It is a hard thing to write the history of a soul. The human soul is not a simple study; it is constituted of so many parts, faculties, emotions, sympathies, antipathies, as to render its diagnosis imperfect, nay perhaps impossible. We seldom understand one another’s motives; we do not always understand our own. We are a mystery, each of us, to his neighbour; I had almost said we are a mystery each to himself.
Yet this is the task which must be undertaken in this chapter—to relate the spiritual agonies of a soul. It will be necessary to show by what process of reason or conviction one who had been trained in the safe though narrow path of Christian evangelical orthodoxy became, as it were, a wanderer, homeless and hopeless, how he passed from certainty to doubt, from doubt to negation, and at length went down into the valley of darkness from which there is often no return.
In the history of a soul, its own confessions, its own introspections, are the only guides. All else is conjecture, imagination. Such papers or letters as Gerald Eversley has left will therefore be used here, for in them he speaks for himself, and the record, though incomplete, is not untrue. But the difficulty in using them is that they lack date, method, consecutiveness; they are like the volcanic upheavings of a soul’s fiery unrest; the doubts which possessed him, and the reactions of his faith are welded together. Yet who is there that is at all times equally religious or equally irreligious? Is not every man a believer sometimes, a sceptic sometimes? Has not faith its days of sunshine and of cloud in every life? It is not perhaps faith or unfaith that discriminates mankind; it is rather the longing for faith, the anguish of unfaith, or the opposites of these.
Doubts of God break upon the soul as the waves upon the shore, surging, retreating, engulfing one another with incessant flux and reflux in measured advance until the flood or in measured ebb-tide, but alas! defertilising, devastating it always, and leaving it strewn with the débris of weed, shingle, shifting sand, and the wreckage of men.
How impotent, too, are words as images of thought! They pursue ideas, beliefs, reflections, with halting steps; for between the thought and its expression lies an interval, brief or prolonged, and while the mind is expressing itself, it moves. Men are often doubters before they confess their unbelief, and when they proclaim it, they are drawing near to faith again.
He whose spiritual history is here recorded was a youth. He lacked the moderating, chastening experience of age; he had seen only two-and-twenty years when this story comes to an end. His view of religion might have been calmer had his years been more; but it would not, I think, have been more touching or more tragical. The experienced Christian, the confirmed Agnostic may both alike smile—it were more fitting, perchance, that they should weep—at the half-reasonings, the lights and shadows of belief, the exaggerations and recoils in the lonely pilgrimage of this young soul. And yet this at least is sure, that if the fate of a human soul battling in the great waters within the sight and hail of the shore, and going down alone, does not profoundly move and thrill the nature of any one of us, it is ill for him; he is far—very far—from the kingdom of God.
Let it not be deemed that Gerald Eversley ever fell into the sophistry of treating religious belief as a thing indifferent. That miserable thought could not be his. Early hallowed associations possessed him. The beauty of a life ordered by religion was before his eyes. In the hours when he had drifted farthest from the sanctuary of God he would still, I think, have owned that life without religion, though it might be lived, and lived not selfishly nor unprofitably, yet was not, nor could ever be, the same thing.
And if he asked himself Is religion needed? he could give but one answer. The world around him, the world within him, were his witnesses. Human nature is not so constituted that it can afford to dispense with its strongest motive to morality. ‘Is it said,’ he writes, ‘that the belief in God does not make men moral? To say so is to deny the influence of belief upon action altogether. Why do men act in one way rather than in another? Because of their beliefs. Belief is the sole curb of passion. A man’s creed determines soon or late his deeds. Man, so far as he is a rational being, must be guided by his reasonable expectations of consequences, i.e. by his beliefs. What absurdity, then, to imagine that a belief in man’s responsibility for his actions—public or obscure—for his words, for his very thoughts, to an Infallible, Eternal and Almighty Judge, is not an infinitely potent cause of moral action! The man of belief and the man of unbelief stand on different platforms. It is the former who provides, the latter who accepts, the sanctions of morals. Infidelity may appeal to public opinion as a restraining force; but what created public opinion? Faith.’
Then he seeks to meet the objection that religion does not always moralise human lives. ‘It is true, but what if it is? Motives do not always produce their natural results; they may be counteracted by other motives or by passions stronger for a time than themselves, for man is not simply rational, he is a creature of emotion, impulse, passionate desire. The sea, high-swollen by gales, overleaps its walls, dashes its salt spray for a brief while above the cliff. Are the walls then useless? were it well to pull them down? Better to strengthen them, deepen them, heighten them. No; religion may be false, but it has no substitute.’
It is clear that when he wrote these words—and they were never cancelled—he longed to believe; he realised the beauty, the blessedness of belief. Would that beauty and blessedness be always his? He saw the storm descending upon him from afar, and he cowered before it. He ‘feared as he entered into the cloud.’ Men talk sometimes of ‘giving up’ religious belief; but no belief that is worth possessing was ever ‘given up;’ it is torn away by some cruel power irresistible, and the soul is left lacerated, bleeding from the wound. To Gerald Eversley (if he had ever known them) would have come home those wonderful lines which show that Goethe passed through deeper spiritual waters than he was fain to confess:
Wer nie sein Brod mit Thränen ass,
Wer nie die kummervollen Nächte
Auf seinem Bette weinend sass,
Er kennt Euch nicht, Ihr himmlischen Mächte.
Ihr führt ins Leben uns hinein,
Ihr lasst den Armen schuldig werden,
Dann überlasst Ihr ihn der Pein,
Denn alle Schuld rächt sich auf Erden.
Let us try to follow him in his wanderings.
All unbelief begins in a distrust of the goodness of God. To be able to say ‘I believe in God’ is to have a religion, nay, if the truth be told, it is to have all religion. That majestic article of belief is so high a triumph over the apparent faults, schisms, lapses, miseries, agonies of Nature, that he whose heart can say ‘I believe that God is good’ is prepared for other beliefs as developments of that.
Consider how great a belief it is—great in its difficulty, great in its august beneficence. ‘I believe in the All-Good,’ or, as Christ put it, ‘I believe in God the Father.’ Marvellous it is that Theist or Deist should have been a term used reproachfully. To believe in a superintending gracious Providence; to believe that in life’s sorrowful straits an Everlasting Eye oversees us, an Almighty Voice still bids us be of cheer; to believe that there is a soul of goodness in things evil, that life is a riddle of which the key is held in divine invisible hands, and that we see as yet but a fragment of the scheme that extends from eternity to eternity—is not this the heart of religion? is it not a solace, guidance, discipline of the soul? ‘I marvel,’ says Gerald Eversley in one of his letters, ‘that the mere faith in God, apart from prophets, priests, mediators, revealers, has not exercised a more sacred, divine influence among men. But I marvel yet more at the tenacious strength with which men in all ages and in all quarters of the world have adhered to that belief, so antithetical as it is to moral experience. The warrant of it lies not, methinks, in the phenomena of Nature or Life. It lies in the constitution of the human heart. Fecisti nos ad Te, as St. Augustine says, et cor nostrum inquietum est donec requiescat in Te. We cling to the faith in God, not because it is open to no objection, but because, when our vision is clearest, not chequered or distorted by pride, passion, cupidity, self-deception, no other faith than that is possible. I believe in God.’
When Gerald Eversley in his lonely meditations found that the belief in God (which he had always taken as axiomatic) was gravely questioned, it was as though the earth were quaking under his feet. The extinguishing of the sun or moon in the heaven would not be a more terrible shock than is the loss of God to a young soul. It is altogether desolate if bereft of Him. It is so trustful, so generous, so positive; it leans so hard upon its faiths, and is so sure of their ability to endure whatever assault of criticism may be opposed to them, that to lose aught is to lose all; and, when the faith in God fails, the man, from a sentiment of having been abused and cheated, plunges many a time headlong into sin. Oh! the pity that God should fail men in their bitter need of Him!
I find this passage in one of Gerald Eversley’s papers, written, it would seem, not long after the date of his leaving St. Anselm’s. It is like much that men have thought and written since the world was.
‘What is the voice of Nature? Is it love? I see a wild battling of forces, ruthless, inexplicable, working out good—such good as exists—by agonies of evil. I see the strong trampling on the weak, life issuing from suffering and death, pain inflicted every day upon the innocent and unoffending; everywhere violence, cruelty, pestilence, cataclysm the laws of the universe. No, the voice of Nature is not love.
‘What is the voice of History? Is that then love? Has the progress of man been effected by beneficent agencies? Are the hands of civilisation stained with no bloodshed? Everywhere the pages of human history exhibit the red fires of tyranny, injustice, persecution, conscience sacrificed at the stake, virtue outraged and expelled, vice enthroned in the palace, nay, in the sanctuary of God, armies of men slaughtered for a tyrant’s will, butcheries, fusillades, dragonnades, noyades, the axe, the scaffold, the guillotine. Everywhere, everywhere.
‘Why should the Almighty, if He be All-Merciful, permit this carnage? There is no answer.’
The revolt of souls against religion is more often moral than intellectual in its origin. It is when the moral sense is shocked that the intellect sharpens its sword in the cause of unbelief.
The growing humanity of life—a humanity which is the one clear compensating gain for many defaults—rises in protest against the severities of religious history or religious doctrine. The murderous deeds wrought by the heroes and heroines of the Old Testament did not offend the Covenanters as they offend their late descendants to-day. It would not seem that the teaching of Christ, in regard to the future life and its punishments and rewards, aroused so much as one faint murmur of indignation among His contemporaries, who were the vigilant jealous enemies of His Messiahship. Yet that teaching, interpreted with the literalness which would wring the last latent drop of bitterness out of metaphor or allegory, has come to be so keenly resented by sensitive consciences as to imperil the claim of His religion to be the divinely appointed satisfaction for the spiritual needs of humanity.
Gerald was led on—it is but a step—from doubting the justice of God in this world to doubting it in the next. His spirit revolted at the inequalities and disproportions of the present life. But it revolted still more at the thought of an immutable inequality between the destinies of men in the unseen life. His father had always assumed this inequality as an element of revelation. He had spoken of the ‘great gulf fixed,’ of the eternity of bliss, and the eternity of condemnation. It was as sure to him as the Incarnation itself; nay, he would argue, if there was an Incarnation of the Eternal, can the penalty of rejecting Him be less than eternal?
There is no mistake in religion so great as that of being too logical. In the affairs of man and man logic has its place, for they are confined within the boundaries of the reason. But in the relation of the Infinite to the finite, in the problem where one factor is Infinity, logic is the most dangerous, the most fatal of possible guides. From Augustine to Calvin and Jonathan Edwards, it has been the vice of theology. Mr. Eversley did not ask himself, Can one man sin and the consequences for man be everlasting, and shall a God die and the consequences of His death end for most men with threescore years and ten?
Strictly considered, the revelation of the Divine Nature is and must be not single, but twofold. Every truth of God has two sides, like a medal, and it is impossible to view them simultaneously. The nearest human approximation to such truth will be found to lie in a harmony of conflicting propositions. Logical contradictions are an absurdity in human things; in divine things they are sometimes the only possible expressions of truth. The divine severity and the divine forgiveness, like necessity and free will, run in parallel lines which know no meeting in this life, but may perchance meet in the eternal Life of Heaven.
Gerald Eversley seems to have had some inkling or presentiment of this fact, for I find somewhat later a reference to Isaiah lv. 8, 9, as a passage affording the solution of religious difficulties. ‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.’
But it was the last flicker of the dying flame. On the very same page there is a sentence showing how the bitter herb of unbelief had already begun to poison the spring of happiness in his life.
For no sooner is the goodness of God denied or doubted than a sense of dissatisfaction arises in the human mind. Things are well as they are, if they are the expression of a divine (though inscrutable) will. They are not well, if judged in and by themselves.
Gerald Eversley found himself impatient (as so many before him) of the circumstances of his being, nay, of his being itself. Instead of thanking God for his creation, he censured his father for it. Questions such as these welled up in his soul: ‘Why was I born, when it were so much better not to have been than to be? Τὸ μὴ φῦναι ἃπαντα νικᾷ λόγον. Why has man no option in his birth? why may he have none in his death? Where is the right of parents to bring children into life, knowing not if it will be to them a misery, a curse? How can he who believes that the vast majority of mankind are predestined to an everlasting woe, augment, with a light and laughing heart, the number of the damned?’
And again:
‘The honour of parents hangs upon the belief in God. The duty of parents to the children whom they have begotten, perhaps to those children’s bitter pain, is a law of Nature. But the duty that children owe to parents needs a revelation of the Divine Will. And what if the revelation fails?’
Thus Gerald for the first time in life began to look with angry eyes upon the father who had once been his ideal of human goodness. Mr. Eversley held that children were ‘an heritage and gift that cometh of the Lord;’ he had been known to say that, where God sent the mouths, He would send the bread to feed them. The theory can hardly be said to be justified by experience. Gerald resented and condemned it. He argued that the parent was responsible for his children’s welfare here and hereafter. Unhappy, wretched he was in his view; it made his home (with its widening circle of open-mouthed little sisters) intolerable to him; his father ceased to be any more his friend, and became to him as a stranger, and for many months in the early days of his college life, Kestercham—the once loved village of his boyhood—saw him not.
His vision being thus disturbed, his soul embittered, he turned a fierce scrutiny upon the evidences of Christ’s religion. He treated them fiercely, almost vindictively. He resolved to give them no quarter. He would be true to his conscience—logically true—be the cost what it might. He seemed to delight in tearing his old beliefs to shreds. Human nature is strangely capable of finding pleasure in self-inflicted pain.
It is not the function of a religious creed to solve all difficulties. Difficulties, physical, intellectual, spiritual, are the stimulus of humanity. Do them away, and humanity becomes contented and enervated. Lessing said, not less forcibly than nobly, that the possession of truth belongs to God; it is the search for truth that is the dignity of man. In this light Pilate’s question gets a new meaning, What is truth?
No evil could happen to human nature so great as the loss of its unsolved and as yet insoluble mysteries.
Religion does not affect to solve religious difficulties. Difficulties are inherent in the relation of the divine to the human. God may be apprehended but not comprehended. Were it possible to comprehend Him, it would be impossible to worship Him. The blessing of religion is not in solving the mysteries of life or nature; it is in showing that there is a solution, and that God keeps it in His hands.
But Gerald Eversley’s mind was already decided for negation (though he knew it not) when he applied himself to the study of Christianity. That it was so is clear from such words as these in one of his papers:
‘Can it be supposed that God, if He were good and would that all men should be saved, would leave His revelation in doubt? A revelation which can be denied is no revelation. Would He have committed it to fallible men and to yet more fallible records and documents of men? Would He not have written it in flaming characters across the heaven, like the sacred sign that made the Emperor Constantine a Christian? Who will stake his all upon an hypothesis? Who will die for a superior probability? It cannot be a divine providence that loving souls, eager to believe, should be tossed to and fro as on a wild sea and be never at rest. Give me certainty, not an agony of doubt and fear. O God, if Thou be God, prove Thyself God.’
Oh! Gerald, Gerald, it is not the certainties of life (they are few enough) for which men die. The theories, hypotheses, uncertainties—these, and only these, may claim the supreme self-sacrifice.
It is distrust in the goodness of God, I say again, which is the beginning of all unbelief. Gerald Eversley thought himself unfairly used by religion, and his reprisal lay in using religion with more unfairness.
The truth is that if God be good, if He be, as the Wisdom has it, a ‘lover of souls,’ then it is a natural presumption that He should anticipate the need of His children, by establishing an understanding or sympathy between Himself and them. Granted the goodness of God, inspiration and revelation, however understood, cease to be intrinsically difficult; they are natural, almost necessary. The one eternal paradox would be that God should care for men and should take no means to assure them of His care.
But a treasure is not the less a treasure because it is in earthen vessels. The human record of a divine revelation may be looked at either broadly or in detail. If it be scrutinised microscopically, many flaws, fissures, faults will come to light. The element of humanity is in all things the element of error. It is only in the inviolate works of God in Nature that the microscope reveals ever new wonders of beneficence and beauty. But religion can never depend upon disputed points of authorship and chronology. Truth is self-luminous; it matters not who discovers or describes it. Names, places, dates, are the accidents of a religion; they are not of its essence. We need no proof of the sun in heaven. We need no proof of the Divine Life on earth. He who lived that Life called Himself the Son of Man. That one who is mere man should call Himself the Son of Man, were arrogance. But that one who is higher than man, stooping for a time to human estate, should call Himself the Son of Man, is the perfectness of condescension. More it is not necessary to define. ‘If you do not ask me,’ says the philosopher, ‘I know.’
Gerald Eversley fell into the mistake of pressing details. It is the mistake of one who would contemn a hero for an error in dress. Revelation is not infallibility. Life is spontaneous, erratic; death is rigid, immaculate, complete in itself. God speaks by revelation; revelation is life.
Gerald Eversley argued himself into his own predetermined conviction. He did not believe in God, therefore he did not believe in revelation. He mistook his premiss for his conclusion.
He stood then in his thoughts face to face with Christ. We all stand so one day. The ages of history are as one vast columnar gallery, and at its head looms the one pathetic Divine Figure, saying to every individual soul of man, What thinkest thou of Me? It is the one eternal question, ever ancient, ever new; there is no other question in the world.
The life of Christ is unlike other lives. Its features are distinct and pre-eminent. All depends (though Gerald failed to see it) upon the way of looking at them.
It is possible to argue from miracle to Christ. Or it is possible to argue from Christ to the miracles. Gerald reasoned that miracles could not occur; therefore Christ did not work miracles; therefore He is not the Son of God.
But what means that phrase, The Son of God? Is it literal, sufficient truth? Is it not metaphor? and is not metaphor the sole expression of divine relations?
Sonship implies two things in the human conception of it—posteriority and inferiority; but no sooner does the Creed declare Him Son of God than it declares that He is neither posterior nor inferior to His Father, and yet it calls Him Son. It denies in one clause what it asserts in another. It is self-contradictory, but it is not therefore false.
Why, then, does the Christian Church make use of metaphor? Partly, perhaps, because it is natural to human language to express the spiritual in terms of the sensuous; are not conception, apprehension, religion itself, terms of the senses? But partly, too, because metaphor appeals to the emotions; its very vagueness is suggestive, stimulating, inspiring, and it is by the emotions that religion lives. To say, then, that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, is not to say that that is intrinsic absolute truth.
Gerald Eversley had surrendered his faith in the divine nature of Christ. But he still clung to faith in Him as the highest or archetypal man, understanding so His self-chosen title ‘the Son of Man.’ This is the confession which, it will be remembered, he tried to make once to his father. He essayed to speak of Christ as perfect man, though not divine. He forgot that, if there were a perfect man, he would be more than man. Imperfection is an attribute of humanity.
Yet how infinitely touching is at times the desire of those who no longer believe Him divine to acknowledge and reverence Him as the head of the whole human family! They still speak of Him as ‘the Great Master,’ ‘the Holy One,’ ‘the Lord,’ nay even as ‘the Saviour.’ It is the glow that flushes the horizon when the sun has already sunk into the waves.
Gerald Eversley, in this phase of his belief or unbelief, said to himself, ‘He is nearer to me than he was, now that I think of him as man. Time was when his voice came to my ears, as it were, through long and distant avenues. Now I speak to him face to face. He is my elder brother, like myself, yet oh! how much higher! I grasp his hand. He goes before me on the dark and lonesome road. What need to dream of him as descending from heaven, or emptied of a divine glory? It is enough that one who walked upon the earth, a man among men, living the common life of men, tempted as men are, suffering like men, yet lived so sublime a life as to extort from human souls the vain ascription of divinity. That is my comfort, greater than if he had been the firstborn of Creation, and legions of angels had waited upon his word.’
Gerald Eversley did not long deceive himself with the imagination that the residuary Christ of his speculations was the same Being whom he had known and adored in childhood. It is the idlest of idle superstitions that modern reason or sentiment can rewrite the Gospel. Human thought did not create Christ, as Rousseau’s Vicaire Savoyard knew well. Neither can it re-create Him. And if the re-creation were possible, there would be a new Christ. If the angels of God were not obedient to His summons, His strong forbearance in not calling upon them was a mockery. If He could not have saved Himself from death, then His death is no longer meritorious. If he was, like other men, of the earth earthy, where then is the condescension of His humanity? Such a Christ may be a Friend, an Exemplar, a spiritual Leader; the world’s Saviour and Redeemer He is not.
For a while Gerald Eversley flattered himself that this was enough. The miraculous (he said) does not happen. Then there is no Christ. Gerald Eversley manufactured his own Christ and sought to worship Him; but the prayer died away upon his lips.
Yet, after all, this manufactured Christ did not content him. It is easy to make a selection of His words and teachings that please the individual, and to leave the rest. It is easy, but it is not satisfying. And the worst is, that one person is as much entitled to make his selection as another. Gerald, being honest with himself, could not but own that there are words, and actions too, of Christ which do not harmonise with any such selective process. It was a pain to him that so much must be left out. The divine and the human elements are the warp and the woof in the sacred biography. The result of selection is destruction. An accomplished critic, in the exercise of his selective faculty, has decided that Christ could not have spoken the parable of the Prodigal Son. Is the result to discredit the parable of the Prodigal Son, or to discredit the principle of selection? Heaven help us when the Christ of God is dissolved in the crucible of critical taste!
I do not say that a human Christ is not worth having; I only say that he is not the Christ of Christendom. Perhaps Gerald Eversley felt it to be so too; for he wrote, ‘No man is happy in a God whom he fashions for himself. The objects of worship are given, not made; they proceed from God to man, not from man to God. Science can analyse, but it cannot create. It can explain every hue of the rainbow, but it cannot set the rainbow in the heaven.’
He had ceased to worship the divine Son of Man; was it likely that he would worship His shadow? Jesus Christ was to him one whom he could admire or reverence, like Socrates or Marcus Aurelius; He was no more a Guide for life and for death.
So Gerald Eversley faced faith on the ocean of life like a vessel without rudder or compass. The sanctions of his life, its encouragements, its consolations were lost. He was without faith in the world.
To the obligation of the moral law he still clung. It was not in his nature to commit the baseness of discovering in infidelity a pretext for sin. The supremacy of honour, truth, charity, purity, was still the law of his life. Whether these high principles of conduct were self-sufficient, whether they could for ever flourish in a climate that knew not the golden sunlight, he did not ask, he did not wish to ask. He was trying to live the Christian life without Christ. He was not happy.
In the academical society to which he migrated from St. Anselm’s, he was subjected to a new and penetrating experience. His intellectual distinction won him, from the first, admission into a cultivated society. He was struck by the conversation of his associates. It was brilliant and fascinating. It sparkled with jest and epigram. It overran in festive good humour. But it lacked seriousness. It seemed remote from the realities of life. There was in it no sense of responsibility, of awe, of the sense of sin, of the longing for righteousness. The froth upon the cup was high and shining; but in the wine was no strength, no virtue. One of Gerald’s frequent companions at Balliol was heard to say that he did not see what good religion was; for he was doing his duty, and he could not do it better if there were a hundred Gods to punish him. Gerald thought of the Pharisee and the Publican, and of the reverential solemnity with which his father had been wont to repeat the words, ‘God be merciful to me a sinner.’
Yet the stream carried him away. How hard it is to live in the stream and not be borne away by it! And Gerald came to feel the absence of belief to be as natural as belief had once been to him. He took it for granted. He said to himself that nobody believed, because he and his half-score of friends were unbelievers. It began to seem to him a thing incredible that he had once enjoyed a simple unquestioning faith in God and Christ.
It may be that, if it were the Divine Will to test the worth of human souls, no better test were possible than the withdrawal of religious faith. Better, in God’s eyes it may be, than the soul that believes, is the soul that acquits itself nobly in the absence of belief. To steer straight on when the waves of the deep run mountain-high, and neither sun nor moon appears for many days in heaven—this is the triumph of a faithless faith. O soul, that deemest thyself forsaken of God, thou bearest within thee a God whose name is conscience.
And yet the desolation of being faithless—how great it is! Never had Gerald been so solitary before. He shrank more and more from going home. The meeting with his father was painful to him, for he had given up the habit of going to church. And if he knew that his father prayed for him, that was but one witness more to the vanity of prayer.
At college the men whom he met habitually were either the votaries or (more often) the enemies of religion, and he was neither. Except at Helmsbury, and there only on the rare occasions of conversation with Lady Venniker, he could look for sympathy nowhere. He found it not in the earth nor yet in the heaven, and he knew not that it could ever be found.
Unhappy then he was, and daily unhappier. If he asked, ‘Is there a God? do I stand in relation to Him? Has there been One who spoke on earth in the accents of heaven? Is man responsible except to man? Is there a hereafter? Whence came I? Whither am I going?’—the only answer was the echo of his own voice. Culture could tell him all things, save the one thing that his soul needed to know. It might be that that knowledge was for ever hidden. But if so, if the questions that man is compelled to ask are the questions to which an answer is denied, then is life vain, nebulous, self-torturing, nay, it is death.
Lonely was Gerald, indescribably lonely. One extract from his papers, written when he had been at college a year and more, may be given here; it will not unfitly bring this chapter to a conclusion.
‘I lay wakeful one night until the night was passing into morning. It was more than I could bear—that aching, terrible void. I could have chosen death rather than that living pain. At last I rose from my bed, half dressed myself, and went out. The night had been rainy. The lamps in the courtyard were just flickering on the verge of extinction; they seemed to me emblems of my own dying faith. For a time I stood upon the bridge, gazing downwards into the dark, sluggish water. Many thoughts, weird and dreadful, coursed through my mind; I can scarcely recall them. But I know I said, standing there, “Is life then worthy to be lived, if such be life? What is it that constrains me to suffer and live? Religion teaches that life is a service, and the living man a soldier set at his post by Divine Will, and it is treachery or cowardice to quit it until He gives the command. But I have done with religion. And if my life is my own, and death is sweeter, or less bitter, than life, why live?” So I said—but not yet, not yet. The roseate light began to play on the eastern horizon. I crossed the courtyard, and returned, not as I had come, but under the shadow of the old ivy-grown wall. When my servant came in the morning I was asleep.’
To this had Gerald Eversley come.
‘And Job spake, and said, Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived. Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it.’