The Case of Richard Meynell Part 75

"_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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sage, 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d; 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 G.o.d? Age by age, man's consciousness cuts deeper into the vast mystery that surrounds us; absorbs, trans.m.u.tes, 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 G.o.d 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. .h.i.therto 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d, 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 Cross Told 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--divide _us_--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 pa.s.sion 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 s.p.a.ce at least, with our Master, into the heavenly house, and still our sore hearts before our G.o.d."

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 of Hester maimed and dying; and the face of Meynell bending over her.

Then from this intimity, this sacredness of feeling, the speaker pa.s.sed 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 mult.i.tude 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, pa.s.sed 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 a Modernist, 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 for _England_ to 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 pa.s.sing 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 surpa.s.sed 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?"