Yeast: a Problem

‘Most true.  But how would you have Him unveil Himself?’

‘By unveiling Himself.’

‘What?  To your simple intuition?  That was Semele’s ambition. . . .  You recollect the end of that myth.  You recollect, too, as you have read the Neo-Platonists, the result of their similar attempt.’

‘Idolatry and magic.’

‘True; and yet, such is the ambition of man, you who were just now envying Tregarva, are already longing to climb even higher than Saint Theresa.’

‘I do not often indulge in such an ambition.  But I have read in your Schoolmen tales of a Beatific Vision; how that the highest good for man was to see God.’

‘And did you believe that?’

‘One cannot believe the impossible—only regret its impossibility.’

‘Impossibility?  You can only see the Uncreate in the Create—the Infinite in the Finite—the absolute good in that which is like the good.  Does Tregarva pretend to more?  He sees God in His own thoughts and consciousnesses, and in the events of the world around him, imaged in the mirror of his own mind.  Is your mirror, then, so much narrower than his?’

‘I have none.  I see but myself, and the world, and far above them, a dim awful Unity, which is but a notion.’

‘Fool!—and slow of heart to believe!  Where else would you see Him but in yourself and in the world?  They are all things cognisable to you.  Where else, but everywhere, would you see Him whom no man hath seen, or can see?’

‘When He shows Himself to me in them, then I may see Him.  But now—’

‘You have seen Him; and because you do not know the name of what you see—or rather will not acknowledge it—you fancy that it is not there.’

‘How in His name? What have I seen?’

‘Ask yourself.  Have you not seen, in your fancy, at least, an ideal of man, for which you spurned (for Mellot has told me all) the merely negative angelic—the merely receptive and indulgent feminine-ideals of humanity, and longed to be a man, like that ideal and perfect man?’

‘I have.’

‘And what was your misery all along?  Was it not that you felt you ought to be a person with a one inner unity, a one practical will, purpose, and business given to you—not invented by yourself—in the great order and harmony of the universe,—and that you were not one?—That your self-willed fancies, and self-pleasing passions, had torn you in pieces, and left you inconsistent, dismembered, helpless, purposeless?  That, in short, you were below your ideal, just in proportion as you were not a person?’

‘God knows you speak truth!’

‘Then must not that ideal of humanity be a person himself?—Else how can he be the ideal man?  Where is your logic?  An impersonal ideal of a personal species! . . .  And what is the most special peculiarity of man?  Is it not that he alone of creation is a son, with a Father to love and to obey?  Then must not the ideal man be a son also?  And last, but not least, is it not the very property of man that he is a spirit invested with flesh and blood?  Then must not the ideal man have, once at least, taken on himself flesh and blood also?  Else, how could he fulfil his own idea?’

‘Yes . . .  Yes . . .  That thought, too, has glanced through my mind at moments, like a lightning-flash; till I have envied the old Greeks their faith in a human Zeus, son of Kronos—a human Phoibos, son of Zeus.  But I could not rest in them.  They are noble.  But are they—are any—perfect ideals?  The one thing I did, and do, and will believe, is the one which they do not fulfil—that man is meant to be the conqueror of the earth, matter, nature, decay, death itself, and to conquer them, as Bacon says, by obeying them.’

‘Hold it fast;—but follow it out, and say boldly, the ideal of humanity must be one who has conquered nature—one who rules the universe—one who has vanquished death itself; and conquered them, as Bacon says, not by violating, but by submitting to them.  Have you never heard of one who is said to have done this?  How do you know that in this ideal which you have seen, you have not seen the Son—the perfect Man, who died and rose again, and sits for ever Healer, and Lord, and Ruler of the universe? . . .  Stay—do not answer me.  Have you not, besides, had dreams of an all-Father—from whom, in some mysterious way, all things and beings must derive their source, and that Son—if my theory be true—among the rest, and above all the rest?’

‘Who has not?  But what more dim or distant—more drearily, hopelessly notional, than that thought?’

‘Only the thought that there is none.  But the dreariness was only in your own inconsistency.  If He be the Father of all, He must be the Father of persons—He Himself therefore a Person.  He must be the Father of all in whom dwell personal qualities, power, wisdom, creative energy, love, justice, pity.  Can He be their Father, unless all these very qualities are infinitely His?  Does He now look so terrible to you?’

‘I have had this dream, too; but I turned away from it in dread.’

‘Doubtless you did.  Some day you will know why.  Does that former dream of a human Son relieve this dream of none of its awfulness?  May not the type be beloved for the sake of its Antitype, even if the very name of All-Father is no guarantee for His paternal pity! . . .  But you have had this dream.  How know you, that in it you were not allowed a glimpse, however dim and distant, of Him whom the Catholics call the Father?’

‘It may be; but—’

‘Stay again.  Had you never the sense of a Spirit in you—a will, an energy, an inspiration, deeper than the region of consciousness and reflection, which, like the wind, blew where it listed, and you heard the sound of it ringing through your whole consciousness, and yet knew not whence it came, or whither it went, or why it drove you on to dare and suffer, to love and hate; to be a fighter, a sportsman, an artist—’

‘And a drunkard!’ added Lancelot, sadly.

‘And a drunkard.  But did it never seem to you that this strange wayward spirit, if anything, was the very root and core of your own personality?  And had you never a craving for the help of some higher, mightier spirit, to guide and strengthen yours; to regulate and civilise its savage and spasmodic self-will; to teach you your rightful place in the great order of the universe around; to fill you with a continuous purpose and with a continuous will to do it?  Have you never had a dream of an Inspirer?—a spirit of all spirits?’

Lancelot turned away with a shudder.

‘Talk of anything but that!  Little you know—and yet you seem to know everything—the agony of craving with which I have longed for guidance; the rage and disgust which possessed me when I tried one pretended teacher after another, and found in myself depths which their spirits could not, or rather would not, touch.  I have been irreverent to the false, from very longing to worship the true; I have been a rebel to sham leaders, for very desire to be loyal to a real one; I have envied my poor cousin his Jesuits; I have envied my own pointers their slavery to my whip and whistle; I have fled, as a last resource, to brandy and opium, for the inspiration which neither man nor demon would bestow. . . .  Then I found . . . you know my story. . . .  And when I looked to her to guide and inspire me, behold! I found myself, by the very laws of humanity, compelled to guide and inspire her;—blind, to lead the blind!—Thank God, for her sake, that she was taken from me!’

‘Did you ever mistake these substitutes, even the noblest of them, for the reality?  Did not your very dissatisfaction with them show you that the true inspirer ought to be, if he were to satisfy your cravings, a person, truly—else how could he inspire and teach you, a person yourself!—but an utterly infinite, omniscient, eternal person?  How know you that in that dream He was not unveiling Himself to you—He, The Spirit, who is the Lord and Giver of Life; The Spirit, who teaches men their duty and relation to those above, around, beneath them; the Spirit of order, obedience, loyalty, brotherhood, mercy, condescension?’

‘But I never could distinguish these dreams from each other; the moment that I essayed to separate them, I seemed to break up the thought of an absolute one ground of all things, without which the universe would have seemed a piecemeal chaos; and they receded to infinite distance, and became transparent, barren, notional shadows of my own brain, even as your words are now.’

‘How know you that you were meant to distinguish them?  How know you that that very impossibility was not the testimony of fact and experience to that old Catholic dogma, for the sake of which you just now shrank from my teaching?  I say that this is so.  How do you know that it is not?’

‘But how do I know that it is?  I want proof.’

‘And you are the man who was, five minutes ago, crying out for practical facts, and disdaining cold abstract necessities of logic!  Can you prove that your body exists?’

‘No.’

‘Can you prove that your spirit exists?’

‘No.’

‘And yet know that they both exist.  And how?’

‘Solvitur ambulando.’

‘Exactly.  When you try to prove either of them without the other, you fail.  You arrive, if at anything, at some barren polar notion.  By action alone you prove the mesothetic fact which underlies and unites them.’

‘Quorsum hæc?’

‘Hither.  I am not going to demonstrate the indemonstrable—to give you intellectual notions which, after all, will be but reflexes of my own peculiar brain, and so add the green of my spectacles to the orange of yours, and make night hideous by fresh monsters.  I may help you to think yourself into a theoretical Tritheism, or a theoretical Sabellianism; I cannot make you think yourself into practical and living Catholicism.  As you of anthropology, so I say of theology,—Solvitur ambulando.  Don’t believe Catholic doctrine unless you like; faith is free.  But see if you can reclaim either society or yourself without it; see if He will let you reclaim them.  Take Catholic doctrine for granted; act on it; and see if you will not reclaim them!’

‘Take for granted?  Am I to come, after all, to implicit faith?’

‘Implicit fiddlesticks!  Did you ever read the Novum Organum?  Mellot told me that you were a geologist.’

‘Well?’

‘You took for granted what you read in geological books, and went to the mine and the quarry afterwards, to verify it in practice; and according as you found fact correspond to theory, you retained or rejected.  Was that implicit faith, or common sense, common humility, and sound induction?’

‘Sound induction, at least.’

‘Then go now, and do likewise.  Believe that the learned, wise, and good, for 1800 years, may possibly have found out somewhat, or have been taught somewhat, on this matter, and test their theory by practice.  If a theory on such a point is worth anything at all, it is omnipotent and all-explaining.  If it will not work, of course there is no use keeping it a moment.  Perhaps it will work.  I say it will.’

‘But I shall not work it; I still dread my own spectacles.  I dare not trust myself alone to verify a theory of Murchison’s or Lyell’s.  How dare I trust myself in this?’

‘Then do not trust yourself alone: come and see what others are doing.  Come, and become a member of a body which is verifying, by united action, those universal and eternal truths, which are too great for the grasp of any one time-ridden individual.  Not that we claim the gift of infallibility, any more than I do that of perfect utterance of the little which we do know.’

‘Then what do you promise me in asking me to go with you?’

‘Practical proof that these my words are true,—practical proof that they can make a nation all that England might be and is not,—the sight of what a people might become who, knowing thus far, do what they know.  We believe no more than you, but we believe it.  Come and see!—and yet you will not see; facts, and the reasons of them, will be as impalpable to you there as here, unless you can again obey your Novum Organum.’

‘How then?’

‘By renouncing all your idols—the idols of the race and of the market, of the study and of the theatre.  Every national prejudice, every vulgar superstition, every remnant of pedantic system, every sentimental like or dislike, must be left behind you, for the induction of the world problem.  You must empty yourself before God will fill you.’

‘Of what can I strip myself more?  I know nothing; I can do nothing; I hope nothing; I fear nothing; I am nothing.’

‘And you would gain something.  But for what purpose?—for on that depends your whole success.  To be famous, great, glorious, powerful, beneficent?’

‘As I live, the height of my ambition, small though it be, is only to find my place, though it were but as a sweeper of chimneys.  If I dare wish—if I dare choose, it would be only this—to regenerate one little parish in the whole world . . . To do that, and die, for aught I care, without ever being recognised as the author of my own deeds . . . to hear them, if need be, imputed to another, and myself accursed as a fool, if I can but atone for the sins of . . .

He paused; but his teacher understood him.

‘It is enough,’ he said.  ‘Come with me; Tregarva waits for us near.  Again I warn you; you will hear nothing new; you shall only see what you, and all around you, have known and not done, known and done.  We have no peculiar doctrines or systems; the old creeds are enough for us.  But we have obeyed the teaching which we received in each and every age, and allowed ourselves to be built up, generation by generation—as the rest of Christendom might have done—into a living temple, on the foundation which is laid already, and other than which no man can lay.’

‘And what is that?’

‘Jesus Christ—THE MAN.’

He took Lancelot by the hand.  A peaceful warmth diffused itself over his limbs; the droning of the organ sounded fainter and more faint; the marble monuments grew dim and distant; and, half unconsciously, he followed like a child through the cathedral door.