Chapter III: Part 3

“Now I was aware that there was something of the same activity in the heart of the woman, but I did not know which was the controlling power. I did not know whether the initiative sprang from the Tabernacle and communicated itself to the nun’s will; or whether she, by bending herself upon the Tabernacle, set in motion a huge dormant power. It appeared to me possible that the solution lay in the fact that two wills co-operated, each reacting upon the other. This, in a kind of way, appears to me now true as regards the whole mystery of free-will and prayer and grace.

“At any rate the union of these two represented itself to me, as I have said, as forming a kind of engine that radiated an immense light or sound or movement. And then I perceived something else too.

“I once fell asleep in one of those fast trains from the north, and did not awake until we had reached the terminus. The last thing I had seen before falling asleep had been the quiet darkening woods and fields through which we were sliding, and it was a shock to awake in the bright humming terminus and to drive through the crowded streets, under the electric glare from the lamps and windows. Now I felt something of that sort now. A moment ago I had fancied myself apart from movement and activity in this quiet convent; but I seemed somehow to have stepped into a centre of busy, rushing life. I can scarcely put the sensation more clearly than that. I was aware that the atmosphere was charged with energy; great powers seemed to be astir, and I to be close to the whirling centre of it all.

“Or think of it like this. Have you ever had to wait in a City office? If you have done that you will know how intense quiet can coexist with intense activity. There are quiet figures here and there round the room. Or it may be there is only one such figure––a great financier––and he sitting there almost motionless. Yet you know that every movement tingles, as it were, out from that still room all over the world. You can picture to yourself how people leap to obey or to resist––how lives rise and fall, and fortunes are made and lost, at the gentle movements of this lonely quiet man in his office. Well, so it was here. I perceived that this black figure knelt at the centre of reality and force, and with the movements of her will and lips controlled spiritual destinies for eternity. There ran out from this peaceful chapel lines of spiritual power that lost themselves in the distance, bewildering in their profusion and terrible in the intensity of their hidden fire. Souls leaped up and renewed the conflict as this tense will strove for them. Souls even at that moment leaving the body struggled from death into spiritual life, and fell panting and saved at the feet of the Redeemer on the other side of death. Others, acquiescent and swooning in sin, woke and snarled at the merciful stab of this poor nun’s prayers.”

The priest was trembling now with excitement.

“Yes,” he said; “yes, and I in my stupid arrogance had thought that my life was more active in God’s world than hers. So a small provincial shopkeeper, bustling to and fro behind the counter, might think, if only he were mad enough, that his life was more active and alive than the life of a director who sits at his table in the City. Yes, that is a vulgar simile; but the only one that I can think of which in the least expresses what I knew to be true. There lay my little foolish narrow life behind me, made up of spiritless prayers and efforts and feeble dealings with souls; and how complacent I had been with it all, how self-centred, how out of the real tide of spiritual movement! And meanwhile, for years probably, this nun had toiled behind these walls in the silence of grace, with the hum of the world coming faintly to her ears, and the cries of peoples and nations, and of persons whom the world accounts important, sounding like the voices of children at play in the muddy street outside; and indeed that is all that they are, compared to her––children making mud-pies or playing at shop outside the financier’s office.”

The priest was silent, and his face became quieter again. Then in a moment he spoke again.

“Well,” he said, “that is what I believe to have been an intellectual vision. There was no form or appearance or sound; but I can only express what was shown to me to be true, under those images. It almost seems to me as I look back now as if the air in the chapel were full of a murmurous sound and a luminous mist as the currents of need and grace went to and fro. But I know really that the silence was deep and the air dim.”

Then I made a foolish remark.

“If you feel like that about the Contemplative Life, I wonder you did not try to enter it yourself.”

The priest looked at me for a moment.

“It would be rash, surely, for a little shopkeeper of no particular ability to compete with Rothschild.”

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Under Which King?

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“All such knowledge as this, whether it comes from God or not, can be
but of little profit to the soul in the way of perfection, if it
trusts to it: yea, rather, if it is not careful to reject it, ... it
will bring upon it great evil; ... for all the dangers and
inconveniences of the supernatural apprehensions, and many more, are
to be found here.”

_The Ascent of Mount Carmel_.

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Under Which King?

WITHIN a day or two of our conversation on St. Teresa, I asked the old priest about what is called “Quietism.” A friend had given me an old copy of Molinos’ _Spiritual Guide_, and I knew that the writer had been condemned and imprisoned for life, and yet I could not understand in what lay his crime.

“It is difficult to put into words,” said the priest, “or even to understand, why certain sentences are condemned, since it is probably possible to parallel them from other Catholic mystics whose names are honoured. Yet the fact remains that the result of Molinos’ teaching was neglect of the Sacraments and of external means of grace, which was not so in the case of the schools of other mystics.”

“But I will tell you a story,” he went on, “to illustrate the effect of certain kinds of mysticism; and I must leave you to judge whether my friend was right or wrong in what he decided, for I must tell you first that the incident did not happen to me. On the whole I may say that I have my own opinion on the subject, but I will not tell you what it is, as sometimes I am strongly inclined to change it. However, you shall hear the story. Shall we take a stroll on the terrace?”

And when we had reached it, he began:

“My friend was a priest of about thirty years of age (this happened some forty years ago). He was working in the country at the time, and had a great deal of leisure for reading, and this he chiefly occupied in the study of various mystics, and most of them of the Quietistic school. You know, too, that one of their characteristic lines of thought lies in the abandonment of all effort save that of adhering to God, and even that is to be a passive rather than an active effort. The soul must lie still, says one of them, and be drawn as if by a rope up the Mount of Perfection. The slightest movement will check or divert that swift and steady approach towards God.

“But my friend not only studied writers of this school intellectually, but he put himself more or less under their spiritual direction. He told me afterwards that it seemed to him that if he used the Sacraments faithfully, and if he found that his devotion towards them did not cool, he would be sufficiently protected against possible extravagances or heresies in his spiritual reading. His daily meditation, too, he told me, began to mean more to him than ever in his lifetime: the presence of God seemed more real and accessible, and, above all, the guidance of God in his daily life more apparent. The time that really matters, as he said to me once, is the time between our religious exercises; and in this time, too, God manifested Himself. In fact, from all that he said to me, I have very little doubt that his character and spiritual life were both deepened and purified, at any rate at first, by his devotional study of these mystics.

“One word more before I begin the actual story.

“I said just now that the guidance of God began to be more apparent in his daily life. There are two main ways of settling questions that come up for decision, and both ways are possible to a religious man. One way is to lay stress on the intellectual side, to weigh the arguments carefully, and decide, as it were, by reasoning alone: the other is to lay comparatively little stress on the arguments and the intellectual side generally, and to make the main effort lie in the aspiration of the will towards God for guidance. We may call them, roughly, the intellectual and the intuitive. Now of course my friend’s mystical studies inclined him more and more towards the latter. He told me, in fact, that in the most ordinary questions––in his visiting his people––in his preaching––in his dealings with souls––he began more and more to refuse intellectual light, and to trust instead to the immediate interior guidance of the Holy Ghost. More than once, for example, he laid aside the sermon he had prepared, as he entered the pulpit, and preached from a text that had seemed to be suggested to him. Of course it was not so good from the literary point of view; but that, as he very justly said, is not the most important question in judging of a sermon. He seemed to find, he told me, that his spiritual power in every way developed, both in his interior life and in his dealings with others.

“In his conversations, too, he would allow long silences to come, if it did not seem to him that God moved him to speak; at other times he would drop conventional modes of speech and say things that, humanly judged, were calculated to do the very opposite of what he personally desired. Sometimes in such a case his wish was attained, and sometimes not; but in both cases he forced himself to regard it as if he had succeeded. In short, he acted and spoke in obedience to this interior drawing, and disregarded consequences entirely. And this, I need hardly say, is one road to interior peace.

“And then at last a startling thing happened.

“There had been some crime committed: I have not an idea what it was. Two men were involved in the consequences. One, whom we will call A., had committed the crime: but he could only be prosecuted if B., whom he had seriously injured, consented to take action. Now my friend was deeply interested in A., and he thought he knew that the one chance of A.’s salvation lay in his being allowed to go unpunished. But Lord B., who, by the way, was an Irish peer, of no importance himself, though his father had been well known, was a hard, vindictive man, and had publicly announced his intention of ruining A. In this state of affairs my friend was asked to intercede by A. and his friends.

“Lord B. lived in a large country-house some four or five miles from my friend’s house. He was an unmarried man, but generally had his house fairly full of his friends, who did not bear the best possible reputation.

“My friend arrived at the house by appointment with B., whom he did not personally know, towards the close of a rainy autumn afternoon. In spite of his anxiety he had resolved to be guided as usual by the interior monitor whom he had learnt to trust, and he had hardly thought of a single argument which he could use. Yet he felt confident that he was right in coming, and equally confident that he would know what to say when the time came. As he got near the house this confident sense of guidance increased to an extent that almost terrified him. It seemed to him, as he walked under the dripping yellow branches, that a strong, almost physical, oppression carried him forward. As if in a dream he saw the manservant appear in answer to his ring, and heard, as from a great distance, the man tell him that Lord B. had come in a little while before, and was now expecting him in the smoking-room.

“On entering the house these curious sensations, which he hardly attempted to describe to me, seemed to diminish a little, and he felt cool and confident. He told me that the sense of oppression resting on him was dispelled, as if by a breeze, as he passed along the corridor on the ground floor on his way to the smoking-room in the west wing of the house.

“The servant threw open the door and announced him, and my friend went through, and the door closed behind him: but the moment he had crossed the threshold he felt that something was wrong.

“There was a circle of men, some in shooting costume, and some as if they had not been out all day, sitting in easy chairs round the fire, which was to the right of the door. My friend could see most of their faces, and Lord B.’s face among them, as he paused at the door; but not one offered to move, though all looked curiously at him.

“There was silence for a moment, and then Lord B. said suddenly and loudly:

“‘Well, here’s the parson at last, sermon and all.’

“And then two or three of the men laughed.

“My friend saw of course that Lord B. had arranged the interview in this way simply in order to insult him, and that he would not be able to speak to him in private at all, as he had hoped. There was, he told me, just one great heave of anger in his heart at this offensive behaviour; but he did his best to crush it down, and still stood without speaking. He had not, he said, an idea what to say or do, so he stood and waited.

“Lord B. got up in a moment and lit a cigarette with his back to my friend; and then turned and faced him, leaning against the mantelpiece.

“‘Well,’ he said, ‘we’re all waiting.’

“Still there was silence. One of the men beyond the fire suddenly laughed.

“‘Now then,’ said Lord B. impatiently, ‘for God’s sake say what you came to say, and go.’

“As this sentence ended my friend felt a curious sensation run over him, like those he had experienced in the park, but far stronger. He could never give me any description of it, except by saying that it seemed as if a force were laying hold of him in every remote fibre of his bodily and spiritual being. His own will seemed to give up the control into some stronger hand, and he felt a sense of being steadied and quieted.

“Then he was aware that his own voice said a single sentence of some half-dozen words; but though he heard each word, it was instantly obliterated from his mind. In his description of it all to me afterwards, he said it was like words that we hear immediately before we fall asleep in a lecture-room or a railway carriage: each word is English and intelligible, but the sentence conveys no impression.

“While his voice spoke for perhaps two or three seconds, his eyes were fixed on Lord B.’s face, and in that momentary interval he saw a terrible fear and astonishment suddenly stamped upon it. The mouth opened in loose lines and the cigarette fell out, and B.’s hands rose instinctively as if to keep my friend off. One of the men, too, at the further end of the circle suddenly sprang erect, with the same kind of imploring horror on his face.

“That was all that my friend had time to see; for the same power that had laid hold of him turned him immediately to the door, and he opened it and went out and down the corridor. As he went the strange sensation passed, but he felt the sweat prick to his skin and then pour down his face. He heard, too, as he reached the end of the corridor, a bell peal violently somewhere. He passed out into the hall, and even as he opened the front door a servant dashed past him through the hall and down the corridor, up which he had just come.

“He went straight home, feeling terribly tired and overwrought, and had to go to bed on reaching his house, tortured by neuralgia.

“Two hours later a note was brought by a groom from Lord B., written in a shaking hand, with an abject apology for his reception in the afternoon; an entreaty to him not to mention the subject again which he had spoken of in the sitting-room, with a scarcely veiled offer of a bribe, and an emphatic promise to withdraw all proceedings against A.

“On the following day he was told that Lord B. was supposed to be unwell, and that the house-party had been hurriedly broken up the night before.

“From that day to this he has never had an idea of what the sentence was that his voice spoke that worked such a miracle.”

“That is a most curious story,” I said. “What do you make of it?”

The priest smiled.

“I will tell you what my friend made of it. He gave up his study of mysticism, yet without in any sense condemning that line of thought of which I have spoken. His reasons, which he explained to me after coming to a decision, were that such a visitation might or might not be from God. If it were not from God, then that proved that he had been meddling with high things, and had somehow slipped under some other control. If it were from God, it might be that it was just for that very purpose that he had been brought so far, but that he dared not pursue that path without some distinct further sign. ‘In any case,’ he said, ‘no soul can be lost by following the simple and well-beaten path of ordinary devotion and prayer.’ And so he returned to intellectual forms of meditation, such as most Christians use. He died a few years ago, full of holiness and good works.

“But for you there are several opinions open. Either that it was an intensely strong case of hypnotic thought-transference from Lord B. to my friend, and that the latter only spoke mechanically of something that lay in the former’s mind; or you may decide that the whole affair was of the Evil One, and that A. would have been all the better for prosecution, and that an evil being somehow found entrance into the strained nature of my friend, and used it for his own purposes; or that the prophetic gift was bestowed on him, but that the ordeal was too fierce and he too cowardly to claim it. And there are other solutions as well, no doubt possible.

“For myself I think I have formed my opinion; but I would prefer, as Herodotus says, to keep it to myself.”

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With Dyed Garments

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“Jesu, well ought I love Thee,
For Thou me shewest Thy rood-tree,
Thy crown of thorns, and nails three,
The sharp spear that piercéd Thee.”
_Swete Jhesu now wil I Synge._

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With Dyed Garments

WHEN the second post came in one morning I saw a letter addressed to the priest, in the trembling large characters of an old man’s hand, lying upon the slab in the hall. When I came in to lunch I found the old clergyman with an open letter in his hand, and his face full of almost childish happiness.

“I have heard from my oldest friend,” he said, making a little movement with the letter. “It is months since he has written. I have known him ever since we were boys.”

We sat down to lunch, but he kept on referring to his friend, and to the pleasure the letter gave him.

“We are always planning to meet,” he said to me presently. “But we never can manage it. We are both so old. He is much more active than I am, however. He is full of good works, while I, as you know, lead an idle life. I could not take charge of a church. It is all I can do now to serve my own little chapel upstairs.”

“Where is he working?” I asked.

“I think perhaps you fancy he is in Holy Orders, but he is not. He has been on the Stock Exchange till a few years ago, and now he is living in the country, getting ready to die, as he tells me. But he is full of good works; his letter here has news about the village, and of a man whose acquaintance he has made in the reading-room there, which he himself built a year ago; but he is full of plans too, and asks my advice.”

“It is not often you come across a business man like that,” I said.

“No, he is wonderful, but he has been like that for years. He has done a great deal all his life among poor people in London. For years he never missed his two or three nights a week in some club, or on some committee, or visiting sick people.”

I began to think that it might have been through the friendship of the priest that this man had been such a worker. But presently he began again.

“Perhaps the most wonderful thing was the way he first began to do such work. Let me see, have I mentioned his name? No? Then I can tell you, otherwise it would not be discreet; that is––” he added, “if you would care to hear.”

I told him I should be very much interested.

“Then after lunch we will have coffee in the garden, and I will tell you.”

When we had sat down under the shade of a wall, with the tall avenue of pines opposite us making a dark tangled frieze against the delicate sky, he began.

“What I am going to tell you now has been gathered partly from conversations with my friend: and partly from letters he has written to me. Years ago I jotted down the order of events, with names and dates, but that, of course, I fear I cannot show even to you. However, I know the story well, and you may rely on the main facts.

“I must tell you first that many years ago now, my friend, who was about forty years old, had lately become a partner in his father’s firm: and of course was greatly occupied with all the details of business. It was a broker’s firm, well established and did a good steady business. My friend at that time had no idea of doing any work outside his occupation. I heard him say in fact, about this time, that his work seemed to absorb all his energies and capacity. Then the first event of the series took place.

“He was coming home one frosty afternoon in December, between three and four o’clock, on the top of an omnibus. He was sitting in front and looking about him. He noticed a poorly-dressed man standing on the pavement on the right-hand side, as if he wished to cross. Then he began to cross, and came at last right up to the omnibus on which my friend was sitting, and paused a moment to let it pass. As he stood there, my friend watching him with that listless interest with which a tired man will observe details, a hansom cab moving quickly came in the opposite direction. It seemed as if the horse would run the man down. It was too sudden to warn him, but the man saw it, and to avoid the horse sprang quickly forward, his head half turned away, and his feet came between the front and back wheels of the omnibus. There was a jolt and a terrible scream, and my friend horrified leant far over the side to see. When the omnibus had passed the man stood for a moment on his crushed feet, and then swayed forward and fell on his face. My friend started up and made a movement to go to him, but several others had seen the accident and ran to the man, and a policeman was crossing quickly from the other side, so he sat down again and the omnibus carried him on.

“Now this horrible thing remained in my friend’s mind, haunted him, shocked him profoundly. He could not forget the terrible face of pain that he had seen upturned for an instant, and his imagination carried him on in spite of himself to dwell on the details of those crushed feet. He wrote me a long letter a week or two afterwards, minutely describing all that I have told you.

“The following summer he was going down to the Kennington Oval one Saturday afternoon to see the close of some famous cricket match. He travelled by the Underground Railway as far as Westminster, and from there determined to walk at least across the Bridge. He walked on the right-hand side, and had reached the steps of St. Thomas’ Hospital. He waited here a moment undecided whether to walk on or drive.

“As he waited, he half turned and saw a beggar sitting in the angle between the steps and the wall. There was a white dog beside him. The beggar’s face was partly bandaged; but what caught my friend’s attention most were his two hands. They were lying palms downwards on the beggar’s knees, bandaged like his face, but in the centre of each was a dark spot, showing through the wrapping, as if there were a festering wound that soaked through from underneath. My friend looked at him in disgust for a moment: but terribly fascinated by those quiet suffering hands; and then he passed on. But during all that afternoon he could not forget those hands. I daresay he was overwrought and nervous. But his memory too went back to the accident by the Marble Arch. That night too, as he told me in a conversation afterwards, as he tossed about, his windows wide open to catch the night air, half waking visions kept moving before him of a man with crushed feet and bandaged hands, who moaned and lifted a drawn face to the sky.

“Early that autumn he was alone, except for the servants, in his father’s house in London. A maid was taken ill. I forget the nature of the illness, but perhaps you will be able to identify it when I have finished. At any rate the girl grew quickly worse. One morning just before he started to the City the doctor, who had called early that morning, asked to have a word with him, and told him he thought he ought to operate immediately, and asked for his sanction.

“‘Well,’ said my friend, ‘of course I must speak to the girl about it. Have you told her yet?’

“‘No,’ said the doctor, ‘I thought I should mention it to you first. I understand that the girl has no relations in the world.’

“‘Can you tell me the nature of the operation?’ asked my friend.

“‘It is not really serious. It is an incision in the right side,’ and he added a few details explaining the case.

“‘Well,’ said my friend, ‘we had better go upstairs together.’

“They went up and found the girl perfectly conscious and reasonable. She consented to the operation, which was fixed for that evening.

“But all that day the picture floated before his eyes of the quiet room at the top of the house, and the girl lying there waiting. And then the scene would shift a little. And he would see the girl after it was over, with a bandage against her side, and the knowledge of the little wound beneath. When he reached home, late in the evening, the doctor was waiting for him.

“‘It has been perfectly successful,’ he said, ‘and I think she will recover.’

“Now, that evening, as my friend sat at the dinner-table alone, smoking and thinking, his old experiences came to his mind again. In less than a year he had seen three things, none of which seemed to have any very close relation to him, but each of which had deeply affected him. He told me afterwards that he began to suspect a design underlying them; but he had not a glimmer of light, strange as it may seem to you and me, as to the nature of that design. Within a month, however, I received a letter from him, from some place in the country where he was staying, describing the following incident.

“He had gone down from a Saturday to Monday to a friend’s house in Surrey. On the Sunday afternoon he and his friend went for a walk through some woods. Autumn was in full glory, and the trees were blazing in red and gold: and the bramble branches were weighed down with purple fruit. As they walked together along a grass ride they heard shouts and laughter of children in the woods on one side. They could hear footsteps pattering through dry leaves, and the tearing and trampling of brushwood; and in a moment more a boy burst out of the thin hedge, tripped in a bramble, and rolled into the grass walk. He was up again in a moment laughing and flushed, but my friend saw across his forehead a little thin red dotted line where a thorn had scratched him. As the boy laughed up into their faces, he lifted his hand to his forehead.

“‘Why it’s wet,’ he said, and then, looking at his fingers: ‘Why, it’s blood! I’ve scratched myself.’

“Other footsteps came running through the undergrowth, and the boy himself ran off down the road, and the footsteps in the wood stopped, retraced themselves and died away in faint rustlings up the hill. But as my friend had looked he had seen in his memory those other experiences of the last year. And all seemed to concentrate themselves on one Figure––with wounded feet and hands and side––and a torn forehead.

‘My friend stood quiet so long that his companion spoke to him and touched his arm.

“‘Yes, I am ready,’ he said; ‘let us go home.’

“The end of the letter I cannot quote to you. It is too intimate and personal. But it ended with a request to myself to give him an introduction to some friend who would give him work to do in some poor district. And work of that kind he has carried on ever since.”

The old priest’s voice ceased.

“There is one thing my friend did not know,” he said after a moment. “When that particular operation on the side is performed, of which I have spoken, there comes out blood and water. A doctor will tell you so.”

And then:

“That is my friend’s story,” he said, “Do you not think it remarkable?”

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Unto Babes

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“Saint Bernard speaks of the words of Job that he says: ‘_Abscondit
lucem in manibus_’ (that is to say, ‘God has light hid in His
hands’)––‘Thou wot well, he that has a candle a-light between his
hands, he may hide it and shew it at his own will. So does our Lord
to His chosen.’”

_The Abbey of the Holy Ghost._

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Unto Babes

A FEW days after the conversation I have described my visit to the old man came to an end, and my work drew me back to London; but I left behind me a promise to return and spend Christmas at his house. He in the meantime would, he promised me, try to put together some other stories for me against the time that I should return. There were many others, he said, that he had come across in his life which he hoped would interest me, besides a few more personal experiences of his own.

And so I left him smiling and waving to me from his bedroom window that overlooked the drive (for I had to go by an early train), with the clean-shaven face of his old servant looking at me discreetly and gravely from the clear-glass chapel window next to the priest’s room, where he had been setting things ready before his master was dressed.

* * * * *

It was a dark winter afternoon when I returned, a week or so before Christmas.

The coachman told me on my inquiry that his master seemed very much aged during the autumn and winter, that he had scarcely left the house since the leaves had fallen, except to sit for an hour or two in sunshiny weather in the sheltered angle of the wall where was the tiled platform that I have spoken of; and that he was afraid he had been suffering from depression. There had been days of almost complete silence, at least so Parker had told him, when the master had sat all day turning over letters and books and old drawers.

I reproached myself with having troubled the old man with demands for more stories; and feared that it had been in the attempt to please me that he had fallen brooding over the past, perhaps dwelling too much on sorrows of which I knew nothing.

As we passed under the pines that tossed their sombre plumes in the wind, the sun, breaking through clouds in an angry glory on my right, blazed on the little square-paned windows of the house on my left. The chapel-window on the top story seemed especially full of red light streaming from within, but the flame swept across the upper story as we drove past, and left the windows blank and colourless just before we turned the corner at the back of the house.

The old man met me in the hall, and I was startled to see the change that had come to him. His eyes seemed larger than ever, and there was a sorrow in them that I had not seen before. They had been the eyes of a stainless child, wide and smiling; now they were the eyes of one who was under some burden almost too heavy to be borne. In the stronger light of the sitting-room as the candles shone on his face, I saw that my impression had only been caused by a drooping of the eyelids, that now hung down a little further. But it looked a tired face.

He welcomed me, and said several charming things to me that I should be ashamed to quote, but he made me feel that he was glad that I had come; and so I was glad too. But he said among other things this:

“I am glad you have come now, because I think I shall have something further to tell you. I have had indications during this autumn that the end is coming, and I think that if I have to pass through a dark valley,––and I feel that I am at its entrance even now,––I think that He will give me His staff as well as His rod. But I am an old man and full of fancies, so please do not question me. But I am very glad,” and he took my hand and stroked it for a moment, “very glad that you are here, because I do not think that you will be afraid.”

During the following days he told me many stories, bringing out the old books and letters of which the coachman had spoken, and spelling out notes through his tortoiseshell glass, as he sat by the open fireplace in the central sitting-room, with the logs crackling and overrun with swift sparks as they rested on their bed of ashes. The door into the garden where the old drive had once been was now kept closed, and a heavy curtain hung over it.

We did not go out very much together––only in the early afternoons we would walk for an hour or so, he leaning on my arm and on a stick, up and down the terraced walk that lay next the drive under the pines, as the sunset burned across the hills like a far-away judgment. Some day perhaps I will write out some of the stories that he told me, although not all. I have the notes by me.

Here is one of them.

We were walking on one of these dark winter afternoons very slowly uphill towards the village that the priest might get a change from the garden. The morning had been gusty and wet, with sleet showers and even a sprinkle of pure snow as the sky cleared after lunch-time; and now the weather was settling down for a frost, and the snow lay thinly here and there on the rapidly hardening ground.

“It is remarkable,” the old man was saying to me, “how in spite of our Lord’s words people still think that faith is a matter more or less of intellect. Such a phrase as ‘intelligent faith’ is, of course, strictly most incorrect.”

He stopped and looked at me as he said this, as if prepared for dispute. I did not disappoint him.

“You are very puzzling;” I said. “I cannot believe that you do not value intellect. Surely it is a gift of God, and therefore may adorn faith, as any other gift may do.”

“Yes,” he said, walking on, “it may adorn it; but it has nothing more to do with it really than jewels have to do with a beautiful woman. In fact, sometimes faith is far more beautiful unadorned, and it is quite possible to crush a delicate and growing faith with a weight of learned arguments intended to adorn and perfect it. Christian apologetics, it seems to me, are only really useful in the mouth of one who realises their entire inadequacy. You can demonstrate nothing of God. You can, by arguments, draw a number of lines that converge towards God, and render His existence and His attributes probable; but you cannot reach Him along those lines. Faith depends not on intellectual but on moral conditions. ‘Blessed are the pure in heart,’ said our Saviour, not ‘Blessed are the profound or acute of intellect’––‘for they shall see God.’ It is certainly true of intellectual as of all other riches that they who possess them shall find difficulty in entering into the kingdom of God.”

“And so,” I said, “you think that intellectual powers are not things to covet, and that education is not a very important question after all?”

“No more than wealth,” he answered, “at least so far as you mean by education instruction in demonstrable facts or exact sciences. The point of our existence here is to know God. Well, you know for yourself how the race for wealth is ruining millions of souls to-day. No less surely is keen intellectual competition ruining souls. Mr. ––––, for instance,” he said, naming a well-known critic and poet; “was there ever a man of keener and finer intellect, or of more unerring instinct in matters of literary taste? Well, once I talked with that man most of a day on all his own subjects; in fact, he did nearly all the talking, and I was astonished, I must confess, at the perfection of the training of his already brilliant powers. So much I could perceive, though of course I could not follow him. And of course there were many delicate shades of beauty, if not much more, invisible to me in his talk and criticism. His scale of intellectual beauty ran up out of my sight altogether. But what astonished me more was the coarseness and dulness of his spiritual instinct. I will not call him a child in matters of faith, because that would be high praise; but he was just an ill-bred boor. I have known many a Sussex villager of far purer and finer spiritual fibre. No, no; faith can and does exist quite apart from intellect; and to increase or develop the one often means the decrease and incoherence of the other. _Seigneur, donnez-moi la foi du charbonnier!_”

I must confess that this was a new point of view for me; and I am not sure now whether I do not still think it exaggerated and dangerous; but I said nothing, because it did seem to open up difficult questions, and also to throw light on other difficult questions. The priest turned to me again as he walked.

“Why, it must be so,” he said; “if it were not, clever people would have a better hope of salvation than stupid people; and that is absurd––as absurd as if rich people should be nearer God than poor people. No, no; talents are distributed unevenly, it is true: to one ten and to another five; but each has one pound, all alike.”

We had reached the top of the slope, and the towering hedges had gradually fallen away, so that we could now see far and wide over the country. Away behind us, as we paused for breath, we could see the misty Brighton downs, while in the middle distance lay tumbled wooded hills, with smoke beginning to curl up here and there from the evening fires of hidden villages. The sky was clear overhead, but in the west, where the sunset was beginning to smoulder, a few heavy clouds still lingered.

“And God sees all:” said the priest. “Can you put up with another story as we walk home again? I think I ought to be turning now.”

We turned and began to retrace our steps downhill.

“This is not an experience of my own,” he said. “It was told me by a friend of mine in Cornwall. He was the squire of a little village a few miles out of Truro, and lived there most of the year except a few weeks in the spring, when he would go abroad. He was a man of great learning and taste, but had the faith of a little child. It was like a spring of clear water to hear him speak of God and heavenly things.

“There was a boy in the village who was an idiot. His parents were dead, and he lived alone with his old grandmother, who was a strict Calvinist, and who regarded her grandson as hopelessly damned because his faith and his expression of it were not as hers. There were evident signs, she said, that God’s inscrutable decrees were against him. The local preachers there would have nothing to do with the boy; and the clergyman of the parish, after an attempt or two, had given the child up as hopeless. I think my friend told me that the clergyman had tried to teach him Old Testament history.

“Well, the boy was a terrible and disgusting case. I will not go into details beyond saying that the boy’s head had the look of a mule about it; his mother, I think, had had a fright shortly before his birth, and the boy used to think sometimes that he was a horse or mule, and the village children used to encourage him in it, and ride and drive him on the green, for he was quite harmless. And so he grew up, neglected and untaught, spending much of his time out of doors, and creeping home on all fours in the evening, snorting and stamping and neighing when he was much excited; and he would stable himself in a corner of the wide dark kitchen, and munch grass; while his grandmother sat in her high chair by the fire reading in her Bible, or looking over her spectacles at the poor misshapen body in the corner that held a damned soul.

“Now my friend hated to see this child. It was the one thing that troubled his faith. Those who have the faith of children have also the troubles of children; and this living example before his eyes of what looked like the carelessness of God, or worse, was a greater offence to my friend’s faith than all infidel arguments, or the mere knowledge that such things happened.

“On a certain Christmas Eve my friend had been a long tramp over the hills with a guest who was staying with him for the shooting. They were returning through his own property towards evening, and were just dropping down from the hill. Their path lay along the upper edge of an old disused stone-quarry, whose entrance lay perhaps a hundred yards away from the valley-road that led into the village––so it was a lonely and unfrequented place. The evening was closing in; and my friend, as he led the way along the path, was trying to make out the outlines of stones and bushes on the floor of the quarry, which lay perhaps seventy feet below them. All at once his eye was caught by the steady glimmer of light somewhere in the dimness beneath, and the sound of a voice. He guessed at once that there were tramps below, and was angry at the thought that they must have wilfully disregarded the notice he had put up about making a fire so close to the wood: and he determined to turn them out, and, if need be, to give them shelter for the night in one of his own outhouses. So he stopped and explained to his friend which path would take him home, while that he himself intended to make his way along the lip of the quarry to the entrance, and then to go on into its interior where the tramps had made their camp; and he promised to be at the house five minutes after his friend.

“So they separated, and he himself soon found his way down a narrow overgrown path that brought him to the opening of the quarry.

“It was a good deal darker here, as the hill shadowed it from the west, and high trees rose on one side; but he was able to stumble along the stony path which led to the interior, though it grew darker still as he went. Presently he turned the corner of a tall boulder, and emerged into the kind of semi-circus that formed the heart of the quarry: before him, about a third way up the slope, burned the glimmer of light he had noticed from above, but even as he saw it it went out: my friend stood in the path and called out, explaining who he was, not threatening at all, but offering, if it was any one who wanted shelter, to provide it for the night. There was no answer, only the sound of scuffling in the dimness in front, and then the confused sound of footsteps scrambling: my friend ran forward, calling, and made out presently an oddly shaped thing scrambling over the silt and stone towards a shoulder of rock that stood out against the sky on his left (I think he said). He tried to follow, but it was too dark, and after he had stumbled once or twice, he gave up the pursuit. In a moment more the climbing figure stood out clear against the sky for an instant, and then disappeared: and the squire saw with a shock of disgust the mule-like head and tangled hair rising from the high shoulders of the village idiot, and his hands dangling on each side of him; and he heard a high-screaming neighing. But at least, he thought to himself, he would go and see what the boy had been doing.

“He made his way up the slope of silted gravel and mud that lay against the face of the rock, and at last reached a little platform apparently stamped and cut out at the top of the skree just where it touched the quarry-side. It was too dark for him to distinguish anything clearly, so he struck a match and held it in the still sheltered air while he looked about him. This is what he saw.

“There was a short halter, with a kind of rude head-stall, fastened to a rusty iron staple driven into the rock. There was a little pile of cut grass below it. There was a kind of mud trough constructed against the stone, with a little straw sprinkled in it and holly berries and leaves in front of it; but this showed signs of having been hastily trampled down, though parts of it survived: there were marks of hob-nailed boots in it here and there. So much my friend had noticed when the match burned his fingers: but just before he dropped it he noticed something else which made him open his box and light another match: and then he saw the end of a farthing taper sticking out of the ground into which it had been pushed, and another crushed into a ball. He drew out the first and lighted it, and then noticed this last thing. Quite plainly marked on the soft edge of the mud-trough, in a place which the hob-nailed boots had not touched, was the mark of a tiny child’s naked foot, as if a baby had stood in the trough or manger, with one foot on the floor and another on the edge.

“Now I do not know what you think of this, but I know what my friend thought of it, and what I myself think of it. But before he went home he went first to the cottage where the boy lived and found him as usual tethered in the corner, with his grandmother nodding before the fire. The boy would do nothing but snort and stamp: and the grandmother could only say that ten minutes ago the boy had run in and gone straight to his corner as usual. The squire asked whether the boy had been trusted with a child by any one; but the grandmother said it was impossible. Nor indeed did he ever after hear a word of a child having been missed on that afternoon.

“Then, before he went home, he went to the little church, already decorated for the festival, and there with the fragrance of the holly and yew in the air about him, and the glimmer of a candle near the altar where the church-cleaner was sweeping, he praised the Holy Child whose Birth-night it was, and who had not disdained to lie in a manger and be adored by the beasts of the stall.

“The following morning on his way back from church he went to the quarry again with his friend to show him what he had seen; but the manger and the holly-berries and crumpled taper were all gone, and there was nothing to see but the iron staple and the platform beaten hard and flat.”

We had reached the avenue of pines by now that led to the house, and turned in by the little garden-gate.

“The story seems to show,” the priest added, “that intellect has not much to do with the knowledge of God; and that the things which He hides from the wise and prudent He reveals to babes.”

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The Traveller

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“I am amazed, not that the Traveller returns from that Bourne, but
that he returns so seldom.”

_The Pilgrims’ Way._

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The Traveller

ON one of these evenings as we sat together after dinner in front of the wide open fireplace in the central room of the house, we began to talk on that old subject––the relation of Science to Faith.