The Zeit-Geist Part 11

Oh the loneliness of it, to have a creed that no companion has! The sheer sorrow of being compelled by the law of his mind to believe concerning G.o.d what he did not know that any other man believed time and time again obscured Bart Toyner's vision of the divine.

The power of the miracle wrought at his conversion was gone; he had been taught that the miraculous power was only to be with him as long as he yielded implicit obedience, but that implied a clear-cut knowledge of right from wrong which Toyner did not now possess; many of the old rules clashed with that one large new rule which had come to him--that any way of life was wicked which made it appear that G.o.d was in some provinces of life and not in others. "Whatever is not of faith is sin"; but while an old and a new faith are warring in a man's soul the definition fails: many a righteous act is born of doubt, not faith. This was one reason why Toyner no longer possessed all-conquering strength. Another reason there was which acted as powerfully to rob him--the soul-bewildering difficulty of believing that the G.o.d of physical law can also be the G.o.d of promise, that He that is within us and beneath us can also be above us with power to lift us up.

Without a firm grip on this supernatural upholding power Toyner was a man with a diseased craving for intoxicants. He fled from them as a man flies from deadly infection; but with all the help that total abstinence and the absence of temptation can give he failed in the battle. A few weeks after he had returned to Fentown he was brought into his mother's house one morning dead drunk. The mother, whose heart had revived within her a little during the last year, now sank again into her previous dejection. Her friends said to her that they had always known how it would be in the case of so sudden a reformation. When Toyner woke up his humiliation was terrible; he bore it as he had borne all the rest of his pain and shame, silently enough. No one but Ann Markham even guessed the agony that he endured, and she had not the chance to give a kindly look, for at this time Toyner, unable to trust himself with himself, was afraid to look upon Ann lest he should smirch her life.

Again Toyner set his feet sternly in the way of sobriety. Ah! how he prayed, beseeching that G.o.d, who had revealed Himself to be greater and n.o.bler than had before been known, would not because of that show Himself to be less powerful towards those that fear Him. It is the prayer of faith, not the prayer of agonised entreaty, that takes hold of strength. Toyner failed again and again. There was a vast difference now between this and his former life of failure, for now he never despaired, but took up the struggle each time just where he had laid it down, and moreover the intervals of sobriety were long, and the fits of drunkenness short and few; but there were not many besides Ann who noticed this difference. And as for Toyner, the shame and misery of failure so filled his horizon that he could not see the favourable contrast--shame and misery, but never despair; that one word had gone out of his life.

One day a visitor came hurrying down the street to Toyner's home. The stranger had the face of a saint, and the hasty feet of those who are conscious that they bear tidings of great joy. It was Toyner's friend, the preacher. Bart had often written to him, and he to his convert. Of late the letters had been fraught with pain to both, but this was the first time that the preacher had found himself able to come a long journey since he had heard of Toyner's fall. He came, his heart big with the prayer of faith that what he had done once he might be permitted to do again--lead this man once more into the humble path of a time-honoured creed and certain self-conquest. To the preacher the two were one and indivisible.

When this life is pa.s.sed away, shall we see that our prayers for others have been answered most lavishly by the very contradiction of what we have desired?

The visit was well timed. Bart Toyner's father lay dying; and in spite of that, or rather in consequence of nights of watching and the necessary handling of stimulants, Bart sat in his own room, only just returned to soberness after a drunken night. With face buried in his hands, and a heart that was breaking with sorrow, Bart was sitting alone; and then the preacher came in.

The preacher sat beside him, and put his arm around him. The preacher was a man whose embrace no man could shrink from, for the physical part of him was as nothing compared with the love and strength of its animating soul.

"Our Lord sends a message to you: 'All things are possible to him that believeth.'" The preacher spoke with quiet strength. "_You_ know, dear brother, that this word of His is certainly true."

"Yes, yes, I know it. By the hour in which I first saw you I know it; but I cannot take hold of it again in the same way. My faith wavers."

"Your faith wavers?" The preacher spoke questioningly. "My brother, faith in itself is nothing; it is only the hand that takes; it is the Saviour in whom we believe who has the power. You have turned away from Him. It is not that your faith wavers, but that you are walking straight forward on the road of infidelity, and on that path you will never find a G.o.d to help, but only a devil to devour."

Toyner s.h.i.+vered even within the clasp of the encircling arm. "I had tried to tell you in writing that the Saviour you follow is more to me--far more, not less."

"In what way?" The preacher's voice was full of sympathy; but here, and for the first time, Bart felt it was an unconscious trick. Sympathy was a.s.sumed to help him to speak. The preacher could conceive of no divine object of love that was not limited to the pattern he had learned to dwell upon.

"I am not good at words," Toyner spoke humbly. "I took a long time to write to you; I said it better than I could now, that G.o.d is far more because He is a faithful Creator, responsible for us always, whatever we do, to bring us to good. Now I do not need to keep dividing things and people and thoughts into His and not-His. That was what it came to before. You may say it didn't, but it did. And all we know about Jesus--don't you see." (Bart raised his face with piteous, hunted look)--"don't you see that what His life and death meant was--just what I have told you? G.o.d doesn't hold back His robe, telling people what they ought to do, and then judge them. He does not shrink from taking sin on Himself to bring them through death to life. Doesn't your book say so again and again and again?"

"G.o.d cannot sin!" cried the preacher, with the warmth of holy indignation.

Toyner became calm with a momentary contempt of the other's lack of understanding. "That goes without saying, or He would not be G.o.d."

"But that is what you have said in your letters."

There was silence in the room. The misery of his loneliness took hold of Toyner till it almost felt like despair. Who was he, unlearned, very sinful, even now shaken with the palsy of recent excess--who was he to bandy words with a holy man? All words that came from his own lips that hour seemed to him horribly profane. The new idea that possessed him was what he lived by, and yet alone with it he did not gather strength from it to walk upright.

"The father tempted the prodigal," he said, "when he gave him the substance to waste with sinners. Did the father sin? The time had come when nothing but temptation--yes, and sin too--could save. Most things, sir, that you hold about G.o.d I can hold too. There are bad men, powerful and seducing men, in the world; there may easily be unseen devils. There is h.e.l.l on earth, and I don't doubt but that there's the awfulest, longest depth of the same kind of h.e.l.l beyond. There's heaven on earth, and all the love and pain of love we have tell us there's heaven beyond, unspeakable and eternal; but, sir, when you come to limit G.o.d--to say, here the responsibility of the faithful G.o.d stops, here man's self-destruction begins--I can't believe that. He must be responsible, not only for starting us with freedom, but responsible for the use we make of it and for all the consequence. When you say of the infinite G.o.d that h.e.l.l and the devils are something outside of Him--I can't think that. The devils must live and move and have their being in Him. When you say the holy G.o.d ever said to spirit He had created, 'Depart from Me' (except in a parable meaning that as long as a spirit chose evil it would not be conscious of G.o.d's nearness), I tell you, sir, by all He has taught me out of the Bible you gave me, I don't believe it. We've studied the Bible so much now that we know that holiness is just love--the sort of love that holds holy hatred and every other good feeling within itself. We know that love can't fail and cast out the thing it loves. When we know a law, we know the way it must work. If the Bible seems to say the big law it teaches doesn't work out true, it must be like what is said of the six days of creation, something that came as near as it could to what people would understand, but that needs a new explanation."

The young preacher had withdrawn his encircling arm. He sat looking very stern and sad.

"When you begin to doubt G.o.d's word, you will soon doubt that He is, and that He is the rewarder of them that seek Him."

"Sir, it seems to me that it's doubting the incarnate Word to believe what you do, because the main plain drift of all He was and did is contradicted by some few things men supposed Him to mean because they thought them. But it's not that I would set myself up to know about doctrines, if it wasn't that this doctrine had driven me to stop believing and stop caring to do right. I can't just explain it clearly, but when I came to Him the way you told me, and thought the way you told me, I just went on and did it and was blessed and happy in the love of G.o.d as I never could have dreamed of; but all the time there was a something--I didn't know exactly what--that I couldn't bring my mind to; so I just left it. But when I got tempted, and prayed and prayed, then it came on me all of a sudden that I didn't want a G.o.d who had to do with such a little part of life as that. You see it had been simmering in my mind all the days that I stopped doing the things you told me were wrong and yet went on keeping among the publicans and sinners because He did. If I'd just stayed with the church-goers, maybe I wouldn't have felt it; but to think that I couldn't take a hand in an innocent game o'

cards, or dance with the girls that hadn't had another bit of amus.e.m.e.nt--all that wasn't very important, but that sort of thing began it. And then to think that G.o.d was in me and not in them! I began, as I went down the street, wondering who had G.o.d in his heart and who hadn't, that I might know who to trust and who to try to do good to. And then, most of all, there was all my books that I liked so much. I didn't read them any more, for when I thought that G.o.d had set every word in the Bible quite true and left all the other books to be true or not just as it happened, I couldn't think to look at any book but the Bible; for one's greedy of knowing how things really are--that's what one reads for. So you see it was all in my mind G.o.d did things differently one time and another, like making one book and not the others, and only such a small part of things was His; and then when the temptation came, you see, if I'd thought G.o.d was in Markham and the girls I could have done my duty and let Him take care of them; but it was because I'd no cause to think that, and believed that He'd let them go, that I couldn't let them go. I felt that I'd rather give up the sort of a G.o.d I thought on and look after them a bit. It wasn't that I thought it out clear at the time; but that was how it came about, and I was ready to kick religion over. And, sir, if G.o.d hadn't taught me that when I went down to h.e.l.l He was there, I don't think I'd want to be religious again; but now I do want it with all my might and main, and I'll never let go of it, just as I know He won't let go of me--no, not if some of these days they have to shovel me into a drunkard's grave; but I believe that G.o.d's got the same strength for me just as He had when you converted me." Toyner looked round him despairingly as a man might look for something that is inexplicably lost. "I can't think how it is, but I can't get hold of His strength."

The preacher meditated. It had already been given to him to pray with great persistency and faith for this back-slider, and he had come sure of bringing with him adequate help; but now his hope was less. In a moment he threw himself upon his knees and prayed aloud: "Heavenly Father, open the heart of Thine erring child to see that it was the craft and subtlety of the devil that devised for him a temptation he could not resist,--none other but the devil could have been so subtle; and show him that this same devil, clothed as an angel of light, has feigned Thy voice and whispered in his ear, and that until he returns to the simple faith as it is in the gospel Thou _canst_ not help him as of old."

"Stop!" (huskily). "I have not let go of His faith. His faith was in the Father of sinners."

Then the preacher strove in words to show him the greatness of his error, and why he could not hold to it and live in the victory which faith gives. It was no narrow or weak view that the preacher took of the universe and G.o.d's scheme for its salvation; for he too lived at a time when men were learning more of the love of G.o.d, and he too had spoken with G.o.d. The hard outline of his creed had grown luminous, fringed with the divine light from beyond, as the bars of prison windows grow dazzling and fade when the prisoner looks at the sun. All that the preacher said was wise and strong, and the only reason he failed to convince was that Toyner felt that the thought in which his own storm-tossed soul had anch.o.r.ed was a little wiser and stronger--only a little, for there was not a great difference between them, after all.

"I take in all that you say, sir; but you see I can't help feeling sure that it's true that G.o.d is living with us as much and as true when we're in the worst sort of sin, and the greater sin that it brings--for the punishment of sin is more and more sin--and being sure, I know that everything else that is true will come to fit in with it, though I may not be able rightly to put it in now, and what won't come to fit in with it can't be true."

The preacher perceived that the evil which he had set himself to slay was giantlike in strength. He chose him smooth stones for his sling.

His heart was growing heavy with fear of failure, his spirit within him still raised its face heavenward in unceasing prayer. He began to tell the history of G.o.d's ways with man from the first. He spoke of Abraham.

He urged that the great strength had always come to men who had trusted G.o.d's word against reason and against sight. And he saw then that for the first time Toyner raised up his head and seemed stirred with a reviving strength.

The preacher paused, hoping to hear some encouraging word in correspondence to the gesture, but none came.

Then he spoke of Moses and of Joshua, for he was following the tale of G.o.d's rejection of sinful nations.

Toyner answered now. His eye was clearer, his hand steadier. "I have read there's many that say that G.o.d could not have told His people to slay whole nations, men, women, and children. I think it's the shallowest thing that was ever said. I don't know about His _telling people_ to do it--that may be a poem; but that He gave it to them to do, that He gives it to winds and floods and fires and plagues to do, time and time and again, is as certain as that if there's a G.o.d He must have things His way or He isn't G.o.d. But I don't believe that in this world, or in the next, He ever left man, woman, or child, but lived with each one all through the sin and the destruction. And, sir, I take it that men couldn't see that until at last there came One who looked into G.o.d's heart and saw the truth, and He wanted to tell it, but there were no words, so though He had power in Him to be King over the whole earth, He chose instead to be the companion of sinners, and to go down into all the depths of pain and shame and death and h.e.l.l. And He said His Father had been doing it always, and He did it to show forth the Father. That is what it means. I am sure that is what it means."

The preacher was surprised to see the transformation that was going on in the man before him. That wonderful law which gives to some centre of energy in the brain the control of bodily strength, if but the right relations.h.i.+p between mind and body can be established, was again working, although in a lesser degree than formerly, to restore this man before his eyes. Bart, who had appeared shrunken, trembling, and watery-eyed, was pulling himself together with some strength that he had got from somewhere, and was standing up again ready to play a man's part. The preacher did not understand why. There seemed to him to have been nothing but failure in the interview. He made one more effort; he put the last stone in his sling. Toyner had just spoken of the sacrifice of Calvary, and to the preacher it seemed that he set it at naught, because he was claiming salvation for those who mocked as well as for those who believe.

"Think of it," he said; "you make wrong but an inferior kind of right.

You take away the reason for the one great Sacrifice, and in this you are slighting Him who suffered for you."

Then he made, with all the force and eloquence he could, the personal appeal of the Christ whom he felt to be slighted.

"You have spoken of the sufferings of lost and wretched men," he went on; "think of His sufferings! You have spoken of your loneliness; think of His loneliness!"

Then suddenly Bart Toyner made a gesture as a slave might who casts off the chains of bondage. The appeal to which he was listening was not for him, but for some man whom the preacher's imagination had drawn in his place, who did not appropriate the great Sacrifice and seek to live in its power. He did not now seek to explain again that the death of Christ was to him as an altar, the point in human thought where always the fire of the divine life descends upon the soul self-offered in like sacrifice. He had tried to explain this; now he tried no more, but he held out his hands with a sign of joy and recovered strength.

"You came to help me; you have prayed for me; you have helped me; you have been given something to say. Listen: you have told me of Abraham; he was called to go out alone, quite alone. Now you have spoken to me of Another who was alone." Toyner was incoherent. "That was why _He_ bore it, that we might know that it was possible to have faith all alone because He had it. It is easy to believe in G.o.d holding us up when others do, but awfully hard all alone. He knew that, He warned them to keep together; but all the same He lived out His prayers alone."

Toyner looked at the preacher, love and reverence in his eyes. "You saved me once," he said; "you have saved me again."

But the preacher went home very sorrowful, for he did not believe that Bart Toyner was saved.

CHAPTER XVIII.

The spiritual strength that proceeds from every holy man had again flowed in life-giving stream from the preacher to Bart Toyner. The help was adequate. Toyner never became intoxicated again.

His father died; and for two years or more the mother, who had lived frugally all her life, still lived frugally, although land and money had been left to her. The mother would not trust her son, and yet gradually she began to realise that it was he who was quietly heaping into her lap all those joys of which she had been so long deprived. At length she died, the happy mother of a son who had won the respect of other men.

It was after that that Toyner wedded Ann Markham. Then, when he had the power to live a more individual life of enjoyment and effort, it began to be known little by little that these two had committed that sin against society so hard to forgive, the sin of having their own creed and their own thoughts and their own ways.

Toyner was not a preacher. It was not in him to try to change the ideas of those who were doing well with what ideas they had. All that he desired was to live so that it might be known that his G.o.d was the G.o.d of the whole wide round of human activity, a G.o.d who blessed the just and the unjust. Toyner desired to be constantly blessing both the bad and the good with the blessing of love and home which had been given to him. It was inevitable that to carry out such an idea a man must live through many mistakes and much failure. The ideal itself was an offence to society. We have all heard of such offences and how they have been punished.

One great factor in the refining of Ann's life was her lover's long neglect; for he, in the simple belief that she must know his heart and purpose and that she would not be much benefited by his companions.h.i.+p, left her for those years that pa.s.sed before he married her wholly ignorant of his constancy. Ann was constant. Had he explained himself she would have been content and taken him more or less at his own valuation, as we all take those who talk about themselves. Having no such explanation to listen to, she watched and pondered all that he did.

Before the day came in which he made his shy and hesitating offer of marriage, she had grown to be one with him in hope and desire. Together they made their mistakes and lived down their failure. They had other troubles too, for the babies lived and died one by one.

There is seen to be a marvellous alchemy in true piety. Mind and sense subject to its process become refined. Where refinement is not the result, we may believe that there is a false note in the devotion, that there is self-seeking in the effort toward G.o.d. Toyner's wealth grew with the spread of the town over the land he owned. He had the good taste to spend well the money he devoted to pleasure; yet it was not books or pictures or music, acquired late in life, that gave to him and to his wife the power to grow in harmony with their surroundings. It was the high life of prayer and effort that they lived that made it possible for G.o.d--the G.o.d of art as truly as the G.o.d of prayer--to teach them.