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Beside Still Waters, a fiction by Arthur C. Benson |
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Chapter 15. The Pilgrim's Progress--The Pilgrimage... |
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_ Chapter XV. The Pilgrim's Progress--The Pilgrimage--Development--The Eternal Will Hugh was seized, one bright February morning of clear sun and keen winds, with a sudden weariness of his work. This rebellious impulse did not often visit him, because he loved his work very greatly, and there were no hours so happy as those which were so engaged. But to-day he thought to himself suddenly that, lost thus in his delightful labour, he was forgetting to live. How strange it was that the hours one loved most were the hours of work that sped past unconsciously, when one stood apart, absorbed in dreams, from the current of things. It seemed to him that he was like the Lady of Shalott, so intent upon her web and the weaving of it, that she thought of the moving forms upon the road beyond the river merely as things that could be depicted in her coloured threads. He took up the _Pilgrim's Progress_ and sate a long while reading it, and smiling as he read; he wondered why so many critics spoke so slightingly of the second part, which seemed to him in some ways almost more beautiful than the first. There was not perhaps quite the same imaginativeness or zest; but there was more instinctive art, because the writer was retracing the same path, lodging at the same grave houses, encountering the same terrors, and yet representing everything as mirrored in a different quality of mind; the mind of a faithful woman, and of the boys and maidens who walked with her upon pilgrimage. There was not quite the same romance, perhaps, but there was more tenderness and sweetness. It came less from the mind and more from the heart. Hugh smiled to see how rapidly the dangers of the road must have diminished, if Mr. Greatheart had often convoyed a party on their way. That mighty man laid about him with such valour, sliced off the heads and arms of giants with such cordial good-humour, that there could hardly, Hugh thought, have been for the next company any adventures left at all. Moreover so many of the stubborn and ill-favoured persons had come by a bad end, were hung in chains by the road, or lying pierced with sorrows, that later pilgrims would have to complain of a lack of bracing incidents. Still, how delicate and gentle a journey it was, and with what caressing fondness the writer helped these young and faltering feet along the way. What pretty and absurd sights they saw! How laden they were with presents! Christiana had Mr. Skill's boxes, twelve in all, of medicine, with no doubt a vial or two of tears of repentance to wash the pills down; she had bottles of wine, parched corn, figs and raisins from the Lord of the place, to say nothing of the golden anchor which the maidens gave her, which must have impeded her movements. He read with a smile, which was not wholly one of amusement, Mr. Greatheart's admirable argument as to how the process of redemption was executed. The Redeemer, it seemed, had no less than four kinds of righteousness, three to keep, which he could not do without, and one kind to give away. Every detail of the case was supported by a little cluster of marginal texts, and no doubt it appeared as logical and simple to the author as a problem or an equation. But what an extraordinary form of religion it all was! There was not the least misgiving in the mind of the author. The Bible was to him a perfectly unquestioned manifesto of the mind of God, and solved everything and anything. And yet the whole basis of the pilgrimage was insecure. There was no free gift of grace at all. Some few fortunate people were started on pilgrimage by being given an overpowering desire to set out, while the pleasant party who met at Madam Wanton's house, Mr. Lightmind and Mr. Love-the-flesh, with Mr. Lechery and Mrs. Filth, and passed the afternoon with music and dancing, were troubled by no divine misgivings. Then, too, the Lord of the way found no difficulty in easing the path of the gentler sort of pilgrims. He kept the Valley of the Shadow comparatively quiet for Christiana and her tender band. The ugly thing that came to meet them, and the Lion that padded after them, were not suffered to draw near. The hobgoblins were stayed from howling. It never seemed to have occurred to Bunyan to question why the Lord of the way had ever allowed this unhallowed crew to gather in the valley at all. If he could restrain them, and if Mr. Greatheart could hew the giants in pieces, why could not the whole nest of hornets have been smoked out once and for all? Even the Slough of Despond could not be mended with all the cartloads of promises and texts that were shot there. And yet for all that, when one came to reflect upon it, this Calvinistic scheme of election and reprobation did seem to correspond in a terrible manner with the phenomena of the world. One saw people around one, some of whom seemed to start with an instinct for all that was pure and noble, and again others seemed to begin with no preference for virtue at all, but to be dogged with inherited corruption from the outset. The mistake which moralists made was to treat all alike, as if all men had the moral instinct equally developed; and yet Hugh had met not a few men who were restrained by absolutely no scruples, except prudential ones, and the dread of incurring conventional penalties, from yielding to every bodily impulse. If truth and purity and unselfishness were the divine things, if happiness lay there, why were there such multitudes of people created who had no implanted desire to attain to these virtues? It was in the grip of such thoughts that Hugh left the house and walked alone through the streets of the town, as Christian might have walked in the City of Destruction. What was one to fly from? and whither was the pilgrimage to tend? The streets were full of busy comfortable people, some, like Mr. Brisk, men of considerable breeding, some again, like the two ill-favoured ones, marked for doom; here and there was a young woman whose name might have been Dull. What was one's duty in the matter? Was one indeed to repent, with groans and cries, for a corruption of heart that had been bestowed upon one without any choice of one's own? Was one bound to overwhelm one's companions with abundance of pious suggestions, to rebuke vice, to rejoice in the disasters that befell the ungodly? It seemed a hopeless business from first to last; of course, if one had Bunyan's simple faith, if one could believe that at a certain moment, on the Hill of Calvary, a thing had been accomplished which had in an instant changed the whole scheme of the world; that a wrathful Creator, possessed hitherto by a fierce and vindictive anger with the frail creatures whom he moulded by thousands from the clay, was in an instant converted into a tender and compassionate father, his thirst for vengeance satisfied, it would be plain enough; but Hugh felt in the depths of his heart that whatever else might be true, that was not; or at least if it had any semblance of truth in it, it simply consummated a mystery so appalling that one must merely resign all hope and courage. What could one make of a Gospel that could lend any colour to a theory such as this? Was it the fault of the Gospel, or was the error rooted in human nature, a melancholy misinterpretation of a high truth? It seemed to Hugh that the mistake lay there; it seemed to arise from the acceptance by the Puritans of the Bible as all one book, and by the deliberate extrusion of the human element from it. Christ, in the Gospel, seemed to teach, so far as Hugh could understand, not that He had effected any change in the nature or disposition of God, but that He had always been a Father of men, full of infinite compassion and love; the miracle of Christ's life was the showing how a Divine spirit, bound by all the sad limitations of mortality, could yet lead a life of inner peace and joy, a life of perfect trust and simplicity. The clouding of the pure Gospel came from the vehement breath of his interpreters. His later interpreters were men in whose minds was instinctively implanted the old harsh doctrine of man's perverse corruption, and the dark severity of God's justice; and thus the Puritans were misled, because they laid an equal stress upon the whole of the Bible, and spoke of it as all of equal and Divine authority. Instead of rejecting, as faulty human conceptions, what did not harmonise with the purer Gospel light, they sought and found in the Gospel a confirmation of the older human view. They treated the whole collection of books as all equally true, all equally important, and thus they were bent on seeing that the Gospel should fulfil rather than supersede the law. This was in part the spirit of St. Paul; and thus the Puritan Gospel was the Gospel of St. Paul rather than the Gospel of the Saviour. To Hugh the Old Testament was a very wonderful thing, wonderful because it showed the rise of a spirit of personal righteousness in the world, a spirit that worshipped morality with the same vehemence and enthusiasm as that with which the Greeks worshipped beauty. And thus because they had loved righteousness and hated iniquity, there had been given to their imperious nation the reward that the humanity of their race should be chosen to enshrine the Divine Spirit of the Saviour. Hugh felt that the weakness of the ecclesiastical position was its obstinate refusal to admit the possibilities of future development. A century ago, a man who ventured to hint that the story of Noah's Ark might not be historically and exactly true would have been pronounced a dangerous heretic. Now no one was required to affirm his belief in it. Nowadays the belief in the miraculous element even of the New Testament was undeniably weakening. Yet the orthodox believer still pronounced a Christian unsound who doubted it. Here lay the insecurity of the orthodox champions. They stumbled on, fully accepting, when they could not help themselves, the progressive developments of thought, yet loudly condemning any one who was a little further ahead upon the road, until they had caught him up. Still, the old Puritan poet, for all his over-preciseness of definition, all his elaborate scheme of imputed righteousness, all his dreary metaphysic, had yet laid his hand upon the essential truth. Life was indeed a pilgrimage; and as the new law, the law of science, was investigated and explored, it seemed hardly less arbitrary, hardly more loving than the old. It was a scheme of infinite delay; no ardent hopes, no burning conceptions of justice and truth could hasten or retard the working of the inflexible law, which blessed without reference to goodness, and punished without reference to morality. No one could escape by righteousness, no man could plead his innocence or his ignorance. One was surrounded by inexplicable terrors, one's path was set with gins and snares. Here the smoke and the flame burst forth, or the hobgoblins roared in concert; here was a vale of peace, or a house of grave and kindly entertainment; and sometimes from the hill-tops of the land of Beulah, there seemed indeed to be a radiant vision, dim-descried, of towers and pearly gates, a high citadel of heavenly peace. But how little one learned even of one's own strength and weakness! The one instinct, which might itself be a delusion, was that one had a choice in the matter, a will, a power to act or to refrain from acting; there was a deep-seated impulse to fare onward, to hope, to struggle. It was useless to blame the mysterious conditions of the journey, for they were certainly there. The only faith that was possible was the belief that the truth was somehow larger, nobler, more beautiful than one could conceive it to be; and there was a restfulness, when one apprehended what seemed so dark at first, in the knowledge that one's character and environment alike were not one's own choice; the only way was to keep one's eye fixed upon the furthest hope, and never to cease imploring the Power that made us what we were, to give us not abundant, but sufficient, strength, and to guide us into acting, so far as we had power to act, as He willed. This then became for Hugh his practical religion; to commit himself unceasingly, in joy and trouble alike, in the smallest matters, to the Eternal will; until he grew to feel that if there were anything true in the world, it was the power of that perpetual surrender. It was surprising to him to find how anxiety melted into tranquillity, if one could but do that. Not only, he learnt, must great decisions be laid before God, but the smallest acts of daily life. How often one felt the harassing weight of small duties, the distasteful business, the anxious conversation, the dreary occasion; fatigue, disappointment, care, uncertainty, timidity! If one could but put the matter into the hands of God, instead of rehearsing and calculating and anticipating, what a peace flowed into one's spirit! Difficulties melted away like mist before it. The business was tranquilly accomplished; the interview that one dreaded provided its own obvious solution, vexations were healed, troubles were suddenly revealed as marvellously unimportant. One blundered still, went perversely wrong, yielded falteringly to an impulse knowing it to be evil; but even such events had a wholesome humiliation about them which brought healing with it. The essence of the whole situation was to have in one's heart the romance of pilgrimage, to expect experience, both sweet and bitter, to desire the goal rather than the prize; and to find the jewels of patience, hopefulness, and wisdom by the way, where one had least expected them. _ |
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