He was naturally much given to analogy; every train of thought in his mind set up induced parallel currents.He had likened himself to the Anglican church, to the whole Christian body, as, for example, in his imagined second conversation with the angel of God.But now he found himself associating himself with a still more far-reaching section of mankind.This excess of solicitude was traceable perhaps in nearly every one in all the past of mankind who had ever had the vision of God.An excessive solicitude to shield those others from one's own trials and hardships, to preserve the exact quality of the revelation, for example, had been the fruitful cause of crippling errors, spiritual tyrannies, dogmatisms, dissensions, and futilities.
"Suffer little children to come unto me"; the text came into his head with an effect of contribution.The parent in us all flares out at the thought of the younger and weaker minds; we hide difficulties, seek to spare them from the fires that temper the spirit, the sharp edge of the truth that shapes the soul.
Christian is always trying to have a carriage sent back from the Celestial City for his family.Why, we ask, should they flounder dangerously in the morasses that we escaped, or wander in the forest in which we lost ourselves? Catch these souls young, therefore, save them before they know they exist, kidnap them to heaven; vaccinate them with a catechism they may never understand, lull them into comfort and routine.Instinct plays us false here as it plays the savage mother false when she snatches her fevered child from the doctor's hands.The last act of faith is to trust those we love to God....
Hitherto he had seen the great nets of theological overstatement and dogma that kept mankind from God as if they were the work of purely evil things in man, of pride, of self-assertion, of a desire to possess and dominate the minds and souls of others.It was only now that he saw how large a share in the obstruction of God's Kingdom had been played by the love of the elder and the parent, by the carefulness, the fussy care, of good men and women.He had wandered in wildernesses of unbelief, in dangerous places of doubt and questioning, but he had left his wife and children safe and secure in the self-satisfaction of orthodoxy.To none of them except to Eleanor had he ever talked with any freedom of his new apprehensions of religious reality.
And that had been at Eleanor's initiative.There was, he saw now, something of insolence and something of treachery in this concealment.His ruling disposition throughout the crisis had been to force comfort and worldly well-being upon all those dependants even at the price of his own spiritual integrity.In no way had he consulted them upon the bargain....While we have pottered, each for the little good of his own family, each for the lessons and clothes and leisure of his own children, assenting to this injustice, conforming to that dishonest custom, being myopically benevolent and fundamentally treacherous, our accumulated folly has achieved this catastrophe.It is not so much human wickedness as human weakness that has permitted the youth of the world to go through this hell of blood and mud and fire.The way to the kingdom of God is the only way to the true safety, the true wellbeing of the children of men....
It wasn't fair to them.But now he saw how unfair it was to them in a light that has only shone plainly upon European life since the great interlude of the armed peace came to an end in August, 1914.Until that time it had been the fashion to ignore death and evade poverty and necessity for the young.We can shield our young no longer, death has broken through our precautions and tender evasions--and his eyes went eastward into the twilight that had swallowed up his daughter and her lover.
The tumbled darkling sky, monstrous masses of frowning blue, with icy gaps of cold light, was like the great confusions of the war.All our youth has had to go into that terrible and destructive chaos--because of the kings and churches and nationalities sturdier-souled men would have set aside.
Everything was sharp and clear in his mind now.Eleanor after all had brought him his solution.
He sat quite still for a little while, and then stood up and turned northward towards Notting Hill.
The keepers were closing Kensington Gardens, and he would have to skirt the Park to Victoria Gate and go home by the Bayswater Road....
(14)
As he walked he rearranged in his mind this long-overdue apology for his faith that he was presently to make to his family.There was no one to interrupt him and nothing to embarrass him, and so he was able to set out everything very clearly and convincingly.There was perhaps a disposition to digress into rather voluminous subordinate explanations, on such themes, for instance, as sacramentalism, whereon he found himself summarizing Frazer's Golden Bough, which the Chasters'
controversy had first obliged him to read, and upon the irrelevance of the question of immortality to the process of salvation.But the reality of his eclaircissement was very different from anything he prepared in these anticipations.
Tea had been finished and put away, and the family was disposed about the dining-room engaged in various evening occupations;Phoebe sat at the table working at some mathematical problem, Clementina was reading with her chin on her fist and a frown on her brow; Lady Ella, Miriam and Daphne were busy making soft washing cloths for the wounded; Lady Ella had brought home the demand for them from the Red Cross centre in Burlington House.
The family was all downstairs in the dining-room because the evening was chilly, and there were no fires upstairs yet in the drawing-room.He came into the room and exchanged greetings with Lady Ella.Then he stood for a time surveying his children.
