ideal. He must be open-minded, ready to revise his principles in the light of experience. He must hold fast to what brought him joy and peace. How restful after all it was to know that one had one's own problem, one's own conditions! All that was necessary was to put oneself firmly and constantly in harmony with the great purpose that had set one exactly where one was, and given one a temperament, a character, good and evil desires, hopes, longings, temptations, aspirations. One could not escape from them, thank God. If one only desired God's will, one's sins and sufferings as well as one's hopes and joys all worked together to a far-off end. One must go straight forward, in courage and patience and love.