CHAPTER XVII
One Sunday afternoon I went to hear the Altruist lecture on the book of Job.
He had converted a Brand Street dance-hall into an auditorium, and the popular lectures he gave there drew many followers to his feet. He spoke with equal power on social, on religious, and on literary themes. Young working-men flocked round him to hear him set forth the wrongs of our present system of government, and the better things to be. Night after night the hall was crowded by men and women of all ranks and all occupations, who watched with untiring interest his treatment of positivism, agnosticism, atheism, Schopenhauerism, and his triumphant exposition of a belief that they are all recognized and transcended in the creed of the Anglican church.
I can see him now, if I shut my eyes,—a nervous little figure behind the low desk. There was a curious glint in his eyes, which were always looking over and beyond the heads of his audience. I can see, too, the eager, stricken faces of his hearers. They drank in his teachings with consuming thirst.
I have heard him speak many times, but I have rarely seen the eyes of one of his listeners removed an instant from his face. A kind of mesmeric power held them. There were questionings and rebellious objections before his arrival, or after his departure, but never in his presence.
I remember the comments made by two young granite-cutters one night before his lecture, Lecture X., in the “Exposition of Contemporary Thought.”
“I can’t for the life of me see,” said one of them, “how he can believe all this ’ere science and evolution and believe in Genesis too. ’Spose he’ll answer if I ask him?”
“Try,” said the other. “If he can’t answer your question, he’ll turn it intosomething he can answer. He’ll talk, anyway. And I’ll bet a dollar you won’t know but what he’s talking about the thing you asked him.”
But that very night the two young sceptics were smitten down. The Altruist pronounced their questions ignorant and crude, and explained the apparent contradiction in his beliefs as a part of the eternal paradox at the heart of all things.
I invited Janet to go with me on this particular Sunday, but she refused.
“I think that I would rather not hear Paul expound Job,” she said.
“He will do it brilliantly,” I suggested.
“Too brilliantly,” she laughed. “He talks so wisely of all human experience that you suspect him of never having had any of his own. He stands condemned by the amount of wisdom that he can utter concerning life which he has not shared. You feel that it all came from books.”
“But perhaps he will not deal with Job’s emotional experiences. The lecture may bepurely abstract. Don’t you like to hear your cousin philosophize?”
“No,” said the girl, “I don’t. Paul finds the universe easy to explain, but I mistrust his logic. To quote, I have forgotten whom: ‘Corner him in an argument, and he escapes out of the window into the Infinite.’”
So I went alone. Before the Altruist had been speaking five minutes I regretted that Janet had not come. He was alluding to other great rebels of literature,—Dante, Prometheus, and our own Carlyle,—souls stung by hurt into war with God, and afterward fighting their way through to a bitter peace.
There was a hush. Then we heard Job talking with God. His upbraiding of the Creator thundered through the room.
The impression given cannot be translated into words. The audience was swayed by the Altruist as grass is swayed by the wind.
Who had not known moments like that, when one arraigned God for hiding hismeanings from the eyes of men? That time of negation was necessary, leading, as it must, to affirmation. It was only a season of darkness, breaking into clearest light. Soon insight followed blindness; conviction followed doubt. Uncertainty could be only temporary with noble souls. For them the fog cleared, and a universe of order rose from chaos. They would suffer no longer the clouding of the intellect, or know the rebellion of the heart. Their cry was answered, and reason grasped the scheme of things.
Of this sure knowledge, universal expression had been given in the formulas of Anglican belief.
As the Altruist expounded the final relations of Job to the Creator, and explained God’s thought for man, the sudden illumination was blinding. For a moment the ultimate meaning of life and of death seemed ours.
The audience crowded round the Altruist to utter words of gratitude. One or two women wiped their eyes, and working-menof known sceptical tendencies came forward, with a certain shame-facedness, to grasp the Altruist’s hand.
I walked home alone in the early winter twilight.
There was no one in the parlour except the Butterfly Hunter, who was sitting by a western window, with a sheet of sketches from his specimens lying on his knee.
It was too dark to see clearly any longer. The old scientist had forgotten his drawings, and was watching one great star in an orange patch of sky between two dark lines of cloud.
“It is strange,” he said, half to himself, half to me, as I seated myself in an easy chair, “that truth, the least truth, is so hard to find. We buy it dearly, and with long effort, and then we do not understand the whole of it.”
He rose and brought his pictures to me.
“I have been studying that little creature,” he said, “for forty years, and yet I know nothing of the beginning or of the end of its life. It begins in mystery; it ends in mystery.”