Thomas Wingfold, Curate

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.”

“And yet a dragon was believable to the poets that made our old ballads; and now geology reveals that some-such creatures did at one time actually exist.”

“Ah! you turn the tables on me there, Helen! I confess my parallel a false one.”

“A truer one than you think, perhaps,” said Helen. “That a thing should seem absurd to one man, or to a thousand men, will not make it absurd in its own nature; and men as good and as clever as you, George, have in all ages believed in a God. Only their notion of God may have been different from yours. Perhaps their notion was a believable one, while yours is not.”

“By Jove, Helen! you’ve got on with your logic. I feel quite flattered! So far as I am aware you have had no tutor in that branch but myself! You’ll soon be too much for your master, by Jove!”

Like the pied piper, Helen smiled a little smile. But she said seriously,

“Well, George, all I have to suggest is—What if, after all your inability to believe it, things should at last prove, even to your—satisfaction, shall I say?—that there IS a God?”

“Don’t trouble yourself a bit about it, Helen,” returned George, whose mind was full of something else, to introduce which he was anxiously, and heedlessly, clearing the way: “I am prepared to take my chance, and all I care about is whether you will take your chance with me. Helen, I love you with my whole soul.”

“Oh! you have a soul, then, George? I thought you hadn’t!”

“It IS a foolish form of speech, no doubt,” returned Bascombe, a little disconcerted, as was natural. “—But to be serious, Helen, I do love you.”

“How long will you love me if I tell you I don’t love you?”

“Really, Helen, I don’t see how to answer such a question. I don’t understand you at all to-day! Have I offended you? I am very sorry if I have, but I am quite in the dark as to when or where or how.”

“Tell me then,” said Helen, heedless of his evident annoyance and discomfort, “how long will you love me if I love you in return?”

“For ever and ever.”

“Another form of speech?”

“You know what I mean well enough. I shall love you as long as I live.”

“George, I never could love a man who believed I was going to die for ever.”

“But, Helen,” pleaded Bascombe, “if it can’t be helped, you know!”

“But you are content it should be so. You believe it willingly. You scoff at any hint of a possible immortality.”

“Well, but, Helen, what difference can it make between you and me?” returned George, whom the danger of losing her had rendered for the moment indifferent even to his most cherished theory. “If there should be anything afterwards, of course I should go on loving you to the very extreme of the possible.”

“While now you don’t love me enough to wish I may live and not die! Leaving that out of view however, it makes all the difference to the love I should have to expect of you. It may be only a whim—I can prove nothing any more than you—but I have a—whim then—to be loved as an immortal woman, the child of a living God, and not as a helpless bastard of Nature!—I beg your pardon—I forget my manners.”

That a lady should utter such a word!—and that lady, Helen!—George was shocked. Coming on the rest, it absolutely bewildered him. He sat silent perforce. Helen saw it, and yielded to a moment’s annoyance with herself, but presently resumed:

“I have given you the advantage, George, and wronged myself. But I don’t care MUCH. I shall only take the better courage to speak my mind.—You come asking me to love you, and my brother lying mouldering in the earth—all there is of him, you tell me! If you believed he was alive still, and I should find him again some day, there would be no reason why you should not speak of love even now; for where does anyone need love more than at the brink of the grave? But to come talking of love to me, with the same voice that has but just been teaching me that the grave is the end of all, and my brother gone down into it for ever—I tell you, cousin—I must say it—it seems to me hardly decent. For me at least—I will NOT be loved with the love that can calmly accept such a fate. And I will never love any man, believing that, if I outlive him, my love must thereafter be but a homeless torrent, falling ever into a bottomless abyss. Why should I make of my heart a roaring furnace of regrets and self-accusations? The memory of my brother is for me enough. Let me keep what freedom is possible to me; let me rather live the life of a cold-blooded animal, and die in the ice that gathers about me. But before I sit down to await such an end, I shall know whether I am indeed compelled to believe as you do that there is no God, that Death is my lord and master, that he will take me as he has taken my brother and yet I shall never see him more. No, cousin George, I need a God; and if there be none how did I come to need one? Yes, I know you think you can explain it all, but the way you account for it is just as miserable as what you would put in its place. I am not complete in myself like you. I am not able to live without a God. I will seek him until I find him, or drop into the abyss where all question and answer ceases. Then in the end I shall be no worse than you would have me at the beginning—no, it will be nothing so bad, for then I shall not know my misery as you would have me know it now. If we are creatures of nothing, in spite of all the outcry of our souls against that fate, what mighty matter is it if, thus utterly befooled of Nature, we should also a little fool ourselves, by believing in a lovely hope that looks like a promise, and seems as if it ought to be true? How can a devotion to the facts of her existence be required of one whose nature has been proved to her a lie?—You speak from the facts of your nature, George; I speak from the facts of mine.”

Helen had come awake at last! It would have suited George better had she remained a half-quickened statue, responsive only to himself, her not over-potent Pygmalion. He sat speechless—with his eyes fixed on her.

“You need no God,” she went on, “therefore you seek none. If you need none, you are right to seek none, I dare say. But I need a God—oh, I cannot tell how I need him, if he be to be found! and by the same reasoning I will give my life to the search for him. To the last I will go on seeking him, for if once I give in, and confess there is no God, I shall go mad—mad, and perhaps kill somebody like poor Poldie. George, I have said my say. I would not have come into the garden but to say it. Good-bye.”

As she spoke she rose and held out her hand to him. But in the tumult of more emotions than I can well name—amongst the rest indignation, dismay, disappointment, pride, and chagrin, he lost himself while searching in vain for words, paid no heed to her movement, and lifted no hand to take that she offered.

With head erect she walked from the summer-house.

“The love of a lifetime!—a sweet invitation!” she said to herself, as with the slow step of restrained wrath she went up the garden.

George sat for some minutes as she had left him. Then he broke the silence in his own ears and said,

“Well, I’m damned!”

And so he was—for the time—and a very good thing too, for he required it.

CHAPTER XXXI. THOU DIDST NOT LEAVE

The next day the curate found himself so ill at ease, from the reaction after excitement of various kinds, that he determined to give himself a holiday. His notion of a holiday was a very simple one: a day in a deep wood, if such could be had, with a volume fit for alternate reading and pocketing as he might feel inclined. Of late no volume had been his companion in any wanderings but his New Testament.

There was a remnant of real old-fashioned forest on the Lythe, some distance up: thither he went by the road, the shortest way, to return by the winding course of the stream. It was a beautiful day of St. Martin’s summer. In the forest, if the leaves were gone, there was the more light, and sun and shadow played many a lovely game. But he saw them as though he saw them not, for fear and hope struggled in his heart, and for a long time prayer itself could not atone them. At length a calm fell, and he set out to return home, down the bank of the river.

Many-hued and many-shaped had been the thoughts, not that came to him from the forest, but that he had carried thither with him: through all and each of them, ever and again had come dawning the face of Helen, as he had seen it in church the day before, where she sat between her aunt and her cousin, so unlike either. For, to their annoyance, she had insisted on going to church, and to hers, they had refused to let her go alone. And in her face the curate had seen something he had never seen there until then,—a wistful look, as if now she would be glad to pick up any suitable crumb to carry home with her. In that dawn of coming childhood, though he dared not yet altogether believe it such, the hard contemptuous expression of Bascombe’s countenance, and the severe disapproval in Mrs. Ramshorn’s, were entirely lost upon him.

All the way down the river, the sweet change haunted him. When he got into the park, and reached that hollow betwixt the steep ferny slopes where he sat on the day with which my narrative opens, he seated himself again on the same stone, and reviewed the past twelve months. This was much such a day as that, only the hour was different: it was the setting sun that now shone upon the ferns, and cast shadows from them big enough for oaks. What a change had passed upon him! That day the New Testament had been the book of the church—this day it was a fountain of living waters to the man Thomas Wingfold. He had not opened his Horace for six months. Great trouble he had had; both that and its results were precious. Now a new trouble had come, but that also was a form of life: he would rather love and suffer and love still, a thousand times rather, than return to the poverty of not knowing Helen Lingard; yet a thousand times rather would he forget Helen Lingard than lose from his heart one word of the Master, whose love was the root and only pledge and security of love, the only power that could glorify it—could cleanse it from the mingled selfishness that wrought for its final decay and death.

The sun was down ere he left the park, and the twilight was rapidly following the sun as he drew near to the Abbey on his way home. Suddenly, more like an odour than a sound, he heard the organ, he thought. Never yet had he heard it on a week-day: the organist was not of those who haunt their instrument. Often of late had the curate gazed on that organ as upon a rock filled with sweet waters, before which he stood a Moses without his rod; sometimes the solemn instrument appeared to him a dumb Jeremiah that sat there from Sunday to Sunday, all the week long, with his head bowed upon his hands, and not a Jebusite to listen to him: if only his fingers had been taught the craft, he thought, how his soul would pour itself out through the song-tubes of that tabernacle of sweetness and prayer, and on the blast of its utterance ascend to the throne of the most high! Who could it be that was now peopling the silence of the vast church with melodious sounds, worshipping creatures of the elements? If the winds and the flames of fire are his angels, how much more the grandly consorting tones of the heavenly organ! He would go and see what power informed the vaporous music.