The Case of Richard Meynell Part 37

Norham suppressed a slight yawn as he turned in his chair.

"The House of Commons, alas!--never shows to advantage in an ecclesiastical debate. You'd think it was in the condition of Sydney Smith with a cold--not sure whether there were nine Articles and Thirty-Nine Muses--or the other way on!"

Meynell looked at the Secretary of State in silence--his eyes twinkling.

He had heard from various friends of this touch of insolence in Norham.

He awaited its disappearance.

Edward Norham was a man still young; under forty indeed, though marked prematurely by hard work and hard fighting. His black hair had receded on the temples, and was obviously thinning on the crown of the head; he wore spectacles, and his shoulders had taken the stoop of office work. But the eyes behind the spectacles lost nothing that they desired to see; and the general impression was one of bull-dog strength, which could be impertinent and aggressive, and could also masque itself in a good humour and charm by no means insincere. In his political career, he was on the eve of great things; and he would owe them mainly to a power of work, supreme even in these hard-driven days. This power of work enabled him to glean in many fields, and keep his eye on many chances that his colleagues perforce neglected. The Modernist Movement was one of these chances. For years he had foreseen great changes ahead in the relations of Church and State, and this group of men seemed to be forcing the pace.

Suddenly, as his eyes perused the strong humanity of the face beside him, Norham changed his manner. He sat up and put down the paper-knife he had been teasing. As he did so there was a little crash at his elbow and something rolled on the floor.

"What's that?"

"No harm done," said Meynell, stooping--"one of our host's Greek coins.

What a beauty!" He picked up the little case and the coin which had rolled out of it--a gold coin of Velia, with a head of Athene--one of the great prizes of the collector.

Norham took it with eagerness. He was a Cambridge man, and a fine scholar, and such things delighted him.

"I didn't know Flaxman cared for these things."

"He inherited them," said Meynell, pointing to the open cabinet on the table. "But he loves them too. Mrs. Flaxman always has them put out on great occasions. It seems to me they ought to have a watcher! They are quite priceless, I believe. Such things are soon lost."

"Oh!--they are safe enough here," said Norham, returning the coin to its place, with another loving look at it. Then, with an effort, he pulled himself together, and with great rapidity began to question his companion as to the details and progress of the Movement. All the facts up to date, the number of Reformers enrolled since the foundation of the League, the League's finances, the astonis.h.i.+ng growth of its pet.i.tion to Parliament, the progress of the Movement in the Universities, among the ardent and intellectual youth of the day, its spread from week to week among the clergy: these things came out steadily and clearly in Meynell's replies.

"The League was started in July--it is now October. We have fifty thousand enrolled members, all communicants in Modernist churches.

Meetings and demonstrations are being arranged at this moment all over England; and in January or February there will be a formal inauguration of the new Liturgy in Dunchester Cathedral."

"Heavens!" said Norham, dropping all signs of languor. "Dunchester will venture it?"

Meynell made a sign of a.s.sent.

"It is of course possible that the episcopal proceedings against the Bishop, which, as you see, have just begun, may have been brought to a close, and that the Cathedral may be no longer at our disposal, but--"

"The Dean, surely, has power to close it!"

"The Dean has come over to us, and the majority of the Canons."

Norham threw back his head with a laugh of amazement.

"The first time in history that a Dean has been of the same opinion as his Bishop! Upon my word, the government has been badly informed or I have not kept up. I had no idea--simply no idea--that things had gone so far. Markborough of course gives us very different accounts--he and the Bishops acting with him."

"A great deal is going on which our Bishop here is quite unaware of."

"You can substantiate what you have been saying?"

"I will send you papers to-morrow morning. But of course"--added Meynell, after a pause--"a great many of us will be out of our berths, in a few months, temporarily at least. It will rest with Parliament whether we remain so!"

"The Non-Jurors of the twentieth century!" murmured Norham, with a half-sceptical intonation.

"Ah, but this _is_ the twentieth century!"--said Meynell smiling. "And in our belief the _denouement_ will be different."

"What will you do--you clergy--when you are deprived?"

"In the first place, it will take a long time to deprive us--and so long as there are any of us left in our livings, each will come to the help of the other."

"But you yourself?"

"I have already made arrangements for a big barn in the village"--said Meynell, smiling--"a great t.i.the-barn of the fifteenth century, a magnificent old place, with a forest of wooden arches, and a vault like a church. The village will wors.h.i.+p there for a while. We shall make it beautiful!"

Norham was silent for a moment. He was stupefied by the energy, the pa.s.sion of religious hope in the face beside him. Then the critical temper in him conquered his emotion, and he said, not without sarcasm:

"This is all very surprising--very interesting--but what are the _ideas_ behind you? A thing like this cannot live without ideas--and I confess I have always thought the ideas of Liberal Christianity a rather beggarly set-out--excuse the phrase!"

"There is nothing to excuse!--the phrase fits. 'A reduced Christianity'--as opposed to a 'full Christianity'--that is the description lately given, I think, by a divinity professor. I don't quarrel with it at all. Who can care for a 'reduced' anything! But a _transformed_ Christianity--that is another matter."

"Why 'Christianity' at all?"

Meynell looked at him in a smiling silence. He--the man of religion--was unwilling in these surroundings to play the prophet, to plunge into the central stream of argument. But Norham, the outsider and dilettante, was conscious of a kindled mind.

"That is the question to which it always seems to me there is no answer," he said easily, leaning back in his chair. "You think you can take what you like of a great historical religion and leave the rest--that you can fall back on its pre-suppositions and build it anew.

But the pre-suppositions themselves are all crumbling. 'G.o.d,'--'soul,'

'free-will,' 'immortality'--even human ident.i.ty--is there one of the old fundamental notions that still stands, unchallenged? What are we in the eyes of modern psychology--but a world of automata--dancing to stimuli from outside? What has become of conscience--of the moral law--of Kant's imperative--in the minds of writers like these?"

He pointed to two recent novels lying on the table, both of them brilliant glorifications of sordid forms of adultery.

Meynell's look fired.

"Ah!--but let us distinguish. _We_ are not anarchists--as those men are.

Our claim is precisely that we are, and desire to remain, a part of a _Society_--a definite community with definite laws--of a National Church--of the nation, that is, in its spiritual aspect. The question for which we are campaigning is as to the terms of members.h.i.+p in that society. But terms and conditions there must always be. The 'wild living intellect of man' must accept conditions in the Church, as _we_ conceive it, no less than in the Church as Newman conceived it."

Norham shrugged his shoulders.

"Then why all this bother?"

"Because the conditions must be adjusted from time to time! Otherwise the church suffers and souls are lost--wantonly, without reason. But there is no church--no religion--without some venture, some leap of faith! If you can't make any leap at all--any venture--then you remain outside--and you think yourself, perhaps, ent.i.tled to run amuck--as these men do!" He pointed to the books. "But _we_ make the venture!--_we_ accept the great hypothesis--of faith."

The sound of voices came dimly to them from the farther rooms. Norham pointed toward them.

"What difference then between you--and your Bishop?"

"Simply that in his case--as _we_ say--the hypothesis of faith is weighted with a vast ma.s.s of stubborn matter that it was never meant to carry--bad history, bad criticism, an out-grown philosophy. To make it carry it--in our belief--you have to fly in the face of that gradual education of the world--education of the mind, education of the conscience--which is the chief mark of G.o.d in the world. But the hypothesis of Faith, itself, remains--take it at its lowest--as rational, as defensible, as legitimate as any other!"

"What do you mean by it? G.o.d--conscience--responsibility?"

"Those are the big words!" said Meynell, smiling--"and of course the true ones. But what the saint means by it, I suppose, in the first instance, is that there is in man something mysterious, superhuman--a Life in life--which can be indefinitely strengthened, enlightened, purified, till it reveal to him the secret of the world, till it 'toss him' to the 'breast' of G.o.d!--or again, can be weakened, lost, destroyed, till he relapses into the animal. Believe it, we say! Live by it!--make the venture. _Verificatur vivendo_!"