CHAPTER XVII
Which has to do with the Awakening of Youth
Theboy and girl sprang up apace; their brains developing added perception and quickness under Lovegood’s tuition—wits are whetted by congenial wit.
The stripling’s voice broke, lost its treble, and for awhile was awkward to the ear, as his lank limbs to the eye; and a-top of the change the down came upon his lip, adding the last touch of whimsy to youth’s ungainliness. Betty came through the awkward age less awkwardly, showing a lithe gracefulness in her very lankness of limb.
The girl it was who began to show shy reservations.
The lad was becoming restless with—he knew not what. Coming adolescence was setting his youngster blood a-jigging. Boyhood was gone—youth not fully come. Romance was singing in his ears—adventure thrumming impatient fingers on the windows of his fancy—hot instincts leading his feet—wilfulness challenging his daring.
In all this dangerous period of his cubhood, the girl’s sweet companionship steadied the lad—kept him from many tomfool waywardnesses. Her fragrant hair, loose-flowing to the winds, brushed his cheek and veiled him in from much unwholesomeness. The girl’s slender gloved hands held the key to his nobility—opened to him only the view of the best that was in him; whilst his protection of her, and his frank confidence in her, filled the lad’s body with early manhood that had otherwise been filled with indecision and with many and uncouth vulgarities.
And just as, his voice breaking, a hoarser accent came into his speech, so, too, a more robust accent came into his thinking. He began to question, first of all here and there, then from roof to base, what he had accepted with a boy’s frank acceptance.
The Why and the Whence and the Whither had begun to trouble.
He and Betty had taken to going to church of a Sunday evening. At last, puzzled by many things, the lad went boldly and called on the vicar. Encouraged by the well-bred courtesy of the gentle-hearted man and by the noble simplicity and selflessness of his life, and full of eager questionings, he had gone againa time or so; but he found his blunt queries evaded—the deep inmost and basic meaning of life and death, when he pressed for an answer, was at once thrust behind a screen of God and angels, seen dimly across a gulf of heavens and hells, in the human form and habit, and with those earthly functions of which the disembodied spirit had no further need, and through a veil of vague talk of the inspired word.
The inspired word!
Inspiration that could allow discrepancies in the simplest details of the most important things—one gospel giving the Annunciation to Mary, another to Joseph—one giving the Anointing by a woman to the beginning of the ministry, the others to the eve of the Crucifixion—all differing in the statement of the great and solemn act of the very Crucifixion—one stating that the Christ bore His cross, the others that Simon bore it—disagreeing even as to the bitter drink that was given and when given—disagreeing as to the hour of the great tragedy—every one of them all contradicting each other as to the sayings on the cross—the statement by Christ in one gospel to the repentant thief that they would that day be in Paradise denying that the Christ really descended into Hell and rose again the third day—one gospel contradicting the others as to the acts and sayings of these thieves—all at variance even about the last dying words—all writing different inscriptions over the suffering head—one stating that the body was embalmed, another denying its embalming.
There were larger discrepancies: How could the devil tempt God? And even so, what virtue were in so easy a triumph? Why had God, out of His creation of all things, created the devil? How could He punish for sin who had created sin? Why did God create a world so faultily that He Himself condemned it? Why punish His own bungling upon His miserable creatures? How could He set up as eternal reward the prospect of the good being with Him in the heavens and listening to the agony of the victims of His poor maimed handiwork in hell? What had man done more loathsome than to create a Hell? Was this gruesome heaven of gloating over the agony of the damned to be our Immortality? If these things had been written to-day instead of coming out of the dim glamour of the centuries, would they be believed?
The vicar was genuinely shocked.
He stammered of Conduct—he did not guess the extent of the boy’s reading.
The good man had always looked upon any who questioned Christianity as atheists and agnostics—upon atheists and agnostics as criminal and brutish persons. He had never realized that some of the noblest, greatest, purest and sweetest lives had been lived by these—nor that some of the foulest, most damnable, and criminal lives had been spent in vileness by princes of the Church.
The boy bent his brows on the old gentleman’s embarrassment....
Already bored by the vicar’s dusty sermons, and now baffled to find that what had baffled him likewise baffled the vicar, he turned his back on the Church of his people and went with Betty to the pro-cathedral of Rome.
The beauty of the service, its music and its splendid symbolism, appealed for awhile to his artistic senses; but the questionings soon began again to unsettle the lad. For he found that he could not get to the root of things in this exquisite place even as far as with his old vicar. He had imagined the Roman Church as united—as agreed. He found it racked from one end to the other by the warring pronouncements of the Fathers. The cardinal himself it was who blew up the bridge that spanned the road to Rome.
It was the day of a great mass at the Oratory. It had been noised abroad that the church was to be draped red with handsome draperies—that the cardinal was to speak, robed in his crimson vestments. All the leaders of society that held to the Papist tradition were to be there—and, as events turned out, there was, besides, a large gathering of Society that owned no allegiance to Rome, yet enjoyed a handsome pageant.
The boy and girl went—anxious to hear what message the illustrious prince of the Church had for their hearts—what guidance for their lives—what he had to say upon the great intellectual advancement of the age—what upon the great questions that loomed before the puzzled brain of man.
And he, the appointed spokesman of the infallible church, smooth-faced, aristocratic, magnificent, arose from his seat at his ordered place in the elaborate service, and his voice broke the musical refrain of the splendid ceremonial with disturbing accent but to reiterate the narrow message of his Church that only through absolute subjection of mind and body to the forms and traditions and quaint superstitions of that Church could man be saved from everlasting damnation; and, with triumphant note, he revelled in the fact, and could get to little else, that the English Church, which had persecuted Rome for generations, had now begun to place her images upon its altars and in the emptied niches of its portals—had indeed filched the rubric and the habits and the symbols of his Church! And, with exultant voice, swelling to arrogance, he, with the same lips that called his Church catholic, whilst in the very act of narrowing it to a parochial destiny, twitted with parochialism the land whose large religious toleration allowed his Church to live unmolested where that same Church had made a shamble and a stews when it was in power, debauching its once opportunity by fire and torture, showing in such strange hellish wise its large Catholicism to such as had differed from its narrow creed. He spoke passionately of past persecution—he omitted to say who had taught the lesson.
But of the Why and the How and the Whence and the Whither—nothing. All the flattest Agnosticism....
That evening the striplings, together with Netherby Gomme,wandered, with a crowd that pressed, into the large and simple place of worship of a well-known chapel to hear a great Protestant preacher. This man, unaided by the gorgeous ritual of the morning that appealed to every artistic sense, made the simple Protestant claim to individual responsibility, to acts of life as against the ritual of churches. He ignored all Christolatry, as a grown man sets aside the toys of childhood, and his voice thundered that the life of the individual would be judged solely by the part it played towards the ennobling of the community. And he showed that just as Christianity had been born from the Jews and the Greeks, so had Protestantism in turn been born out of Rome; and so must the future ideals of the great peoples, purified still more and more by rejecting the false and the superstitious, be born again out of this same Protestantism.
It was the large, daring, and frank mind of this man that roused the lad from the lethargic irresponsibility of his boyhood to his duty towards life. Just as the Romanist communion by its ideal of the salvation of the individual through and by the community has weakened the force of the individual, so the innate difference of the Protestant ideal, the salvation of the community by and through the individual, strengthened the lad’s nerve and made his will resolute. He flung off his reliance on others and faced his life and his destiny.
He roused from the drowsy contemplation and the fantastic dreads of otherworldliness—ridiculous heavens and more ridiculous hells—and turned to life. For awhile he was not troubled.
The genial optimism of youth came back to him.
It was soon after this stage of awakening intellectual unrest that the lad found himself embarked on the larger tide of the literary and intellectual unrest of the Continent.
Mixing more and more amongst the Bohemians, he found himself amongst frank and fearless thinking; he was roused by the inquisitive genius of France—heard the first words of the daring speculations of German thought. He realized that religious teaching had passed from the Church to the newspaper—to literature—and to the arts; that religion, from being a fierce war of priests, was become a searching into the everyday life of the community, was become a fierce desire to better that life. The angels were flown, theology gone to dust, and man was seeking after the godhead that is in him—he who had kissed the feet of idols, cringing for salvation in whimsical heavens, now stood up and looked at the meaning of manhood.
Thou Shalt Not was giving place to Thou Shalt.