Editorial
THE tribal deity to whom Mr. Trimblerigg owed his origin would, I think, have shown a better sense of the eternal fitness of things had he chosen for his amanuensis one whose theological antecedents were more within his keeping and jurisdiction than my own. But when he visited me with the attack of verbal inspiration which I was powerless to throw off in any other form than that which here follows, he seems rather to have assumed an intellectual agreement which certainly does not exist, and to have ignored as unimportant a divergence of view which I now wish to place on record. For, to put it plainly, I do not worship the god of Mr. Trimblerigg; and had these pages been a complete expression of my own feelings, they would have borne hostile witness not so much against Mr. Trimblerigg, as against his deity.
When nations declare war, or when gods deliver judgment against criminals who are so largely of their own making,—fastening in self-justification on some flagrant instance of wrong-doing which, for those who do not wish to reflect, puts the culprit wholly out of court,—they would do well to select their official historians from minds too abject and submissive to form views of their own; and of course verbal inspiration, as in the case of Balaam, is one way of getting the thing done. But whereas, in that historical instance, it was the ass and not the prophet who kicked last, in this instance, having delivered my message, I claim the right to exonerate myself in a foreword which is entirely my own. And so here, in this place—before he makes revelation or utters prophecy—Balaam speaks his own mind.
I do not think that Mr. Trimblerigg’s deity has dealtfairly by him. To me he seems chargeable with the same exploitive elasticity as that which he exposes in Mr. Trimblerigg, whom he first cockered up in his own conceit by a course of tribal theology, and then callously abandoned to its logical consequences when tribal theology went suddenly out of fashion. For Mr. Trimblerigg was emphatically a product of that self-worship of the tribe or clan, on which divine Individualism has so long fattened itself. He was brought up to believe himself one of a chosen sect of a chosen people, and to judge from a theocratic standpoint the ways, doings, and morals of other sects, communities, principalities, and powers. He could not remotely conceive, without being false to his deity, that his own was not immeasurably the best religion in the world, his god a god of perfect balance and proportion, and himself a chosen vessel of the Lord. In that character he was always anointing himself with fresh oil, which, losing its balance, ran far further than it ought to have done. But if, in consequence, he became an oleaginous character, whose mainly was the blame?
I cannot acquit the deity in whose tenets he had been trained. Having been brought up to read history as a pre-eminent dispensation of mercies and favours to his own race, with a slight push of miracle at the back of it—is it any wonder that, when he applied his gospel to propaganda for the interests of that same race, or went out a missionary to the heathen, it was with a conscientious conviction that a little compulsion was necessary for the saving of souls?
And so, in that shadiest episode of all his career, presented to us by his deity in such an unfavourable light, when the poor benighted heathen began painting Mr.Trimblerigg’s fellow-missionaries black and tan, and other horrible colours to indicate their hearty dislike for a blended gospel of free salvation in Christ and duty and allegiance to the Puto-Congo Rubber shareholders; when they did that, he—quite naturally—invoked the law of the Mosaic dispensation, and did the same to them: and defended himself for these gospel-reprisals by saying that it would have been very unreasonable not to protect Christian missionaries by the only method which savages could understand as a stepping-stone to the methods of Christianity.
The picture as presented is true: that was Mr. Trimblerigg all over. He had a lively notion that Christianity could be induced by pagan methods. But has his deity the right to cast either the first or the last stone at him? If he seemed to be always carrying the New Testament in his coat-tail pocket and making it his foundation for occasions of sitting down and doing nothing, while, up and doing, it was the law of Moses with which he stuffed his breast: and if, when he wanted to thump the big drum (as he so often did), he thumped the Old Testament, he was only doing with more momentary conviction and verve and personal magnetism what the larger tribalism of his day had been doing all along; and his tribal deity never seems to have had the slightest qualms in allowing Mr. Trimblerigg to regard himself as a Christian.
Yet all the time the deity himself knew better, as this record abundantly shows; for having made Mr. Trimblerigg partly but not entirely in his own image, he then used him as a plaything, an object of curiosity; and committing him to that creed of racial aggrandisement of which he himself was beginning to tire, thereby reduced him toridicule, made a fool of him, exalted him to the likeness and similitude of a god, and then—let him go. And though, in the ensuing pages, he has helped himself freely to my opinions, as though they were his own, I do not feel that they were honestly adopted. For a god who tires of his handiwork is still responsible for it, however disillusioned; and when, employing me as his mouthpiece, Mr. Trimblerigg’s maker mocks at the tribal religions which have brought the world so near to ruin, he remains nevertheless a deity tribal in character, albeit a disgruntled one. And if he has manœuvred this record in order to wash his hands of responsibility, it comes, I fear, too late; the source is too suspect to be regarded as impartial, and he himself very much more of a Mr. Trimblerigg than he seems to be aware.
And so my business here is to express an utter disbelief (which I hope readers will bear in mind) that Mr. Trimblerigg’s deity was one about whom it is possible to entertain the larger hope, even in the faint degree suggested by Tennyson,—or that he was anything except a tribal survival to whom Mr. Trimblerigg and others gave names which did not properly belong to him.
What finally laid Mr. Trimblerigg by the heels was the fact that having picked up this god as he went along (finding him favourable to the main chance) it was the main chance—idealized as ‘the larger hope’—which he really worshipped without knowing it. Upon the strength of that inspiration environment intoxicated him, and he drew his spiritual life from the atmosphere around him. Then he was like a bottle of seltzer, which at the first touch of the outer air begins almost explosively to expand; whereas, for the bulk of us, we unbottle to it like still winewithout sound or foam, accepting it as the natural element for which we were born. To Mr. Trimblerigg, on the other hand, it came as a thing direct from God: at the first touch of the herd-instinct he bubbled, and felt himself divine. And in the rush of pentecostal tongues amid which he lost his head, he forgot that atmosphere and environment are but small local conditions, and that, outside these, vacuum and interstellar space hold the true balances of Heaven more surely and correctively than do the brief and shifting lives of men.
This spiritual adventurer, with his alert vision so curiously reduced in scale to seize the opportunities of day and hour, missed the march of time from listening too acutely to the ticks of the clock. And if he offers us an example for our better learning, it is mainly as showing what belittling results the herd-instinct and tribal-deism may produce in a mercurial and magnetic temperament,—making him imagine himself something quite other from what he really is, and his god a person far removed from that category in which he has been placed.
My own interpretation of this ‘Revelation,’ which has made me its involuntary mouthpiece, is that it shows the beginning—but the beginning only—of mental change in a god who has become tired of deceiving himself about the work of his creation; and that it has begun to dawn upon his mind—though he denies it in words—that, in making Mr. Trimblerigg, he has made another little mistake, and that his creation was really stuffed as full of them as a plum-pudding is stuffed with plums. And I have a hope that when tribal deity becomes properly apologetic for its many misshapings of a divided world, humanity will begin to come by its own, and acquire a theology which is not anorganized hypocrisy for the bolstering up of nationalities and peoples.
For here we have a world full of mistakes, which is governed, according to the theologians, by a God who makes none. And what between predestination and free-will, and grace abounding mixed up with original sin, and orthodoxy and heterodoxy at such universal dash throughout the world that not one honest soul in a million has an even chance of being really right,—when that is the spectacle presented to us in the life of the human race, it becomes something of a mockery to minds of intelligence to be told that their gods have never made mistakes.
Those who have been blessed with good parents, do not like them less because of certain failings and limitations which go to the shaping of their characters; and when, arrived at the age of discretion, they have to withstand their failings and recognize their limitations, they do so with a certain amount of deference and with undiminished affection; but they do not, if they are wise, or if they have the well-being of their parents really at heart,—they do not let it be thought that they regard them either as immaculate or infallible.
I have come to the conclusion that a like duty towards its tribal deities belongs to the human race; and that man has made many mistakes simply by regarding these tribal emanations as immune from error, all-seeing, all-wise, all-loving—which they certainly are not. And I believe that Mr. Trimblerigg would have been a very much better and more useful man if he could have conceived his tribal deity as one liable to error like himself. The terrible Nemesis which seized the soul of Mr. Trimblerigg and hurled it to destruction was a very limited and one-sidedconception of what was good and right, embodied in the form of a personal deity who could do no wrong.
So here, as I read it, we have the revelation of the detriment done to a human soul by an embodied belief in itself under cover of a religious creed. And the record of that process has been handed over to me, I suppose, because the tribal deity responsible for the results has got a little tired of the abject flattery of his worshippers, and a little doubtful whether that relation between the human and the divine is really the right one. He is suffering in fact, as I read him, from a slight attack of creative indigestion, and is anxious to get rid of certain by-products which his system cannot properly assimilate: he is anxious, amongst other things, to get rid of responsibility for Mr. Trimblerigg. But the responsibility is there; and I allow myself this foreword in order to declare it in spite of the things which hereafter I am made to say.
‘You cannot unscramble eggs,’ is a dictum as applicable to gods as to mortals. And if people would remember that in their prayers, prayers would be less foolish and fatuous than they often are.
You cannot unscramble eggs. And so, having scrambled Mr. Trimblerigg in the making, his god was attempting a vain thing in trying to unscramble him; and when Mr. Trimblerigg went on his knees and prayed, as he occasionally did, to be unscrambled, he was only scrambling himself yet more in the fry-pan of his tribal theology.
And indeed, when I look at him, I have to admire what a scramble of a man he was!—how the yolk and the white of it, the good and the evil, the thick and the thin of his character did mix, ‘yea, meet and mingle,’ as he would have said himself when his platform sense of poetry gotthe better of him. And so, in the exercise of those contradictory agilities of soul and brain which made him so mixed yet so divided a character, he skipped through life like a flea to Abraham’s bosom, and there—after so many analiashastily assumed and as hastily discarded—lies waiting to answer to his true name when true names are called.
What kind of a name, one wonders, did he finally make for himself in the Book of Life? In that desperate saving of his own face which constitutes his career, he put out of countenance many that were his betters; but it was himself that, in the process, he put out of countenance most of all. Yet in the end revelation came to him; and when, in that ghastly moment of self-discovery, he stood fully charged with the truth, who shall say what miraculous, what fundamental change it may not have wrought in him? When he followed the upward rope which led him so expeditiously Elsewhere, it may have been with the equipment of a new self capable of much better and more honest things that he finally entered Heaven. I cannot believe that such a genius for self-adaptation has incontinently missed its mark. But, in that forward aim, it may well be that he and his tribal deity have parted company; for it is to be noted that, at the last gasp, the god loses sight—does not know what has become of him: thinks, perhaps, that he has gone irretrievably and abysmally—Down. I, on the contrary, have a suspicion and a hope that his tendency may have been—UP.
L. H.