For the rest, as before, they met as equals, curiously congenial to each other, in spite of the battle in front. The Bishop's certainty of victory was once more emphatically shown by the friendly ease with which he still received his rebellious incumbent. Any agreeable outsider of whatever creed—Renan or Loisy or Tyrrell—might have been thus welcomed at the Palace. It was true that till the appeal was decided Meynell remained formally Rector of Upcote Minor. The church and the parish were still in his hands; and the Bishop pointedly made no reference to either. But a very few weeks now would see Meynell's successor installed, and the parish reduced to order.
Such at least was the Bishop's confidence, and in the position in which he found himself—with seven Modernist evictions pending in his diocese, and many more than seven recalcitrant parishes to deal with, he was not the man to make needless friction.
In Meynell's view, indeed, the Bishop's confidence was excessive; and the triumph of the orthodox majority in the Church, if indeed it were to triumph, was neither so near, nor likely to be so complete, as the Bishop believed. He had not yet been able to resume all the threads of leadership, but he was clear that there had been no ebbing whatever of the Modernist tide. On the contrary, it seemed to him that the function at Dunchester might yet ring through England, and startle even such an optimist as Bishop Craye.
The next few days he spent among his own people, and with the Flaxmans. The old red sandstone church of Upcote Minor was closely packed on Sunday; and the loyalty of the parish to their Rector, their answer to the Arches judgment, was shown in the passion, the loving intelligence with which every portion of the beautiful Modernist service was followed by an audience of working men and women gathered both from Upcote itself and from the villages round, who knew very well—and gloried in the fact—that from their midst had started the flame now running through the country. Many of them had been trained by Methodism, and were now returning to the Church that Wesley had been so loath to leave. "The Rector's changed summat," said men to each other, puzzled by that aspect—that unconscious aspect—of spiritual dignity that falls like a robe of honour, as life goes on, about the Knights of the Spirit. But they knew, at least, from their newspapers, how and when that beautiful girl who had grown up from a child in their midst had perished; they remembered the winter months of calumny and persecution; and their rough, kind hearts went out to the man who was so soon, against their will and their protest, to be driven out from the church where for twenty years he had preached to his people a Christ they could follow, and a God they could adore.
The week passed, and the Dunchester meeting was at hand. Meynell was to spend the night before the great service with the old Bishop, against whom—together with the whole of his Chapter—Privy Council action was now pending. Mary was to be the guest of one of the Canons in the famous Close.
Meynell arrived to find the beautiful old town in commotion. As a protest against the Modernist demonstration, all the students from a famous Theological College in a neighbouring diocese under a High Church bishop had come over to attend a rival service in the second church of the town, where the congregation was to be addressed "on this outrage to our Lord" by one of the ablest and most saintly of the orthodox leaders—the Rev. Cyril Fenton, of the Markborough diocese—soon, it was rumoured, to be appointed to a Canonry of St. Paul's. The streets were full of rival crowds, jostling each other. Three hundred Modernist clergy were staying in or near the town; the old Cathedral city stared at them amazed; and from all parts had come, besides, the lay followers of the new Movement thronging to a day which represented for them the first fruits of a harvest, whereof not they perhaps but their children would see the full reaping.
On the evening before the function Meynell went into the Cathedral with Mary just as the lengthening March afternoon was beginning to wane. They stepped through the western doors set open to the breeze and the sunshine into a building all opal and ebony, faintly flooded with rose from the sky without; a building of infinite height and majesty, where clustered columns of black marble, incredibly light, upheld the richness of the bossed roof, where every wall was broidered history, where every step was on "the ruined sides of Kings," and the gathered fragments of ancient glass, jewels themselves, let through a jewelled light upon the creamy stone.
For the first time, since Hester's death, Meynell's sad face broke into joy. The glorious church appeared to him as the visible attestation of the Divine creative life in men, flowing on endlessly, from the Past, through the Present, to the unknown Future.
From the distance came a sound of chanting. They walked slowly up the nave, conscious of a strange tumult in the pulse, as though the great building with its immemorial history were half lending itself to, half resisting, the emotion that filled them. In the choir a practice was going on. Some thirty young clergy were going through the responses and canticles of the new service-book, with an elder man, also in clerical dress, directing them. At the entrance of the southern choir aisle stood the senior verger of the Cathedral in his black gown—open-mouthed and motionless, listening to the strange sounds.
Meynell and Mary knelt for a moment of impassioned prayer, and then sat down to listen. Through the fast darkening church, chanted by half the choir, there stole those words of noblest poetry:
"A new commandment—a new commandment—I give unto you…" To be answered by the voices on the other side—"That ye love—ye love one another!"
And again:
"I have called you friends. Ye are my friends"—
With the reply:
"If ye do the things which I command you."
And yet again:
"The words that I speak unto you:"—
"They—they are spirit; and they are life!"
A moment's silence, before all the voices, gathering into one harmony, sent the last versicle ringing through the arches of the choir, and the springing tracery of the feretory, and of the Lady Chapel beyond.
"Lord to whom shall we go?—Thou—thou hast the words of eternal life!"
"Only a few days or weeks," murmured Meynell, as they passed out into the evening light, "and we two—and those men singing there—shall be outcasts and wanderers, perhaps for a time, perhaps while we live. But to-day—and to-morrow—we are still children in the house of our fathers—sons, not slaves!—speaking the free speech of our own day in these walls, as the men who built them did in theirs. That joy, at least, no one shall take from us!"
At that "sad word Joy" Mary slipped her hand into his, and so they walked silently through the Close, toward the Palace, pursued by the rise and fall of the music from within.
The great service was over, with its bold adaptation of the religious language of the past, the language which is wrought into the being of Christendom, to the needs and the knowledge of the present. And now Meynell had risen, and was speaking to that thronged nave, crowded by men and women of many types and many distinctions, with that mingling of passion and simplicity which underlies success in all the poetic arts, and, first and foremost, the art of religious oratory. The sermon was to be known in after years by the name of "The Two Christianities"—and became one of the chief landmarks, or, rather, rallying cries of the Modernist cause. Only some fragments of it can be suggested here; one passage, above all, that Mary's brooding memory will keep close and warm to her life's end:
"…Why are we here, my friends? For what purpose is this great demonstration, this moving rite in, which we have joined this day? One-sixth at least of this congregation stands here under a sentence of ecclesiastical death. A few weeks perhaps, and this mighty church will know its white-haired Bishop no more. Bishop and Chapter will have been driven out; and we, the rank and file, whose only desire is to cling to the Church in which we were baptized and bred, will find ourselves exiles and homeless.
"What is our crime? This only—that God has spoken in our consciences, and we have not been able to resist Him. Nor dare we desert our posts in the National Church, till force drive us out. Why? Because there is something infinitely greater at stake than any reproach that can be hurled at us on the ground of broken pledges—pledges made too early, given in ignorance and good faith, and broken now, solemnly, in the face of God and this people—for a greater good. What does our personal consistency—which, mind you, is a very different thing from personal honesty!—matter? We are as sensitive as any man who attacks us on the point of personal honour. But we are constrained of God; we bear in our hands the cause of our brethren, the cause of half the nation; and we can no other. Ask yourselves what we have to gain by it. Nay! With expulsion and exile in sight—with years perhaps of the wilderness before us—we stand here for the liberties of Christ's Church!—its liberties of growth and life….
"My friends, what is the life either of intellect or spirit but the response of man to the communication of God? Age by age, man's consciousness cuts deeper into the vast mystery that surrounds us; absorbs, transmutes, translates ever more of truth, into conceptions he can use, and language he can understand.
"From this endless process arise science—and history—and philosophy. But just as science, and history, and philosophy change with this ever-living and growing advance, so religion—man's ideas of God and his own soul.
"Within the last hundred years man's knowledge of the physical world has broadened beyond the utmost dreams of our fathers. But of far greater importance to man is his knowledge of himself. There, too, the century of which we are now the heirs has lifted the veil—for us first among living men—from secrets hitherto unknown. HISTORY has come into being.
"What is history? Simply the power—depending upon a thousand laborious processes—of constructing a magic lens within the mind which allows us to look deep into the past, to see its life and colour and movement again, as no generation but our own has yet been able to see it. We hold our breath sometimes, as for a brief moment perhaps we catch its very gesture, its very habit as it lived, the very tone of its voices. It has been a new and marvellous gift of our God to us; and it has transformed or is transforming Christianity.
"Like science, this new discipline of the human mind is divine and authoritative. It lessens the distance between our human thought and the thought of God, because, in the familiar phrase, it enables us to "think, in some sort, His thoughts after Him." Like science it marches slowly on its way; through many mistakes; through hypothesis and rectification; through daring vision and laborious proof; to an ever-broadening certainty. History has taken hold of the Christian tradition. History has worked upon it with an amazing tenderness, and patience, and reverence. And at the end of a hundred years what do we see?—that half of Christendom, at least, which we in this church represent?
"We see a Christ stripped of Jewish legend, and Greek speculation, and medieval scholasticism; moving simply and divinely among the ways of His Jewish world, a man among men. We can watch, dimly indeed by comparison with our living scrutiny of living men, but still more clearly than any generation of Christendom since the disappearance of the first has been able to watch, the rise of His thoughts, the nature of His environment, the sequence of His acts, the original significance, the immediate interpretation, the subsequent influence of His death. We know much more of Jesus of Nazareth than the fathers of Nicaea knew; probably than St. Paul knew; certainly than Irenaeus or Clement knew.
"But that is only half the truth; only half of what history has to tell. On the one side we have to do with the recovered fact: on the other with its working through two thousand years upon the world.
"There,for the Modernist, lies revelation!—in the unfolding of the Christian idea, through the successive stages of human thought and imagination, it has traversed, down to the burst of revelation in the present day. Yet we are only now at the beginning of an immense development. The content of the Christian idea of love—love, self-renouncing, self-fulfilling—is infinite, inexhaustible, like that of beauty, or of truth. Why? At this moment, I am only concerned to give you the Christian answer, which is the answer of a reasonable faith. Because, like the streams springing forever from 'the pure founts of Cephisus,' to nourish the swelling plains below, these governing ideas of our life—tested by life, confirmed by life—have their source in the very being of God, sharers in His Eternity, His Ever-Fruitfulness….
"But even so, you have not exhausted the wealth of Christianity; For to the potency of the Christian idea is added the magic of an incomparable embodiment in human life. The story of Jesus bears the idea which it enshrines eternally through the world. It is to the idea as the vessel of the Grail.
"… Do these conceptions make us love our Master less? Ask your own hearts? There must be many in this crowded church that have known sorrow—intolerable anguish and disappointment—gnawing self-reproach—during the past year, or months, or weeks; many that have watched sufferings which no philosophic optimism can explain, and catastrophes that leave men dumb. Some among them will have been driven back upon their faith—driven to the foot of the Cross. Through all intellectual difference, has not the natural language of their fathers been also their language? Is there anything in their changed opinions which has cut them off from that sacrifice
"Renewed in every pulse,That on the tedious CrossTold the long hours of death, as, one by one,The life-strings of that tender heart gave way?
"Is there anything in this new compelling knowledge that need—that does—divideus—whose consciences dare not refuse it—from the immortal triumph of that death? In our sharpest straits, are we not comforted and cleansed and sustained by the same thoughts, the same visions that have always sustained and comforted the Christian? No!—the sons of tradition and dogma have no monopoly in the exaltation, the living passion of the Cross! We, too, watching that steadfastness grow steadfast; bowed before that innocent suffering, grow patient; drinking in the wonder of that faith, amid utter defeat, learn to submit and go forward. In us too, as we behold—Hope 'masters Agony!'—and we follow, for a space at least, with our Master, into the heavenly house, and still our sore hearts before our God."
* * * * *
Quietly and low, in tones that shook here and there, the words had fallen upon the spell-bound church.
Mary covered her eyes. But they saw only the more intently the vision ofHester maimed and dying; and the face of Meynell bending over her.
* * * * *
Then from this intimity, this sacredness of feeling, the speaker passed gradually and finally into the challenge, the ringing yet brotherly challenge, it was in truth his mission to deliver. The note of battle—honourable, inevitable battle—pealed through the church, and when it ceased the immense congregation rose, possessed by one heat of emotion, and choir and multitude broke into the magnificent Modernist hymn, "Christus Rex"—written by the Bishop of the See, and already familiar throughout England.
The service was over. Out streamed the great congregation. The Close was crowded to see them come. Lines of theological students were drawn up there, fresh-faced boys in round collars and long black coats, who, as the main body of the Modernist clergy approached, began defiantly to chant the Creed. Meynell, with the old yet stately Bishop leaning on his arm, passed them with a friendly, quiet look. He caught sight for a moment of the tall form of Fenton, standing at their rear—the long face ascetically white, and sternly fixed.
He left the Bishop at the gates of the Palace, and went back quickly for Mary. Suddenly he ran into an advancing figure and found his hand grasped by Dornal.
The two men gazed at each other.
"You were not there?" said Meynell, wondering.
"I was." Dornal hesitated a moment, and then his blue eyes melted and clouded.
"And there was one man there—not a Modernist—who grieved, like aModernist, over the future!"
"Ah, the future!" said Meynell, throwing his head back. "That is not for you or me—not for the bishops, nor for that body which we call the Church—that is forEnglandto settle."
* * * * *
But another meeting remained.
At the parting with Dornal, Meynell turned a corner and saw in front of him, walking alone, a portly gentleman, with a broad and substantial back. A start ran through him. After a moment's hesitation, he began to quicken his steps, and soon overtook the man in question.
Barron—for it was he—stopped in some astonishment, some confusion even, which he endeavoured to hide. Meynell held out his hand—rather timidly; and Barron just touched it.
"I have been attending the service at St. Mathias," he said, stiffly.
"I imagined so," said Meynell, walking on beside him, and quite unconscious of the fact that a passing group of clergy opposite were staring across the street in amazement at the juxtaposition of the two men, both well known to them. "Did it satisfy you?"
"Certainly. Fenton surpassed himself."
"He has a great gift," said Meynell, heartily. They moved on in silence, till at last Meynell said, with renewed hesitation—"Will you allow me to inquire after Maurice? I hope your mind is more at ease about him."
"He is doing well—for the moment." Another pause—broken by Barron, who said hurriedly in a different voice—"I got from him the whole story of the letters. There was nothing deliberate in it. It was a sudden, monkeyish impulse. He didn't mean as much harm by it as another man would have meant."
"No doubt," said Meynell, struck with pity, as he looked at the sunken face of the speaker. "And anyway—bygones are bygones. I hope your daughter is well?"
"Quite well, I thank you. We are just going abroad."
There was no more to be said. Meynell knew very well that the orthodox party had no room in its ranks, at that moment, for Henry Barron; and it was not hard to imagine what exclusion and ostracism must mean to such a temper. But the generous compunctions in his own mind could find no practical expression; and after a few more words they parted.
* * * * *
Next morning, while every newspaper in the country was eagerly discussing the events at Dunchester, Catharine, in the solitude of Long Whindale, and with a full two hours yet to wait for the carrier who brought the papers from Whinborough, was pondering letters from Rose and Mary written from Dunchester on the preceding afternoon. Her prayer-book lay beside her. Before the post arrived she had been reading by herself the Psalms and Lessons, according to the old-fashioned custom of her youth.
The sweetness of Mary's attempt to bring out everything in the Modernist demonstration that might be bearable or even consoling to Catharine, and to leave untold what must pain her, was not lost upon her mother. Catharine sat considering it, in a reverie half sorrow, half tenderness, her thin hands clasped upon the letter:
* * * * *
"Mother, beloved!—Richard and I talked of you all the way back to the Palace; and though there were many people waiting to see him, he is writing to you now; and so am I. Through it all, he feels so near to you—and to my father; so truly your son, your most loving son….
"Dearest—I am troubled to hear from Alice this morning that yesterday you were tired and even went to lie down. I know my too Spartan mother doesn't do that without ten times as much reason as other people. Oh! do take care of yourself, my precious one. To-morrow, I fly back to you with all my news. And you will meet me with that love of yours which has never failed me, as it never failed my father. It will take Richard and me a life time to repay it. But we'll try! … Dear love to my poor Alice. I have written separately to her."
* * * * *
Rose's letter was in another vein.
* * * * *
"Dearest Catharine, it is all over—a splendid show, and Richard has come out of it finely, though I must say he looks at times more like a ghost than a man. From the Church point of view, dear, you were wise not to come, for your feelings must have been sadly mixed, and you might have been compelled to take Privy Council proceedings against yourself. I need not say that Hugh and I felt an ungodly delight in it—in the crowd and the excitement—in Richard's sermon—in the dear, long-nosed old Bishop (rather like a camel, between you and me, but a very saintly one) and in the throng of foolish youths from the Theological College who seemed to think they settled everything by singing the Creed at us. (What a pity you can't enjoy the latest description of the Athanasian Creed! It is by a Quaker. He compares it to 'the guesses of a ten-year old child at the contents of his father's library.' Hugh thinks it good—but I don't expect you to.)"
* * * * *
Then followed a vivacious account of the day and its happenings.
"And now comes the real tug of war. In a few weeks the poor Modernists will be all camping in tents, it seems, by the wayside. Very touching and very exciting. But I am getting too sleepy to think about it. Dear Cathie—I run on—but I love you. Please keep well. Good-bye."
* * * * *
Catharine laid the letter down, still smiling against her will over some of its chatter, and unconsciously made happy by the affection that breathed from its pages no less than from Mary's.
Yet certainly she was very tired. She became sharply conscious of her physical weakness as she sat on by the fire, now thinking of her Mary, and now listening for Alice's step upon the stairs. Alice had grown very dear to Catharine, partly for her own sake, and partly because to be in bitter need and helplessness was to be sure of Catharine's tenderness. Very possibly they two, when Mary married, might make their home together. And Catharine promised herself to bring calm at least and loving help to one who had suffered so much.
The window was half open to the first mild day of March; beside it stood a bowl of growing daffodils, and a pot of freesias that scented the room. Outside a robin was singing, the murmur of the river came up through the black buds of the ash-trees, and in the distance a sheep-dog could be heard barking on the fells. So quiet it was—the spring sunshine—and so sweet. Back into Catharine's mind there flowed the memory of her own love-story in the valley; her hand trembled again in the hand of her lover.
Then with a sudden onset her mortal hour came upon her. She tried to move, to call, and could not. There was no time for any pain of parting. For one remaining moment of consciousness there ran through the brain the images, affections, adorations of her life. Swift, incredibly swift, the vision of an opening glory—a heavenly throng!… Then the tired eyelids fell, the head lay heavily on the cushion behind it, and in the little room the song of the robin and the murmur of the stream flowed on—unheard.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Case of Richard Meynell, by Mrs. Humphrey Ward