The Soul of a Bishop

This sense he had of thinking openly in the sight of God, enabled him to see the adventure of Lady Sunderbund without illusion and without shame. He saw himself at once honest and disingenuous, divided between two aims. He had no doubt now of the path he had to pursue. A stronger man of permanently clear aims might possibly turn Lady Sunderbund into a useful opportunity, oblige her to provide the rostrum he needed; but for himself, he knew he had neither the needed strength nor clearness; she would smother him in decoration, overcome him by her picturesque persistence. It might be ridiculous to run away from her, but it was necessary. And he was equally clear now that for him there must be no idea of any pulpit, of any sustained mission. He was a man of intellectual moods; only at times, he realized, had he the inspiration of truth; upon such uncertain snatches and glimpses he must live; to make his life a ministry would be to face phases when he would simply be “carrying on,” with his mind blank and his faith asleep.

His thought spread out from this perennial decision to more general things again. Had God any need of organized priests at all? Wasn’t that just what had been the matter with religion for the last three thousand years?

His vision and his sense of access to God had given a new courage to his mind; in these moods of enlightenment he could see the world as a comprehensible ball, he could see history as an understandable drama. He had always been on the verge of realizing before, he realized now, the two entirely different and antagonistic strands that interweave in the twisted rope of contemporary religion; the old strand of the priest, the fetishistic element of the blood sacrifice and the obscene rite, the element of ritual and tradition, of the cult, the caste, the consecrated tribe; and interwoven with this so closely as to be scarcely separable in any existing religion was the new strand, the religion of the prophets, the unidolatrous universal worship of the one true God. Priest religion is the antithesis to prophet religion. He saw that the founders of all the great existing religions of the world had been like himself – only that he was a weak and commonplace man with no creative force, and they had been great men of enormous initiative – men reaching out, and never with a complete definition, from the old kind of religion to the new. The Hebrew prophets, Jesus, whom the priests killed when Pilate would have spared him, Mohammed, Buddha, had this much in common that they had sought to lead men from temple worship, idol worship, from rites and ceremonies and the rule of priests, from anniversaryism and sacramentalism, into a direct and simple relation to the simplicity of God. Religious progress had always been liberation and simplification. But none of these efforts had got altogether clear. The organizing temper in men, the disposition to dogmatic theorizing, the distrust of the discretion of the young by the wisdom of age, the fear of indiscipline which is so just in warfare and so foolish in education, the tremendous power of the propitiatory tradition, had always caught and crippled every new gospel before it had run a score of years. Jesus for example gave man neither a theology nor a church organization; His sacrament was an innocent feast of memorial; but the fearful, limited, imitative men he left to carry on his work speedily restored all these three abominations of the antiquated religion, theology, priest, and sacrifice. Jesus indeed, caught into identification with the ancient victim of the harvest sacrifice and turned from a plain teacher into a horrible blood bath and a mock cannibal meal, was surely the supreme feat of the ironies of chance…

“It is curious how I drift back to Jesus,” said Scrope. “I have never seen how much truth and good there was in his teaching until I broke away from Christianity and began to see him plain. If I go on as I am going, I shall end a Nazarene…”

He thought on. He had a feeling of temerity, but then it seemed as if God within him bade him be of good courage.

Already in a glow of inspiration he had said practically as much as he was now thinking in his confirmation address, but now he realized completely what it was he had then said. There could be no priests, no specialized ministers of the one true God, because every man to the utmost measure of his capacity was bound to be God’s priest and minister. Many things one may leave to specialists: surgery, detailed administration, chemistry, for example; but it is for every man to think his own philosophy and think out his own religion. One man may tell another, but no man may take charge of another. A man may avail himself of electrician or gardener or what not, but he must stand directly before God; he may suffer neither priest nor king. These other things are incidental, but God, the kingdom of God, is what he is for.

“Good,” he said, checking his reasoning. “So I must bear witness to God – but neither as priest nor pastor. I must write and talk about him as I can. No reason why I should not live by such writing and talking if it does not hamper my message to do so. But there must be no high place, no ordered congregation. I begin to see my way…”

The evening was growing dark and chill about him now, the sky was barred with deep bluish purple bands drawn across a chilly brightness that had already forgotten the sun, the trees were black and dim, but his understanding of his place and duty was growing very definite.

“And this duty to bear witness to God’s kingdom and serve it is so plain that I must not deflect my witness even by a little, though to do so means comfort and security for my wife and children. God comes first…”

“They must not come between God and me…”

“But there is more in it than that.”

He had come round at last through the long clearing-up of his mind, to his fundamental problem again. He sat darkly reluctant.

“I must not play priest or providence to them,” he admitted at last. “I must not even stand between God and them.”

He saw now what he had been doing; it had been the flaw in his faith that he would not trust his family to God. And he saw too that this distrust has been the flaw in the faith of all religious systems hitherto…

(13)

In this strange voyage of the spirit which was now drawing to its end, in which Scrope had travelled from the confused, unanalyzed formulas and assumptions and implications of his rectory upbringing to his present stark and simple realization of God, he had at times made some remarkable self-identifications. He was naturally much given to analogy; every train of thought in his mind set up induced parallel currents. He had likened himself to the Anglican church, to the whole Christian body, as, for example, in his imagined second conversation with the angel of God. But now he found himself associating himself with a still more far-reaching section of mankind. This excess of solicitude was traceable perhaps in nearly every one in all the past of mankind who had ever had the vision of God. An excessive solicitude to shield those others from one’s own trials and hardships, to preserve the exact quality of the revelation, for example, had been the fruitful cause of crippling errors, spiritual tyrannies, dogmatisms, dissensions, and futilities. “Suffer little children to come unto me”; the text came into his head with an effect of contribution. The parent in us all flares out at the thought of the younger and weaker minds; we hide difficulties, seek to spare them from the fires that temper the spirit, the sharp edge of the truth that shapes the soul. Christian is always trying to have a carriage sent back from the Celestial City for his family. Why, we ask, should they flounder dangerously in the morasses that we escaped, or wander in the forest in which we lost ourselves? Catch these souls young, therefore, save them before they know they exist, kidnap them to heaven; vaccinate them with a catechism they may never understand, lull them into comfort and routine. Instinct plays us false here as it plays the savage mother false when she snatches her fevered child from the doctor’s hands. The last act of faith is to trust those we love to God…

Hitherto he had seen the great nets of theological overstatement and dogma that kept mankind from God as if they were the work of purely evil things in man, of pride, of self-assertion, of a desire to possess and dominate the minds and souls of others. It was only now that he saw how large a share in the obstruction of God’s Kingdom had been played by the love of the elder and the parent, by the carefulness, the fussy care, of good men and women. He had wandered in wildernesses of unbelief, in dangerous places of doubt and questioning, but he had left his wife and children safe and secure in the self-satisfaction of orthodoxy. To none of them except to Eleanor had he ever talked with any freedom of his new apprehensions of religious reality. And that had been at Eleanor’s initiative. There was, he saw now, something of insolence and something of treachery in this concealment. His ruling disposition throughout the crisis had been to force comfort and worldly well-being upon all those dependants even at the price of his own spiritual integrity. In no way had he consulted them upon the bargain… While we have pottered, each for the little good of his own family, each for the lessons and clothes and leisure of his own children, assenting to this injustice, conforming to that dishonest custom, being myopically benevolent and fundamentally treacherous, our accumulated folly has achieved this catastrophe. It is not so much human wickedness as human weakness that has permitted the youth of the world to go through this hell of blood and mud and fire. The way to the kingdom of God is the only way to the true safety, the true wellbeing of the children of men…

It wasn’t fair to them. But now he saw how unfair it was to them in a light that has only shone plainly upon European life since the great interlude of the armed peace came to an end in August, 1914. Until that time it had been the fashion to ignore death and evade poverty and necessity for the young. We can shield our young no longer, death has broken through our precautions and tender evasions – and his eyes went eastward into the twilight that had swallowed up his daughter and her lover.

The tumbled darkling sky, monstrous masses of frowning blue, with icy gaps of cold light, was like the great confusions of the war. All our youth has had to go into that terrible and destructive chaos – because of the kings and churches and nationalities sturdier-souled men would have set aside.

Everything was sharp and clear in his mind now. Eleanor after all had brought him his solution.

He sat quite still for a little while, and then stood up and turned northward towards Notting Hill.

The keepers were closing Kensington Gardens, and he would have to skirt the Park to Victoria Gate and go home by the Bayswater Road…

(14)

As he walked he rearranged in his mind this long-overdue apology for his faith that he was presently to make to his family. There was no one to interrupt him and nothing to embarrass him, and so he was able to set out everything very clearly and convincingly. There was perhaps a disposition to digress into rather voluminous subordinate explanations, on such themes, for instance, as sacramentalism, whereon he found himself summarizing Frazer’s Golden Bough, which the Chasters’ controversy had first obliged him to read, and upon the irrelevance of the question of immortality to the process of salvation. But the reality of his eclaircissement was very different from anything he prepared in these anticipations.

Tea had been finished and put away, and the family was disposed about the dining-room engaged in various evening occupations; Phoebe sat at the table working at some mathematical problem, Clementina was reading with her chin on her fist and a frown on her brow; Lady Ella, Miriam and Daphne were busy making soft washing cloths for the wounded; Lady Ella had brought home the demand for them from the Red Cross centre in Burlington House. The family was all downstairs in the dining-room because the evening was chilly, and there were no fires upstairs yet in the drawing-room. He came into the room and exchanged greetings with Lady Ella. Then he stood for a time surveying his children. Phoebe, he noted, was a little flushed; she put passion into her work; on the whole she was more like Eleanor than any other of them. Miriam knitted with a steady skill. Clementina’s face too expressed a tussle. He took up one of the rough-knit washing-cloths upon the side-table, and asked how many could be made in an hour. Then he asked some idle obvious question about the fire upstairs. Clementina made an involuntary movement; he was disturbing her. He hovered for a moment longer. He wanted to catch his wife’s eye and speak to her first. She looked up, but before he could convey his wish for a private conference with her, she smiled at him and then bent over her work again.

He went into the back study and lit his gas fire. Hitherto he had always made a considerable explosion when he did so, but this time by taking thought and lighting his match before he turned on the gas he did it with only a gentle thud. Then he lit his reading-lamp and pulled down the blind – pausing for a time to look at the lit dressmaker’s opposite. Then he sat down thoughtfully before the fire. Presently Ella would come in and he would talk to her. He waited a long time, thinking only weakly and inconsecutively, and then he became restless. Should he call her?

But he wanted their talk to begin in a natural-seeming way. He did not want the portentousness of “wanting to speak” to her and calling her out to him. He got up at last and went back into the other room. Clementina had gone upstairs, and the book she had been reading was lying closed on the sideboard. He saw it was one of Chasters’ books, he took it up, it was “The Core of Truth in Christianity,” and he felt an irrational shock at the idea of Clementina reading it. In spite of his own immense changes of opinion he had still to revise his conception of the polemical Chasters as an evil influence in religion. He fidgeted past his wife to the mantel in search of an imaginary mislaid pencil. Clementina came down with some bandage linen she was cutting out. He hung over his wife in a way that he felt must convey his desire for a conversation. Then he picked up Chasters’ book again. “Does any one want this?” he asked.

“Not if I may have it again,” consented Clementina.

He took it back with him and began to read again those familiar controversial pages. He read for the best part of an hour with his knees drying until they smoked over the gas. What curious stuff it was! How it wrangled! Was Chasters a religious man? Why did he write these books? Had he really a passion for truth or only a Swift-like hatred of weakly-thinking people? None of this stuff in his books was really wrong, provided it was religious-spirited. Much of it had been indeed destructively illuminating to its reader. It let daylight through all sorts of walls. Indeed, the more one read the more vividly true its acid-bit lines became… And yet, and yet, there was something hateful in the man’s tone. Scrope held the book and thought. He had seen Chasters once or twice. Chasters had the sort of face, the sort of voice, the sort of bearing that made one think of his possibly saying upon occasion, rudely and rejoicing, “More fool you!” Nevertheless Scrope perceived now with an effort of discovery that it was from Chasters that he had taken all the leading ideas of the new faith that was in him. Here was the stuff of it. He had forgotten how much of it was here. During those months of worried study while the threat of a Chasters prosecution hung over him his mind had assimilated almost unknowingly every assimilable element of the Chasters doctrine; he had either assimilated and transmuted it by the alchemy of his own temperament, or he had reacted obviously and filled in Chasters’ gaps and pauses. Chasters could beat a road to the Holy of Holies, and shy at entering it. But in spite of all the man’s roughness, in spite of a curious flavour of baseness and malice about him, the spirit of truth had spoken through him. God has a use for harsh ministers. In one man God lights the heart, in another the reason becomes a consuming fire. God takes his own where he finds it. He does not limit himself to nice people. In these matters of evidence and argument, in his contempt for amiable, demoralizing compromise, Chasters served God as Scrope could never hope to serve him. Scrope’s new faith had perhaps been altogether impossible if the Chasters controversy had not ploughed his mind.

For a time Scrope dwelt upon this remarkable realization. Then as he turned over the pages his eyes rested on a passage of uncivil and ungenerous sarcasm. Against old Likeman of all people!..

What did a girl like Clementina make of all this? How had she got the book? From Eleanor? The stuff had not hurt Eleanor. Eleanor had been able to take the good that Chasters taught, and reject the evil of his spirit…

He thought of Eleanor, gallantly working out her own salvation. The world was moving fast to a phase of great freedom – for the young and the bold… He liked that boy…

His thoughts came back with a start to his wife. The evening was slipping by and he had momentous things to say to her. He went and just opened the door.

“Ella!” he said.

“Did you want me?”

“Presently.”

She put a liberal interpretation upon that “presently,” so that after what seemed to him a long interval he had to call again, “Ella!”

“Just a minute,” she answered.

(15)

Lady Ella was still, so to speak, a little in the other room when she came to him.

“Shut that door, please,” he said, and felt the request had just that flavour of portentousness he wished to avoid.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I wanted to talk to you – about some things. I’ve done something rather serious to-day. I’ve made an important decision.”

Her face became anxious. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“You see,” he said, leaning upon the mantelshelf and looking down at the gas flames, “I’ve never thought that we should all have to live in this crowded house for long.”

“All!” she interrupted in a voice that made him look up sharply. “You’re not going away, Ted?”

“Oh, no. But I hoped we should all be going away in a little time. It isn’t so.”

“I never quite understood why you hoped that.”

“It was plain enough.”

“How?”

“I thought I should have found something to do that would have enabled us to live in better style. I’d had a plan.”

“What plan?”

“It’s fallen through.”

“But what plan was it?”

“I thought I should be able to set up a sort of broad church chapel. I had a promise.”

Her voice was rich with indignation. “And she has betrayed you?”

“No,” he said, “I have betrayed her.”

Lady Ella’s face showed them still at cross purposes. He looked down again and frowned. “I can’t do that chapel business,” he said. “I’ve had to let her down. I’ve got to let you all down. There’s no help for it. It isn’t the way. I can’t have anything to do with Lady Sunderbund and her chapel.”

“But,” Lady Ella was still perplexed.

“It’s too great a sacrifice.”

“Of us?”

“No, of myself. I can’t get into her pulpit and do as she wants and keep my conscience. It’s been a horrible riddle for me. It means plunging into all this poverty for good. But I can’t work with her, Ella. She’s impossible.”

“You mean – you’re going to break with Lady Sunderbund?”

“I must.”

“Then, Teddy!” – she was a woman groping for flight amidst intolerable perplexities – “why did you ever leave the church?”

“Because I have ceased to believe – ”

“But had it nothing to do with Lady Sunderbund?”

He stared at her in astonishment.

“If it means breaking with that woman,” she said.

“You mean,” he said, beginning for the first time to comprehend her, “that you don’t mind the poverty?”

“Poverty!” she cried. “I cared for nothing but the disgrace.”

“Disgrace?”

“Oh, never mind, Ted! If it isn’t true, if I’ve been dreaming…”

Instead of a woman stunned by a life sentence of poverty, he saw his wife rejoicing as if she had heard good news.

Their minds were held for a minute by the sound of some one knocking at the house door; one of the girls opened the door, there was a brief hubbub in the passage and then they heard a cry of “Eleanor!” through the folding doors.

“There’s Eleanor,” he said, realizing he had told his wife nothing of the encounter in Hyde Park.

They heard Eleanor’s clear voice: “Where’s Mummy? Or Daddy?” and then: “Can’t stay now, dears. Where’s Mummy or Daddy?”

“I ought to have told you,” said Scrope quickly. “I met Eleanor in the Park. By accident. She’s come up unexpectedly. To meet a boy going to the front. Quite a nice boy. Son of Riverton the doctor. The parting had made them understand one another. It’s all right, Ella. It’s a little irregular, but I’d stake my life on the boy. She’s very lucky.”

Eleanor appeared through the folding doors. She came to business at once.

“I promised you I’d come back to supper here, Daddy,” she said. “But I don’t want to have supper here. I want to stay out late.”

She saw her mother look perplexed. “Hasn’t Daddy told you?”

“But where is young Riverton?”

“He’s outside.”

Eleanor became aware of a broad chink in the folding doors that was making the dining-room an auditorium for their dialogue. She shut them deftly.

“I have told Mummy,” Scrope explained. “Bring him in to supper. We ought to see him.”

Eleanor hesitated. She indicated her sisters beyond the folding doors. “They’ll all be watching us, Mummy,” she said. “We’d be uncomfortable. And besides – ”

“But you can’t go out and dine with him alone!”

“Oh, Mummy! It’s our only chance.”

“Customs are changing,” said Scrope.

“But can they?” asked Lady Ella.

“I don’t see why not.”

The mother was still doubtful, but she was in no mood to cross her husband that night. “It’s an exceptional occasion,” said Scrope, and Eleanor knew her point was won. She became radiant. “I can be late?”

Scrope handed her his latch-key without a word.

“You dear kind things,” she said, and went to the door. Then turned and came back and kissed her father. Then she kissed her mother. “It is so kind of you,” she said, and was gone. They listened to her passage through a storm of questions in the dining-room.

“Three months ago that would have shocked me,” said Lady Ella.

“You haven’t seen the boy,” said Scrope.

“But the appearances!”

“Aren’t we rather breaking with appearances?” he said.

“And he goes to-morrow – perhaps to get killed,” he added. “A lad like a schoolboy. A young thing. Because of the political foolery that we priests and teachers have suffered in the place of the Kingdom of God, because we have allowed the religion of Europe to become a lie; because no man spoke the word of God. You see – when I see that – see those two, those children of one-and-twenty, wrenched by tragedy, beginning with a parting… It’s like a knife slashing at all our appearances and discretions… Think of our lovemaking…”

The front door banged.

He had some idea of resuming their talk. But his was a scattered mind now.

“It’s a quarter to eight,” he said as if in explanation.

“I must see to the supper,” said Lady Ella.

(16)

There was an air of tension at supper as though the whole family felt that momentous words impended. But Phoebe had emerged victorious from her mathematical struggle, and she seemed to eat with better appetite than she had shown for some time. It was a cold meat supper; Lady Ella had found it impossible to keep up the regular practice of a cooked dinner in the evening, and now it was only on Thursdays that the Scropes, to preserve their social tradition, dressed and dined; the rest of the week they supped. Lady Ella never talked very much at supper; this evening was no exception. Clementina talked of London University and Bedford College; she had been making enquiries; Daphne described some of the mistresses at her new school. The feeling that something was expected had got upon Scrope’s nerves. He talked a little in a flat and obvious way, and lapsed into thoughtful silences. While supper was being cleared away he went back into his study.