The Missionary Part 28

"No, please! I must ask you not to applaud. For one thing, there is not time for it. Just let me get my say said, and then, when Mr. Maxwell gives us the message he has brought us from what we are, perhaps, too ready to believe the enemy's camp, applaud him as much as you like. What I want to do now is to say as far as possible without offence, and without hurting the feelings of the many members of Christian churches who have come amongst us to-night, that it is to be our privilege to listen here in what has been recently called the head-quarters of infidelity--an insulting epithet which I, with you and all true rationalists indignantly repudiate--a man, a Christian clergyman, a priest of the Church of England who has, as you already know, raised a hurricane of criticism throughout this Christian country by daring to tell Christians just what Jesus of Nazareth meant--if plain words mean anything--when he preached the Sermon on the Mount. He has dared to say from a Christian pulpit what we have been saying from these platforms of ours ever since we had them--that Christendom is not Christian, and that it cannot be so until it is prepared to be honest with itself and its G.o.d.

"Mr. Maxwell has come amongst us to-night with other thoughts, other faiths, other beliefs than ours, but from what I see of the audience he will not speak to freethinkers only. I believe that there are more professing Christians in this hall to-night than there ever have been before. Let us remember that. It may be that Mr. Maxwell will teach us some lessons as unpalatable as those which he taught from the pulpit of St. Chrysostom; but do not let us forget this that we shall be listening to a man who is a missionary in the best sense of the word, a man who has justified his faith by the sacrifice of his worldly prospects, and who has taken upon himself a task infinitely more difficult, infinitely more thankless than that of the missionary who, as we believe, carries at an immense expense of money which could be better spent in the charity that begins at home, a message of salvation, as he no doubt honestly believes it to be, to savages who cannot understand it, or to the people who were civilized when we were savages, and who don't want it and won't have it.

"Mr. Maxwell has taken upon himself, if I may say so without offence, a far n.o.bler mission than this, a greater task, if possible, than that of the n.o.ble men and women of all creeds, and no creed, who minister to the wants of our own savages, by which I mean those who have been kept in a state of savagery infinitely worse than that of the negro slave of seventy years ago, by the necessities of the civilization which is no more Christian than it is humane.

"Mr. Maxwell, by preaching that one famous sermon of his, has const.i.tuted himself a missionary to the rich, to those who profess and call themselves Christians, and yet are content to live utterly and hopelessly unchristian lives. Friends, the man beside me has begun to make himself the Savonarola of the twentieth century. Whether his creed is ours or not, we must all agree that that sermon of his is the beginning of a great and n.o.ble work. He told his wealthy and fas.h.i.+onable hearers last Sunday that they could not be Christians unless they were honest with G.o.d and their fellow men. As regards the first part, some of us have different beliefs to his, but as regards the second, we are with him heart and soul. If he can teach us to be honest with ourselves and each other, he will have done more to conquer sin and vice, more to make earth that human paradise that the poets and dreamers and prophets of all ages have longed for and foretold, than all the churches and all the creeds have done for the last two thousand years. It is a G.o.dly because it is a goodly work, and--if there is a G.o.d--that G.o.d will bless him and help him in it."

CHAPTER XXIII.

As the President sat down and Vane rose to his feet, quite a tumult of mingled applause, "hear, hears," hissings and hootings rose up from the strangely a.s.sorted audience.

Vane faced the half-delighted, half-angry throng with the perfect steadiness of a man who has decided upon a certain course and means to pursue it at all hazards. Curiosity reduced one portion of the audience to silence, and a respectful antic.i.p.ation the other. In the sea of faces before him, Vane recognised several that were familiar to him. His father, Carol, Dora, Ernshaw and Rayburn were there as a matter of course. Several clerics, high and low, Anglican and Nonconformist, were dotted about the audience, some with folded arms and frowning brows as though they were expecting the worst of heresies, others smiling in bland and undisguised contempt, believing that they had come to see one of their own cloth, who had already made himself an even more disagreeable subject of reflection to them than even the infidels in whose house the magic of Vane's sudden fame had brought them together, do that which would make it impossible for him to again commit such an offence in the pulpit of an English church.

For a moment or two there was a hush of intense silence of mental suspense and expectation as Vane faced his audience and looked steadily about him before he began to speak, and when he did begin, the silence changed to an almost inaudible murmur and movement which is always the sign of relaxed tension among a large body of human beings.

His first words were as unconventional as they were unexpected.

"Brother men and sister women; some of you, like myself, believe in G.o.d, in the existence of an all-wise, over-ruling Providence, which shapes the destinies of mankind, and yet at the same time allows each man and woman to work out his or her own earthly destinies for good or ill, as he or she chooses--by reason or desire, by inclination or pa.s.sion--and we also believe in the efficacy of the sacrifice which was consummated on Calvary. There are others listening to me now to whom these beliefs are merely idle dreams, the inventions of enthusiasts, or the deliberate frauds of those who brought them into being and imposed them by physical force upon those who had no means of resistance, for their own personal and political ends.

"I have not come here to make any attempt to settle these differences between us. As a priest of the Church, I wish, with all my soul, that I could. As a man, I know that I can't. But there is one ground at least upon which we can meet as friends, whatever our opinions may be as regards religion and theology--two terms which, I think every one here will agree with me, are very far from meaning the same thing."

"As a priest of the Church, I cannot hear that without protest!" cried a tall, high-browed, thin-featured, deep-eyed clergyman, springing to his feet in the middle of the hall. "If theology, the Science of G.o.d, does not mean the same thing as religion, the word religion has no meaning.

More dangerous, I had almost said more disgraceful, words never fell from the lips of a man calling himself a priest of the Church of G.o.d."

The last sentence was spoken in a high, shrill voice, which rose above the angry murmurs which came from all parts of the hall, but these Vane silenced in a moment, by holding up his hand and smiling as some of the audience had never seen a man smile before.

"I am glad," he went on, in slow, very distinct tones, "that such an objection has been raised so early by a brother priest. It will help us to understand each other more clearly, and so I will try to answer him at once. The difference between religion and theology is the difference between the whole and the part; but theology is not a science, for there is no science of the Infinite. It is only the study of the many different conceptions which men of all nations and races have formed as to the nature of the over-ruling Power of the universes--of all the attempts to solve the insoluble and to answer the unanswerable.

"There are two sayings, one Arabian and one Italian, which I hope I may quote without offence. One is, 'G.o.d gives us the outline of the picture, we fill it in. We cannot change the outline, but we are responsible for every stroke of the brush. In the end G.o.d judges the picture.'

"The other was the saying of a famous Italian artist, 'Children and fools should not see work half done.'

"Now let us grant for the sake of argument that there is a Creator, and therefore a scheme of creation. How much can we, dwellers upon a world which is but as a grain of sand washed hither and thither by the tide-flow of the ocean of Infinity, know about the workings of the Will in obedience to which, as some of us believe, that tide ebbs and flows through the uncounted ages of Eternity, and over the measureless expanse of Infinity? Faced with such a colossal problem as this, must we not all confess ourselves to be but as children and fools, since we do not and cannot see even half of the work, but only an immeasurably tiny fragment of it? For this reason I feel justified in saying that those who deny the existence of the Divine Architect of the universe and those who claim to know all about His plans, are, at least, equally mistaken.

"But that, although I have been glad of the opportunity of saying it, is not quite what I came here to say, and, therefore, we will drop that part of the subject. Last Sunday I preached a sermon which--I say it both with wonder and gladness--has produced a very much wider and deeper effect than I could have hoped it would do. That was a sermon preached in a Christian church to a congregation, which, at least, professed and called itself Christian. To-night I am going to ask you to listen to a secular sermon preached from the same text. It will be very brief, because I know that you have a custom, and a very good one, of following discourses with discussion, and as I am going to raise a few distinctly controversial subjects, I want to leave plenty of our available time over for the discussion.

"The theme of my sermon last Sunday at St. Chrysostom's may be summed up in one word--Honesty. The essence of the Sermon on the Mount is just honesty. I suppose everyone here has read it, and therefore you will remember that from beginning to end there is not a word of dogma in it.

In other words it is absolutely untheological. Perhaps this fact, a very important one, has never struck some of you before. When the Master preached that sermon, he, as I believe, deliberately left out every reference to dogma or doctrine, creed or church, so that men, whatever their belief, their nation or their race, could equally accept it as a universal rule of life and conduct.

"Some of us here believe in miracles, some do not. I do, and, so believing, I think that the Sermon on the Mount is the greatest of all miracles. It is a greater thing to preach a doctrine to which all honest men, coming whithersoever they may from the ends of the earth, will and must subscribe if they _are_ honest--a doctrine which is true for all time and for all men, than to cleanse the leper or to raise the dead to life.

"I will ask you to let me put this point in another way, and in a certainly more attractive form. Let me read you the expression of this universal truth in the words of two English poets separated from each other by more than two hundred years of time and many mountain ridges and deep valleys of changing thought and opinion:

"Father of all! in every age, In every clime adored, By saint, by savage, and by sage, Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!

"Thou great First Cause, least understood, Who all my sense confined To know but this, that Thou art good, And that myself am blind.

"Yet gave me, in this dark estate, To see the good from ill; And, binding nature fast in fate, Left free the human will.

"Those lines are from Pope's immortal poem 'The Universal Prayer'; these are from Rudyard Kipling's 'Hymn Before Action.'

"High l.u.s.t and froward bearing, Proud heart, rebellious brow-- Deaf ear and soul uncaring, We seek Thy mercy now!

The sinner that forswore Thee, The fool that pa.s.sed Thee by, Our times are known before Thee-- Lord, grant us strength to die!

"For those who kneel beside us At altars not Thine own, Who lack the lights that guide us, Lord, let their faith atone!

If wrong we did to call them, By honour bound they came; Let not Thy wrath befall them, But deal to us the blame!

"Those, perhaps, are the most solemn and deep-meaning words that have been written or spoken since Jesus of Nazareth preached the Sermon on the Mount, and the inner sense, as I read it, is the same. In life, in death, be honest with yourself, with your brother-man and your sister-woman, and with your G.o.d if you believe in one.

"Last Sunday in the pulpit I quoted the words of Colonel Ingersoll, 'G.o.d cannot afford to d.a.m.n an honest man.' That phrase has always seemed to me a marvellous mixture of blasphemy, ignorance, and sound common sense.

From my point of view it is blasphemous, because it is the utterance of the atom trying to understand the universe. It is ignorant, because it is impossible for that human atom who uttered it to form any adequate conception of the infinitely great whole of which he was an infinitely small part. And yet, humanly speaking, it is the soundest and hardest of common sense. If G.o.d is honest He must respect honesty, no matter whether it is the honesty of belief, or of disbelief, always supposing that the belief and the disbelief _are_ honest.

"The man who calls himself a Christian and does not conduct his daily life in accordance with the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, is one of two things--a fool who cannot understand the meaning of plain words, or a knave, who, for many reasons, which most of my hearers will understand, pretends to be that which he is not. I may remind you here that knavery is not by any means confined to the limits of what is conventionally termed criminality. For every crime that puts a man or a woman into prison, there are a hundred others committed in every-day life with absolute impunity, and yet they are just as serious, and they merit a similar if not a heavier punishment than those which the law punishes with social degradation and the miseries of penal servitude.

"I wonder whether it has occurred to any of you who are listening to me now--whether you are Christians, professed or real, atheists or agnostics--to ask yourselves if, under the present conditions of what we are pleased to call civilization, an honest world would be possible, and that, I may say, is just the same thing as asking whether Christians can or cannot live their lives in accordance with the teachings of Him who went about doing good? Of course we all call ourselves honest, and some of us really believe that we are. At any rate, most of us would feel very much insulted if any one else told us that we were not. But are we? Let us put our pride in our pockets for a moment and try to answer that pregnant question. Honesty, like many other terms, of which immorality is one, has, through its conventional use, acquired a very restricted and therefore a quite unreal meaning. We have, by some vicious process of thought, got accustomed to call a man or a woman who transgresses the social law in a certain direction immoral, and in the same way we have come to apply the word dishonesty to practices which mean stealing or the attempt to steal property of a concrete form.

"But I think you will all agree with me that both these words have come to be used in a sense which is so narrow, that it destroys their original meaning. For every man or woman who transgresses the social law and is therefore called immoral--of course after being found out--there are a hundred or more who break the moral law every hour of their waking lives. All of you, no doubt, possess bibles. Read the 27th and 28th verses of the fifth chapter of the Gospel according to Matthew, and you will understand what I mean.

"But there is another immorality than this, and, as I believe, a greater immorality, for this, so far as it concerns our sister women, is often not immorality at all. It is the surrender of a feeble nature to a pitiless necessity, the necessity to live, the only alternative, in too many cases, to self-murder. There is another immorality infinitely worse than this, which when, as we Christians believe, the hosts of men are ranged before the Bar of Eternal Justice will spell d.a.m.nation, hopeless and irrevocable, and that is the immorality which means a dishonesty that deliberately deceives--not always for the purpose of gain, for this kind of dishonesty is generally practised by those whom, to put it plainly, it would not pay to steal.

"A French philosopher once said that there is that within the heart of every man which, if known, would make his dearest friend hate him. That, I am afraid, is true, not only of men but of women. It is not the fault of the men or the women; it is due simply to artificial conditions of life and to the individual ignorance and stupidity which make reform impossible. Until what we call civilised and Christian Society can make up its mind to conduct its personal, its national, and its international affairs on the broad and simple lines laid down in the Sermon on the Mount, no man can afford to be quite honest. In other words, if Christendom would be really Christian, it would also be honest; honest with itself and with its G.o.d, with the G.o.d whom it now only pretends to wors.h.i.+p, saying loudly, 'Lord, Lord,' and doing not the things which He saith!

"It would not matter--and this I say with all reverence and with a full sense of my responsibilities as a Priest of the Church--it would not matter whether Society called itself Christian or not, as long as it was honest."

"That is absolute atheism and blasphemy!" exclaimed a well-known Nonconformist preacher, springing up and holding his hands out towards the platform. "The man who could speak those words cannot be either a Christian or a minister of the Gospel. I call upon the speaker to be honest now, honest with himself and us, and confess that he is not a Christian, and therefore unworthy to be a preacher of any Christian creed."

A storm of mingled expressions of approval and a.s.sent burst out from every part of the crowded hall. Vane stood immovable and listened to it with a smile hovering round his lips. The President rose at once and said:

"I must remind the reverend gentleman who has made this interruption--an interruption which, if made in a church or a chapel, would render him liable to imprisonment--is entirely out of order. We welcome discussion, but it must come in its proper place. We cannot tolerate interruption, and we won't."

The rebuke was too just and too pointed not to be felt, even by the bigot who had deserved it. He sat down, and when the thunder of applause which greeted the President's brief but pregnant interlude had died away, Vane went on without a trace of emotion in his voice:

"I cannot say that I am sorry that that interruption was made, because it makes it possible for me to ask whether there is really any difference between Christianity and honesty?"

Again he was interrupted, this time by half the audience getting on to its feet and cheering. The other portion sat still, and the units of it began to look at each other very seriously. Vane was, in fact, bringing the matter down to a most uncomfortably fine point. He made a slight motion with his hand, and his hearers, having already recognised the true missionary, or bringer of messages to the souls of men, instantly became silent and expectant.

"If Christianity is not honest, or if honesty is not, for all practical purposes, the same thing as Christianity, then so much the worse for Christianity or for honesty as the case may be. A religion which is not honest is not a religion. Honesty which is not a religion--that is to say a tie between man and man--is not honest. That, I think, is a dilemma from which there is no escape."

There was another burst of applause, this time almost universal, which the President did not attempt to check. A few members of the audience looked even more uncomfortable than before, but by the time Vane was able to make himself heard again it was quite plain that the great majority of his audience, believers and unbelievers, were heart and soul with him.

"That," he went on, with a laughing note in his voice, "shows me that we have got on to friendly territory at last, on to the ground of our common humanity. I said just now, before my friend in the audience diverted my attention to another and very important point, most of us would feel very much insulted if anyone told us that we were not honest.

We should jump to the conclusion that such a statement was the same thing as calling us thieves or swindlers; but that is not the question.

Honesty is not by any means confined to commercial dealings. It has a social meaning and a very far reaching one too, for, as a matter of fact, the man or woman who deceives another in the smallest detail of life is not strictly honest, because it is impossible to be strictly honest without at the same time being strictly truthful.

"It has been said that half the truth is worse than a lie. It is, I think, a greater sin to tell half the truth than a deliberate and comprehensive lie, for it is possible to tell a lie with an honest, if mistaken purpose; and yet the business of the modern world is mainly conducted by half-truths. Everyone tries to deceive the person he is doing business with to some extent. It is not altogether his fault, for he knows that if he didn't do so, the other man would deceive him, and so get the better of the bargain. That is the way of the world, as it is called, and a very bad way, and, as we believe, a very unchristian way it is.