He did not speak.
"But why," she cried, "do you insist on what you cell authority? As a modern woman who has learned to use her own mind, I simply can"t believe, if the G.o.d of the universe is the moral G.o.d you a.s.sert him to be, that he has established on earth an agency of the kind you infer, and delegated to it the power of life and death over human souls.
Perhaps you do not go so far, but if you make the claim at all you must make it in its entirety. There is an idea of commercialism, of monopoly in that conception which is utterly repugnant to any one who tries to approach the subject with a fresh mind, and from an ideal point of view.
And religion must be idealism--mustn"t it?
"Your ancient monks and saints weren"t satisfied until they had settled every detail of the invisible world, of the past and future. They mapped it out as if it were a region they had actually explored, like geographers. They used their reason, and what science they had, to make theories about it which the churches still proclaim as the catholic and final truth. You forbid us to use our reason. You declare, in order to become Christians, that we have to accept authoritative statements. Oh, can"t you see that an authoritative statement is just what an ethical person doesn"t want? Belief--faith doesn"t consist in the mere acceptance of a statement, but in something much higher--if we can achieve it. Acceptance of authority is not faith, it is mere credulity, it is to shirk the real issue. We must believe, if we believe at all, without authority. If we knew, there would be no virtue in striving. If I choose a G.o.d," she added, after a pause, "I cannot take a consensus of opinion about him,--he must be my G.o.d."
Hodder did not speak immediately. Strange as it may seem, he had never heard the argument, and the strength of it, reenforced by the extraordinary vitality and earnestness of the woman who had uttered it, had a momentary stunning effect. He sat contemplating her as she lay back among the cushions, and suddenly he seemed to see in her the rebellious child of which her father had spoken. No wonder Eldon Parr had misunderstood her, had sought to crush her spirit! She was to be dealt with in no common way, nor was the consuming yearning he discerned in her to be lightly satisfied.
"The G.o.d of the individualist," he said at length--musingly, not accusingly.
"I am an individualist," she admitted simply. "But I am at least logical in that philosophy, and the individualists who attend the churches to-day are not. The inconsistency of their lives is what makes those of us who do not go to church doubt the efficacy of their creed, which seems to have no power to change them. The majority of people in St.
John"s are no more Christians than I am. They attend service once a week, and the rest of the time they are bent upon getting all they can of pleasure and profit for themselves. Do you wonder that those who consider this spectacle come inevitably to the conclusion that either Christianity is at fault, is outworn, or else that it is presented in the wrong way?"
The rector rose abruptly, walked to the entrance of the arbour, and stood staring out across the garden. Presently he turned and came back and stood over her.
"Since you ask me," he said slowly, "I do not wonder at it."
She raised her eyes swiftly.
"When you speak like that," she exclaimed with an enthusiasm that stirred him, despite the trouble of his mind, "I cannot think of you as a clergyman,--but as a man. Indeed," she added, in the surprise of her discovery, "I have never thought of you as a clergyman--even when I first saw you this morning. I could not account then for a sense of duality about you that puzzled me. Do you always preach as earnestly as that?"
"Why?"
"I felt as if you were throwing your whole soul into the effort-=oh, I felt it distinctly. You made some of them, temporarily, a little uncomfortable, but they do not understand you, and you didn"t change them. It seemed to me you realized this when Gordon Atterbury spoke to you. I tried to a.n.a.lyze the effect on myself--if it had been in the slightest degree possible for my reason to accept what you said you might, through sheer personality, have compelled me to reconsider. As it was, I found myself resisting you."
With his hands clasped behind him, he paced across the arbour and back again.
"Have you ever definitely and sincerely tried to put what the Church teaches into practice?" he asked.
"Orthodox Christianity? penance, asceticism, self-abnegation--repression--falling on my knees and seeking a forgiveness out of all proportion to the trespa.s.s, and filled with a sense of total depravity? If I did that I should lose myself--the only valuable thing I"ve got."
Hodder, who had resumed his pacing, glanced at her involuntarily, and fought an inclination to agree with her.
"I see no one upon whom I can rely but myself," she went on with the extraordinary energy she was able to summon at will, "and I am convinced that self-sacrifice--at least, indiscriminate, unreasoning self-sacrifice--is worse than useless, and to teach it is criminal ignorance. None of the so-called Christian virtues appeals to me: I hate humility. You haven"t it. The only happiness I can see in the world lies in self-expression, and I certainly shouldn"t find that in sewing garments for the poor.
"The last thing that I could wish for would be immortality as orthodox Christianity depicts it! And suppose I had followed the advice of my Christian friends and remained here, where they insisted my duty was, what would have happened to me? In a senseless self-denial I should gradually have, withered into a meaningless old maid, with no opinions of my own, and no more definite purpose in life than to write checks for charities. Your Christianity commands that women shall stay at home, and declares that they are not ent.i.tled to seek their own salvation, to have any place in affairs, or to meddle with the realm of the intellect.
Those forbidden gardens are reserved for the lordly s.e.x. St. Paul, you say, put us in our proper place some twenty centuries ago, and we are to remain there for all time."
He felt sweeping through him the reverse current of hostility.
"And what I preach," he asked, "has tended to confirm you in such a mean conception of Christianity?"
Her eye travelled over the six feet of him--the kindling, reflecting eye of the artist; it rested for a moment on the protesting locks of his hair, which apparently could not be cut short enough to conform; on the hands, which were strong and sinewy; on the wide, tolerant mouth, with its rugged furrows, on the breadth and height of the forehead. She lay for a moment, inert, considering.
"What you preach--yes," she answered, bravely meeting his look. "What you are--no. You and your religion are as far apart as the poles. Oh, this old argument, the belief that has been handed down to the man, the authority with which he is clothed, and not the man himself! How can one be a factor in life unless one represents something which is the fruit of actual, personal experience? Your authority is for the weak, the timid, the credulous,--for those who do not care to trust themselves, who run for shelter from the storms of life to a "papier-mache"
fortress, made to look like rock. In order to preach that logically you should be a white ascetic, with a well-oiled manner, a downcast look lest you stumble in your pride; lest by chance you might do something original that sprang out of your own soul instead of being an imitation of the saints. And if your congregation took your doctrine literally, I can see a whole army of white, meek Christians. But you are not like that. Can"t you see it for yourself?" she exclaimed.
"Can"t you feel that you are an individual, a personality, a force that might be put to great uses? That will be because you are open-minded, because there is room in you for growth and change?"
He strove with all his might to quell the inner conflagration which she had fanned into leaping flames. Though he had listened before to doubt and criticism, this woman, with her strange shifting moods of calm and pa.s.sion, with her bewildering faculty of changing from pa.s.sive to active resistance, her beauty (once manifest, never to be forgotten), her unique individuality that now attracted, now repelled, seemed for the moment the very incarnation of the forces opposed to him and his religion. Holder, as he looked at her, had a flash of fierce resentment that now, of all times, she should suddenly have flung herself across his path. For she was to be reckoned with. Why did he not tell her she was an egoist? Why didn"t he speak out, defend his faith, denounce her views as prejudiced and false?
"Have I made you angry?" he heard her say. "I am sorry."
It was the hint of reproach in her tone to which the man in him instantly responded. And what he saw now was his portrait she had painted. The thought came to him: was he indeed greater, more vital than the religion he professed? G.o.d forbid! Did he ring true, and it false?
She returned his gaze. And gradually, under her clear olive skin, he saw the crimson colour mounting higher.... She put forth her hand, simply, naturally, and pressed his own, as though they had been friends for a lifetime....
CHAPTER X. THE MESSENGER IN THE CHURCH
I
The annual scourge of summer had descended pitilessly upon the city once more, enervating, depressing, stagnating, and people moved languidly in the penetrating heat that steamed from the pores of the surrounding river bottoms.
The rector of St. John"s realized that a crisis had come in his life,--a crisis he had tried to stave off in vain. And yet there was a period during which he pursued his shrunken duties as though nothing had happened to him; as a man who has been struck in battle keeps on, loath to examine, to acknowledge the gravity of his wound; fearing to, perhaps. Sometimes, as his mind went back to the merciless conflict of his past, his experience at the law school, it was the unchaining of that other man he dreaded, the man he believed himself to have finally subdued. But night and day he was haunted by the sorrowful and reproachful face of Truth.
Had he the courage, now, to submit the beliefs which had sustained him all these years to Truth"s inexorable inspection? Did he dare to turn and open those books which she had inspired,--the new philosophies, the historical criticisms which he had neglected and condemned, which he had flattered himself he could do without,--and read of the fruit of Knowledge? Twice, thrice he had hesitated on the steps of the big library, and turned away with a wildly beating heart.
Day by day the storm increased, until from a cloud on the horizon it grew into a soul-shaking tempest. Profoundly moved Parr"s he had been on that Sunday afternoon, in Eldon Parr"s garden, he had resolutely resolved to thrust the woman and the incident from his mind, to defer the consideration of the questions she had raised--grave though they were--to a calmer period. For now he was unable to separate her, to eliminate the emotion--he was forced to acknowledge--the thought of her aroused, from the problems themselves. Who was she? At moments he seemed to see her shining, accusing, as Truth herself, and again as a Circe who had drawn him by subtle arts from his wanderings, luring him to his death; or, at other times, as the mutinous daughter of revolt. But when he felt, in memory, the warm touch of her hand, the old wildness of his nature responded, he ceased to speculate or care, and he longed only to crush and subdue her by the brute power of the man in him. For good or bad, she had woven her spell.
Here was the old, elemental, twofold contest, carnal and spiritual, thoroughly revived!...
He recalled, in his musings, the little theological school surrounded by southern woods and fields, where he had sometime walked under autumn foliage with the elderly gentleman who had had such an influence on his life--the dean. Mild-mannered and frail, patient in ordinary converse,--a lion for the faith. He would have died for it as cheerfully as any martyr in history. By the marvels of that faith Holder had beheld, from his pew in the chapel, the little man transformed. He knew young men, their perplexities and temptations, and he dealt with them personally, like a father. Holder"s doubts were stilled, he had gained power of his temptations and peace for his soul, and he had gone forth inspired by the reminder that there was no student of whom the dean expected better things. Where now were the thousands of which he had dreamed, and which he was to have brought into the Church?...
Now, he asked himself, was it the dean, or the dean"s theology through which his regeneration had come? Might not the inherent goodness of the dean be one thing, and his theology quite another? Personality again!
He recalled one of the many things which Alison Parr had branded on his memory,--"the belief, the authority in which the man is clothed, and not the man!" The dean"s G.o.d had remained silent on the subject of personality. Or, at the best, he had not encouraged it; and there were--Hodder could not but perceive--certain contradictions in his character, which were an anomalistic blending of that of the jealous G.o.d of Moses and of the G.o.d of Christ. There must be continuity--G.o.d could not change. Therefore the G.o.d of infinite love must retain the wrath which visited sins of the fathers on the children, which demanded sacrifice, atonement,--an exact propitiation for his anger against mankind. An innocent life of sorrow and suffering!
And again, "You and your religion are as far apart as the poles!" Had he, Hodder, outgrown the dean"s religion, or had it ever been his own?
Was there, after all, such a thing as religion? Might it not be merely a figment of the fertile imagination of man? He did not escape the terror of this thought when he paused to consider his labour of the past two years and the vanity of its results. And little by little the feeling grew upon him, such being the state of his mind, that he ought not to continue, for the present at least, to conduct the services. Should he resign, or go away for a while to some quiet place before he made such a momentous decision? There was no one to whom he could turn; no layman, and no clergyman; not even the old bishop, whom he had more than once mentally accused of being, too broad and too tolerant! No, he did not wish a clergyman"s solution. The significance of this thought flashed through him--that the world itself was no longer seeking clergymen"s solutions. He must go off alone, and submit his faith to the impartial test.
It was in a vigil of the night, when he lay in the hot darkness, unable to sleep, that he came at length to this resolve. And now that he had cut the knot he was too just to blame Alison Parr for having pointed out--with what often had seemed a pitiless cruelty--something of which he had had a constantly growing perception yet had continually sought to evade. And he reviewed, as the church bells recorded the silent hours, how, little by little, his confidence had crumbled before the shocks of the successive revelations--some of them so slight that they had pa.s.sed unnoticed: comparisons, inevitably compelled; Dalton Street; the confessions of Eleanor Goodrich and Mrs. Constable; Mr. Plimpton and his views of life--Eldon Parr! Even the slamming of the carriage doors in Burton Street had had a significance!
Might it not prove that this woman had let fall into the turbid waters of his soul the drop that was to clear them forever? He would go away.
He would not see her again.
Over the sleeping city, unapprehended, stole the dawn.
He arose, but instead of falling on his knees he went to the window and lifted his face to the whitening sky.... Slowly out of the obscurity of the earth"s shadow emerged the vague outlines of familiar things until they stood sharply material, in a silence as of death. A sparrow twittered, and suddenly the familiar, soot-grimed roofs were bathed in light, and by a touch made beautiful....
Some hours later the city was wide awake. And Hodder, bathed and dressed, stood staring down from his study window into the street below, full now of young men and girls; some with set faces, hurrying, intent, others romping and laughing as they dodged the trucks and trolley cars; all on their way to the great shoe factory around the corner, the huge funnels of which were belching forth smoke into the morning air.
The street emptied, a bell rang, a whistle blew, the hum of distant machinery began....