THE SOUL OF A BISHOP

Otago Witness, Issue 3315, 26 September 1917, Page 58

THE SOUL OF A BISHOP

By H. G. WELLS. Author of "The Wonderful Visit." CHAPTER THE SIXTH. EXEGETICAL. § IWithout any sense of transition the Bishop found himself seated in tlra, little North Library of the Athenceum Club and staring at the bust of John Wilson Croker. He was sitting motionless and musing deeply. He was questioning with a cool and steady mind whether he had seen a vision or whether he had had a dream. If it had been a dream it had been an extraordinarily vivid and convincing dream. He still seemed to be in the presence of God, and it perplexed him not at all that he should also be in the presence of Croker. The feeling of mental rottenness and insecurity that had weakened his thought through the period of his illness had gone. He was secure again within himself. It did not seem to matter fundamentally it was an experience of thing's without or of things within him that had happened to him. It was clear to him that much that he had seen was at most expressive, that some. was altogether symbolical.. Eor example, if the latter, there was that sudden absurd realisation of his sash and gaiters, and. his perception of them as encumbrances in his pursuit of God. But the setting and essential of the whole thing remained in his mind neither expressive nor symbolical, but as real and immediately perceived, and that was the presence and kingship of God. God was still with h.-n and about him and over him and sustaining him. He was back again in his world and his ordinary life, in his clothing and his body and his club, but God had been made and remained altogether plain and manifest. Whether an actual vision had made his conviction, or whether the conviction of his own subconscious mind had made the dream, seemed but a small matter beside the "conviction that this, was indeed the God he had desired and the God who must rule his life.

" The stuff. The stuff had little to do with it. It just cleared my head . . . I have seen. I have seen really. I know."

For a long time as it seemed the Bishop remained wrapped in clouds of luminous meditation. • Dream or vision, it did not matter j the essential thing was thai he had made up his mind about God—he had found God. he oerceived®that his theological perplexities had gone. God was higher and simpler and nearer than any theological God, than v the God of the Three Creeds. Those creeds lay about in his mind now like garments flung aside,, no trace nor suspicion of divinity sustained them any longer. And now -. Now he would go out into the world. The little library of the Athenseum had no visible door. He went to the bookmasked entrance In the corner, and felt among the bookshelves for the hidden latch. Then he paused, held by a curious thought. What exactly was the intention c* that symbolical struggle wvth his sash and gaiters, and why had they impeded his pursuit of God? To what particularly significant action was he going out? The Three Creeds were like garments flung aside. But he was still wearing the uniform of a priest iii the service of those three creeds. . , .

After a long interval he walked into the big reading room. He ordered some tea and dry toast and butter, and sat down very thoughtfully in a corner. He was still sitting and thinking at half-past eight. It may seem strange to the reader that this bishop, who had been doubting and criticising the Church and his system, of beliefs for four long years, had never before faced the possibility of a severance from his ecclesiastical dignity. But he had grown up in the Church, his life had been so ei' 'irely clerical and Anglican that the widest separation he had hitherto been able to imagine from this past had left him still a bishop, heretical perhaps, innovating -in the 'broadening of beliefs and the liberalising of practice, defensive even as Chasters was defensive, but still with the palace and his dignities, differing in opinion rather than in any tangible reality from his previous self. For a bishop, disbelief in the Church is a far •irofounder scepticism than mere disbelief in God. God is unseen, and in daily things unfelt; but the • Church is with the predestined bishop always. His concept of the extremest possible departure from orthodoxy had been something that Chasters had phrased as " a restatement of Christ." It was a new idea, an idea that had come with an immense effect of severance and novelty, that God could be other than £he God of the Creed, could present Himself to the imagination as a figure totally unlike the white, gentle, and uncompromising Redeemer of an Anglican's thought. That the Bishop should treat the whole teaching of the Church, and the Church itself, as wrong was an idea so new that it fell upon him now like a thunderbolt out of a cloudless sky. But here, clear in his mind now, was a feeling, amounting to conviction, that it was the purpose and gesture of the true God that he should come right out of the Church and all his professions. And in the first glow of his vision he felt this gesture imperative. He must step right cut . . . whither? How? And when? To begin with it seemed to him that an immediate renunciation was demanded. But it wa-s a momentous step. He wanted to think. And to go on thinking. Bather than to act precipitately. , Although the imperative seemed absolute, some delaying and arresting Instinct insisted that

he must " think." If he went back to Princhester the everyday duties of his position -would confront him at once with an effect of a definite challenge. He decided to take one of the Reform Club bedrooms for two or three days, and wire to Princhester that he was "unavoidably delayed in town," without further explanations. Then perhaps this inhibitory torce would give way.

It did not, • however, give way. His mind sat down for two oays in a blank amazement at the course before him, and at the end of that time this reasonless and formless intuition was as strong as ever. During that time, except for some incidental exchanges at his clubs, he talked to lio one. At first he did not want to talk to anyone. He remained mentally and practically active, with a still intensely vivid sense that God —the true God —stood watching him and waiting for him to follow. And to follow meant slipping right out of all the world he had ever known. To thrust his foot right over the edge of a cliff would scarcely have demanded more from the Bishop's store of resolution. He stood on the very verge. The chief secretion of his mind was a shadowy experiment or so in explanation of why he did not follow.

Insensibly the extreme vividness of his sense of God's earnestness decreased. But he still retained a persuasion of the reality of an immediate listener waiting, # and of the need of satisfying him.

On the third day he found his mind still further changed. He no longer felt that God was in Pall Mall <or St. James's Park, whither he resorted to walk and muse. He felt now that God was somewhere about the horizon. . . . He

felt, too, no longer that he thought straight into the mind of God. He thought now of what he would presently say to God. He turned over and rehearsed phrases. With that came a desire to try them first on some other hearer. And from that! to the attentive head of Lady Sunderbund, prettily beirt towards him, was no great leap. She would understand, if anyone could understand, the great change that had happened in his mind. . He found her address in the telephone book. She could be quite alone to him if he wouldn't mind "just me." It was, he said, exactly what he desired. But when he got to her great airy flat overlooking Hyde Park, with its Omega Workshop furniture and its arresting decoration, he was not so sure whether thfs encounter was so exactly the thing he had desired as he had supposed. The world had become opaque and real again as he walked up St. James's street, and.past the Ritz. He had a feeling that he was taking an afternoon off from God. The adventurous modernity of the room in which, he waited 'intensified that. One whole white wall was devoted to a small picture by Wyndham Lewis. It was like a picture of an earthquake in a city of aniline pink and grey and keen green cardboard, and he wished it had never existed.

He turned his back upon it and stared out of the "window over the trees and greenery. The balcony was decorated with white and pink geraniums in pot 3 painted black and gold, and the railings of the balcony were black and gold with crimson shapes like squares wildly out of drawing. ~*\ Lady Sunderbund keot him waiting, perhaps, five minutes. Then she came sailing into him. She was dressed in a way, and moved across the room in a wav, that was more reminiscent of Botticelli's Spring than ever—only with a kind of supei'added, stiffish polonaise of lace, —and he did not want to be reminded of Botticelli's Spring or wonder why she had taken to stiff lace polonaises. He did not inquire whether he had met Lady Sunderbund to better advantage at Mrs Garstein Fellow3's, or whether his memory had overrated her, or whether anything had happened to his standard of taste; but his feeling now was decidedly one of disappointment, and all the talk and selfexamination he had promised himself seemed to wither and hide away within him. For a time he talked of her view, and then admired her room and its arrangement, which he thought really were quite unbecomingly flippant and undignified for a room. Then came the black tea thing'3 on their orange tray, and he searched in his mind for small talk to sustain their interview. But he had already betrayed his disposition to "go on with onr talk" in his telephone inquiry, and Lady Sunderbund, perceiving his shyness, began to make openings for him —at first just little hinting openings, and then larger and larger ones, until at last one got him.

"I'm ?o glad," she said, "to see you again. I'm so glad to go on with our talk. I've thought about it and thought about it."

She beamed at him happily. " X've thought ova ev'y wo'd yon paid," she went on when she had finished conveying her pretty bli?s to him. " I've been so helped by thinking the k'eeds are svmbols. And all you said. And I've felt time after time you couldn't stay whe' you Ave'. That what you we' sayine to me would have to be said 'ight out."

That brought him in. He could not very well evade that opening without incivility. After all, he had asked to see her, and it was a foolish thing to let little decorative accidentals put him off his friendly purpose. A woman may have flower-pots painted gold with black checkers, and still be deeply tmderstandlng. He determined to tell her what was in his mind. But he found something barred him from telling that he had had an actual vision of God. It was as if that had been a private and confidential meeting. tt wasn't, he felt, for him either to boast ft privilege or tell others of things that God had not chosen to show theni-

"Since 1 saw you," he said, "I "have

thought a great deal—of the subject of our conversation." "I have been t'ying to think," she said in a confirmatory tone, as if sho had cooperated. " My faith in God grows," he said. She glowed. Her lips fell apart. She flamed attention. "But it grows less like the faith of the Church—less and less. I was born and trained in Anglicanism, and it is with a sort of astonishment I find myself passing now out of every sort of Catholicism—seeing it from the outside. ..." "Just as one might see Buddhism," she supplied. 'And yet feeling nearer—infinitely nearer to God," he said. "Yes," sho panted; "yea." " I thought it one went out, one went out just to doubt and darkness." "And you don't?" ';No." " You have gone at one step to a new 'iligion!" . He stared for a moment at the phrase. "To religion," he said. "It is so wondyful," she said, with her hands straight down upon the couch upon which she was sitting, and leaning forward at him, so as to seem almost as much out of drawing as a modern picture. "It seems," he reflected; " —as if it were a natural thing." « She came back to. earth very slowly. She turned to the tea things with hushed and solemn movements as though she administered a ceremony of peculiar' significance. The Bishop, too, rose slowly' out of the profundity of his confession. "No sugar, please," he said, arresting the lump in mid-air. < It was only when they were embarked upon cups of tea and had a little refreshed themselves that she carried the talk further. " Does it mean that you must leave the Church?" she asked. "It seemed so at first," he said. " But now I do not know. I do not know what I ought to do." She awaited his next thought. "It is as if one had lived in a room all one's life and thought it, the world—and then suddenly walked out through a door and discovered the sea and the mountains and stars. So it was with me and the > Anglican Church. It seems so extraordinary now—and it would have seemed the most natural thing a year ago—to think that I ever believed that the - Anglican Compromise was the final truth of religion, that nothing more until the end of the world could ever be known that Cosmo Gordon Lang did not know, that there could be no conception of God and His quality that Randall Davidson did not possess." He paused. " I did," he said. " I did," she responded with round blue eyes of wonder. "At the utmost the Church of England is ar tabernacle on a road." "A 'oad that goes whe'?" she rhetorised. "Exactly," said the Bishop, and put down his cup. "You see, my dear Lady Sunderbund," he resumed, "I am exactly in the position of that man at the door." She quoted aptly and softly; " The wo'ld was all befo' them whe' to choose." He -was struck by the aptness of the words. "I feel I have to come right out into the bare truth. What exactly then do I become? Do I lose my priestly function because I discover how great God is? But what am I to do?" He opened a new layer of his thoughts to her. "There is a saying," he remarked, " once a priest always a priest. I cannot imagine myself as other than what I am." "But o'thodox no maw," she said. " Orthodox—self-satisfied no longer. A priest who seeks, an exploring priest." "In a Chu'ch of Pog ess and B'othe'hood,' she carried him on. "At any rate, in a progressive and learning Church." She flashed and glowed assent. "I have been haunted," he said, "by those words spoken at Athens. ' Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you.' That comes to me with an effect of—guidance is an oldfashioned word—shall I say suggestion? To stand by the altar bearing strange names and ancient symbols, speaking plainlv to all mankind of the / one true God-^—l"

He did not get much beyond this point at the time, though he remained talking with Lady Sunderbund for nearly an hour longer. The rest was merely a beating out of what had already been said. But insensibly she renewed her original charm, and as ho became accustomed to her he forgot a certain artificiality in her manner and the extreme modernity of her costume and furniture. She was a wonderful listener; nobody else could have helped him to expression in quite the same way, and when he left her he felt that now he was capable of stating his case in a coherent and acceptable form to almost any intelligent hearer. He had a point of view now that was no longer embarrassed 'by the immediate golden presence of God; he was no longer dazzled nor ecstatic; his problem had diminished to the scale of any other great human problem, to the scale of political problems about which there is no such \n-gency as there is about a house on fire, for example. And now the desire for expression was running strong. He wanted to state his situation. If he did not state he would have to act; and as he walked baok to the club dinner he turned over possible interlocutors in his thoughts. Lord Rampound sat with him at dinner, and he came near broaching the subject with him. But Lord Rampound that evening had that morbid running of bluish legal anecdotes which is so common an affliction

with lawyers, and theology sinks and dies in that turbid stream.

But as he lay in bed that night he thought of his old friend and helper, Bishop Likeman, and it was borne in upon him that he should consult him. And this he did next dav.

Since the clays when* the Bishop had been ©illy plain Mr Scrope, the youngest and njost helpful of Likeman's historical band of curates, their friendship had continued. Likeman had been a second father to him; in particular his tact and helpfulness had shone during those days of doubt and anxiety when dear old Queen Victoria, God's representative on earth, had obstinately refused, at the eleventh hour, to make him a bishop. She had those pig-headed fits, and she was touchy about the bishops. She had liked Scrope on account of the excellence of his German pronunciation; but she had been irritated by newspaper paragraphs—nobody could ever find out who wrote them, and nobody could ever find out who showed them to the old lady—anticipating - his elevation. She had gone very red in the face and stiffened in the Guelphic manner whenever Scrope and so a rich harvest of spiritual life had.remained untilled for some months. Likeman had brought her round. It seemed arguable that Scrope owed some explanation to Likeman before he came to any open breach with the Establishment. (To be Continued.)