Catharine Furze Part 7

18. _And a certain ruler asked Him, saying, Good Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life_?

19. _And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou Me good? None is good, save one, that is G.o.d_.

20. _Thou knowest the commandments, Do not commit adultery, Do not kill, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Honour thy father and mother_.

21. _And he said, All these have I kept from my youth up_.

22. _Now when Jesus heard these things, He said unto him, Yet lackest thou one thing: sell all that thou hast and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow Me_.

Mr Cardew did not approach this theme circuitously or indifferently, but seemed in haste to be on close terms with it, as if it had dwelt with him and he was eager to deliver his message.

"I beseech you," he began, "endeavour to make this scene real to you. A rich man, an official, comes to Jesus, calls Him Teacher--for so the word is in the Greek--and asks Him what is to be done to inherit eternal life.

How strange it is that such a question should be so put! how rare are the occasions on which two people approach one another so nearly! Most of us pa.s.s days, weeks, months, years in intercourse with one another, and nothing which even remotely concerns the soul is ever mentioned. Is it that we do not care? Mainly that, and partly because we foolishly hang back from any conversation on what it is most important we should reveal, so that others may help us. Whenever you feel any promptings to speak of the soul or to make any inquiries on its behalf, remember it is a sacred duty not to suppress them.

"This ruler was happy in being able to find a single authority to whom he could appeal for an answer. If anybody wishes for such an answer now, he can find no oracle sole and decisive. The voices of the Church, the sects, the philosophers are clamorous but discordant, and we are bewildered. And yet, as I have told you over and over again in this pulpit, it is absolutely necessary that you should have one and one only supreme guide. To say nothing of eternal salvation, we must, in the conduct of life, shape our behaviour by some one standard, or the result is chaos. We must have some one method or principle which is to settle beforehand how we are to do this or that, and the method or principle should be Christ. Leaving out of sight altogether His divinity, there is no temper, no manner so effectual, so happy as His for handling all human experience. Oh, what a privilege it is to meet with anybody who is controlled into unity, whose actions are all directed by one consistent force!

"Jesus, as if to draw from this ruler all that he himself believed, tells him to keep the Law. The Law, however, is insufficient, and it is noteworthy that the ruler felt it to be so. To begin with, it is largely negative: there are three negatives in this twentieth verse for one affirmative, and negations cannot redeem us. The law is also external.

As a proof that it is ineffectual, I ask, Have you ever _rejoiced_ in it?

Have you ever been kindled by it? Have all its precepts ever moved you like one single item in the story of the love of Jesus? Is the man attractive to you who has kept the law and done nothing more? Would not the poor woman who anointed our Lord's feet and wiped them with her hair be more welcome to you than the holy people who had simply never transgressed?

"We are struck with the magnitude of the demand made by Jesus on this ruler. To obtain eternal life he was to sell all he had, give up house, friends, position, respectability, and lead a vagrant life in Palestine with this poor carpenter's son. Alas! eternal life is not to be bought on lower terms. Beware of the d.a.m.nable doctrine that it is easy to enter the kingdom of heaven. It is to be obtained only by the sacrifice of _all_ that stands in the way, and it is to be observed that in this, as in other things, men will take the first, the second, the third--nay, even the ninety-ninth step, but the hundredth and last they will not take. Do you really wish to save your soul? Then the surrender must be absolute. What! you will say, am I to sell everything? If Christ comes to you--yes. Sell not only your property, but your very self. Part with all your preferences, your loves, your thoughts, your very soul, if only you can gain Him, and be sure too that He will come to you in a shape in which it will not be easy to recognise Him. What a bargain, though, this ruler would have made! He would have given up his dull mansion in Jerusalem, Jerusalem society, which cared nothing for _him_, though it doubtless called on him, made much of him, and even professed undying friends.h.i.+p with him; he would have given this up, nothing but this, and he would have gained those walks with Jesus across the fields, and would have heard Him say, 'Consider the lilies!' 'Oh, yes, we would have done it at once!' we cry. I think not, for Christ is with us even now.'

Curiously enough, the conclusion was a piece of the most commonplace orthodoxy, lugged in, Heaven knows how, and delivered monotonously, in strong contrast to the former part of the discourse.--M. R.

These notes, made by one who was present, are the mere ashes, cold and grey, of what was once a fire. Mr. Cardew was really eloquent, and consequently a large part of the effect of what he said is not to be reproduced. It is a pity that no record is possible of a great speaker.

The writer of this history remembers when it was his privilege to listen continually to a man whose power over his audience was so great that he could sway them unanimously by a pa.s.sion which was sufficient for any heroic deed. The n.o.blest resolutions were formed under that burning oratory, and were kept, too, for the voice of the dead preacher still vibrates in the ears of those who heard him. And yet, except in their hearts, no trace abides, and when they are dead he will be forgotten, excepting in so far as that which has once lived can never die.

Whether it was the preacher's personality, or what he said, Catharine could hardly distinguish, but she was profoundly moved. Such speaking was altogether new to her; the world in which Mr. Cardew moved was one which she had never entered, and yet it seemed to her as if something necessary and familiar to her, but long lost, had been restored. She began now to look forward to Sunday with intense expectation; a new motive for life was supplied to her, and a new force urged her through each day. It was with her as we can imagine it to be with some bud long folded in darkness which, silently in the dewy May night, loosens its leaves, and, as the sun rises, bares itself to the depths of its cup to the blue sky and the light.

CHAPTER VII

The Misses Ponsonby speedily came to a conclusion about Catharine, and she was forthwith labelled as a young lady of natural ability, whose education had been neglected, a type perfectly familiar, recurring every quarter, and one with which they were perfectly well able to deal. All the examples they had had before were ticketed in exactly the same terms, and, so cla.s.sed, there was an end of further distinction. The means taken with Catharine were those which had been taken since the school began, and special attention was devoted to the branches in which she was most deficient, and which she disliked. Her history was deplorable, and her first task, therefore, was what were called dates. A table had been prepared of the kings and queens of England--when they came to the throne, and when they died; and another table gave the years of all the battles. A third table gave the relations.h.i.+p of the kings and queens to each other, and the reasons for succession. All this had to be learned by heart. In languages, also, Catharine was singularly defective. Her French was intolerable and most inaccurate, and of Italian she knew nothing. Her dancing and deportment were so "provincial," as Miss Adela Ponsonby happily put it, that it was thought better that the dancing and deportment teacher should give her a few private lessons before putting her in a cla.s.s, and she was consequently instructed alone in the rudiments of the art of entering and leaving a room with propriety, of sitting with propriety on a sofa when conversing, of reading a book in a drawing-room, of acknowledging an introduction, of sitting down to a meal and rising therefrom, and in the use of the pocket-handkerchief. She had particularly shocked the Misses Ponsonby on this latter point, as she was in the habit of blowing her nose energetically, "snorting," as one of the young ladies said colloquially, but with truth, and the deportment mistress had some difficulty in reducing them to the whisper, which was all that was permitted in the Ponsonby establishment, even in cases of severe cold. On the other hand, in one or two departments she was far ahead of the other girls, particularly in arithmetic and geometry.

It was the practice on Monday morning for the girls to be questioned on the sermons of the preceding Sunday, and a very solemn business it was.

The whole school was a.s.sembled in the big schoolroom, and Mr. Cardew, both the Misses Ponsonby being present, examined _viva voce_. One Monday morning, after Catharine had been a month at the school, Mr. Cardew came as usual. He had been preaching the Sunday before on a favourite theme, and his text had been, "So then with the mind I myself serve the law of G.o.d, but with the flesh the law of sin," and the examination at the beginning was in the biography of St. Paul, as this had formed a part of his discourse. No fault was to be found with the answers on this portion of the subject, but presently the cla.s.s was in some difficulty.

"Can anybody tell me what meaning was a.s.signed to the phrase, 'The body of this death'?"

No reply.

"Come, you took notes, and one or two interpretations were discarded for that which seemed to be more in accordance with the mind of St. Paul.

Miss Arden"--Miss Arden was sitting nearest to Mr. Cardew--"cannot you say?"

Miss Arden shook her ringlets, smiled, and turned a little red, as if she had been complimented by Mr. Cardew's inquiries after the body of death, and, glancing at her paper, replied--"The death of this body."

"Pardon me, that was one of the interpretations rejected."

"This body of death," said Catharine.

"Quite so."

Mr. Cardew turned hastily round to the new pupil, whom he had not noticed before, and looked at her steadily for a moment.

"Can you proceed a little and explain what that means?"

Catharine's voice trembled, but she managed to read from her paper: "It is strikingly after the manner of St. Paul. He opposes the two pictures in him by the strongest words at his command--death and life. One _is_ death, the other _is_ life, and he prays to be delivered from death; not the death of the body, but from death-in-life."

"Thank you; that is very nearly what I intended."

Mr. Cardew took tea at the Limes about once a fortnight with Mrs. Cardew.

The meal was served in the Misses Ponsonby's private room, and the girls were invited in turn. About a fortnight after the examination on St.

Paul's theory of human nature, Mr. and Mrs. Cardew came as usual, and Catharine was one of the selected guests. The company sat round the table, and Mrs. Cardew was placed between her husband and Miss Furze. The rector's wife was a fair-haired lady, with quiet, grey eyes, and regular, but not strikingly beautiful, features. Yet they were attractive, because they were harmonious, and betokened a certain inward agreement.

It was a sane, sensible face, but a careless critic might have thought that it betokened an incapability of emotion, especially as Mrs. Cardew had a habit of sitting back in her chair, and generally let the conversation take its own course until it came very chose to her. She had a sober mode of statement and criticism, which was never brilliant and never stupid. It ought to have been most serviceable to her husband, because it might have corrected the exaggeration into which his impulse, talent, and power of pictorial representation were so apt to fall. She had been brought up as an Evangelical, but she had pa.s.sed through no religious experiences whatever, and religion, in the sense in which Evangelicalism in the Church of England of that day understood it, was quite unintelligible to her. Had she been born a few years later she would have taken to science, and would have done well at it, but at that time there was no outlet for any womanly faculty, much larger in quant.i.ty than we are apt to suppose, which has an appet.i.te for exact facts.

Mr. Cardew would have been called a prig by those who did not know him well. He had a trick of starting subjects suddenly, and he very often made his friends very uncomfortable by the precipitate introduction, without any warning, of remarks upon serious matters. Once even, shocking to say, he quite unexpectedly at a tea-party made an observation about G.o.d. Really, however, he was not a prig. He was very sincere. He lived in a world of his own, in which certain figures moved which were as familiar to him as common life, and he consequently talked about them. He leaned in front of his wife and said to Catharine--

"Have you read much, Miss Furze?"

"No, very little."

"Indeed! I should have thought you were a reader. What have you read lately? any stories?"

"Yes, I have read 'Ra.s.selas.'"

"'Ra.s.selas'! Have you really? Now tell me what you think of it."

"Oh! I cannot tell you all."

"No; it is not fair to put the question in that way. It is necessary to have some training in order to give a proper account of the scope and purpose of a book. Can you select any one part which struck you, and tell me why it struck you?"

"The part about the astronomer. I thought all that is said about the dreadful effects of uncontrolled imagination was so wonderful."

"Don't you think those effects are exaggerated?"

She lost herself for a moment, as we have already seen she was in the habit of doing, or rather, she did not lose herself, but everything excepting herself, and she spoke as if n.o.body but herself were present.

"Not in the least exaggerated. What a horror to pa.s.s days in dreaming about one particular thing, and to have no power to wake!"

Her head had fallen a little forward; she suddenly straightened herself; the blood rose in her face, and she looked very confused.

"I should like to preach about Dr. Johnson," said Mr. Cardew.