Delphi Complete Works of Jerome K. Jerome (Illustrated) (Series Four) (211 page)

“You remember Sheepskin,” he went on, “the old vicar? The Reverend Horace Pendergast has got the job now. He’s a cousin of Eleanor’s — rattling good preacher. We’re hoping to make him a bishop. I went to see the old man once, when I was a youngster, to arrange about my uncle’s funeral, and he threw me in a sermon. I don’t know why — I wasn’t worrying much about religion in those days; but I can still see his round, pink, puzzled face and his little fat hands that trembled as he talked. It was near Christmas time — Christ’s birthday; and all that he could think about, he told me, were the Christmas bills and how to meet them. It wasn’t his fault. How can a respectable married man be a Christian? ‘How can I preach Christ?’ — there were tears in his eyes—’ Christ the outcast, the beggar, the servant of the poor, the bearer of the Cross.’ That’s what he had started out to preach. The people would only have laughed at him. He lives in a big house, they would have said, and keeps four servants and a gig. His sons go to college, and his wife and daughters wear rich garments. ‘Struggle enough I find it, Strong’nth’arm,’ he confessed to me. ‘But I ought not to be struggling to do it. I ought to be down among the people, preaching Christ, not only with my lips but with my life.’ It isn’t talkers for God, it is fighters for God that are wanted. Men who are not afraid of the world!”

The daylight had faded. Betty had pushed the table into a corner. They sat beside the blazing logs.

“Some years ago,” said Betty, “I travelled from San Francisco to Hong Kong in company with a Chinese gentleman. It was during the off season, and half a dozen of us had the saloon to ourselves. There were two commercial travellers and a young missionary and his wife. By process of natural selection — at least so I like to believe — Mr. Cheng and myself chummed on. He was one of the most interesting men I have met, and I think he liked talking to me. I remember one brilliantly clear night we were alone together on the deck. I was leaning back in my chair looking up at the Southern Cross. Suddenly I heard him say that the great stumbling-block in the way of man’s progress was God. Coming from anybody else the remark would have irritated me; but I knew he wasn’t trying to be clever; and as he went on to explain himself I found myself in agreement with him. Man’s idea of God is of some all-powerful Being who is going to do everything for him. Man has no need to exert himself. God, moving in mysterious ways, is labouring to make the world a paradise where man may dwell in peace and happiness. All man has to do is to trust in God and practise patience. Man, if he took the task in hand for himself could turn this world into a paradise to-morrow without waiting for God. But it would mean man giving up his greeds and passions. It is easier to watch and pray. God has promised man the millennium, in the dim and distant future. Men by agreeing together could have the millennium ready in time for their own children. When man at last grasps the fact that there is no God — no God, that is, in the sense that he imagines — that whatever is going to be done for him has got to be done by himself, there will be born in man the will to accomplish his own salvation. It is this idea of man as the mere creature, the mere puppet of God, powerless to save himself, helpless to avert his own fate, that through the ages has paralysed man’s spiritual energies.

“God is within us. We are God. Man’s free will is boundless. His future is in his own hands. Man has only to control his evil instincts and heaven is here; Man can conquer himself. Of his own will, he does so every day. For the purposes of business, of pleasure, of social intercourse, he puts a curb upon his lusts and passions. It is only the savage, the criminal that lets them master him. Man is capable of putting greed and selfishness out of his life. History, a record of man’s sin and folly, is also a record of man’s power to overcome within himself the obstacles that stand in the way of his own progress.

“Garibaldi called upon his volunteers to disregard all worldly allurements, to embrace suffering, wounds and death for the cause of Italian unity.

And the young men flocked to his banners. Let the young men once grasp that not God but they themselves can win for all mankind freedom and joy, and an ever-increasing number of them will be willing to make the necessary sacrifice.

“One man showed them the way. There have, at various times, been born exceptional men through whom the spirit we call” God has been able to manifest itself, to speak aloud to men. Of all these, your Christ was perhaps more than any of the others imbued with this spirit of God. In Christ’s voice we recognize the voice of God. It is the voice we hear within us, speaking to each of us individually. Christ’s one commandment:

‘ Love one another,’ is the commandment that God has been whispering to us from the beginning of creation. Out of that commandment life sprang. Through that commandment alone can life be made perfect. Love one another. It would solve every problem that has plagued mankind since the dawn of the Eocene epoch. It would recall man’s energies from the barren fields of strife to mutual labour for the husbandry of all the earth. In the words of your prophet: ‘The Wilderness be made glad, the desert rejoice and blossom as the rose.’ Why has man persisted in turning a deaf ear to this one supreme commandment? Why does man persistently refuse to follow the one guide who would lead him out of all his sorrows? To love is as easy as to hate. Why does he set himself deliberately to cultivate the one and not the other? There is no more reason for a French peasant hating a German farm labourer, for a white man hating a brown man, for a Protestant hating a Catholic, than for loving him. But our hate we take pains to nourish, it is a part of our education. We teach it to our children. At the altar of hate man is willing to make sacrifice; he will give to his last penny. On the altar of hate the mother will consent to the slaying of her own first-born. All things that are good come to man through love. No man denies this. No man but seeks, within the circle of his own home, to surround himself with love. Life without love is every man’s fear. To gain and keep love man sacrifices his own ease and comfort. To love is sweeter than to hate. Man watches himself, lest by sloth or indifference he should let love die; plans and labours to strengthen and increase love. If he would, he could love all men. If man took the same pains to cultivate his will to love that he takes to cultivate his will to hate, he could change the world.

“Man excuses himself for disregarding Christ’s express commandment by telling himself that the salvation of the world is God’s affair, not his. God’s love will make for man’s benefit a new heaven and a new earth. There is no need for man to bestir himself. While man pursues his greeds and hatreds God is busy preparing the miracle. One day, man is to wake up and find, to his joy, that he loves his fellow man; and the tears of the world will be wiped away. It is not God, it is man that must accomplish the miracle. It is by man’s own endeavour that he will be saved; by cleansing himself of hate, by setting himself in all seriousness to this great business of loving. Until he obeys Christ’s commandment he shall not enter the promised land.

“I have put it more or less into my own words,” she explained, “but I have given you the sense of it. He thought the time would come — perhaps soon — when the thinkers of the world would agree that civilization had been progressing upon a wrong line — that if destruction was to be avoided, man must retrace his steps. He thought that, apart from all else, the mere instinct of self-preservation would compel the race to turn aside from the pursuit of material welfare to the more important work of its spiritual development. He did not expect any conscious or concerted movement. Rather he believed that men and women in increasing numbers would withdraw themselves from the world, that they might live lives in conformity with God’s laws. He was a curious mixture of the religious and the scientific. He often employed the word God, but could not explain what he meant beyond that he ‘felt’ him. He held that the only altar at which a reasonable man could worship was the altar erected by the Greeks: ‘To the Unknown God.’ Christ he regarded as a Promethean figure who had received the fire from heaven and brought it down to men. That fire would never be extinguished. The spirit of Christ still moved about the world. It was the life force behind what little love still glowed and flickered among men. One day the smouldering embers would burst into flame.”

Betty put in two or three years at The Priory on and off, occupying herself chiefly with writing. But the wanderlust had got into her blood, and her book finished she grew restless.

One day Anthony and Eleanor had dined with her at The Priory. Eleanor had run away immediately after dinner to attend a committee meeting of the Children’s Holiday Society of which she was the president. Betty, she was sure, sympathized sufficiently with the movement to forgive her. She would be back soon after nine. Betty and Anthony took their coffee in the library.

“I wanted you both to come to-night,” she explained. “I’ve got into a habit of acting suddenly when an impulse seizes me. I may wake up any morning and feel I’ve got to go.”

“Whither?” he asked.

“How much money can I put my hands on within the next few months?” she asked.

She had warned him that she might be talking business. He mentioned a pretty considerable sum.

“All earned by the sweat of other people’s brows,” she commentated with a smile.

“You give away a pretty good deal of it,” he reminded her consolingly.

“Oh, yes,” she said, “I am very good. I take from them with one hand and give them back thirty per cent, of it with the other; that’s what our charity means. And it doesn’t really help, that’s the irritating part of it. It’s just the pouring out of a libation to the God-of-Things-as-they-are. ‘The poor always ye have with you.’”

“I sometimes think,” he said, “that Christ, when he told the young man to sell all he had and give it to the poor, was thinking rather of the young man than of the poor. It would have done them but such fleeting good. But to the young man it meant the difference between slavery and freedom. To be quit of it all. His horses and his chariots. His fine houses and his countless herds. His army of cringing servants. His horde of fawning clients. How could he win life, bound hand and foot to earth? Not even his soul was his own. It belonged to his great possessions.”

She was going into central Russia. She had passed through there some years ago and had happened upon one of its ever recurring famines. There was talk of another in the coming winter.

“The granary of Europe,” she continued. “I believe we import one-third of our grain from Russia. And every year the peasants die there of starvation by the thousand. That year I was there they reckoned a hundred thousand perished in one valley. They were eating the corpses of the children. And on my way to St. Petersburg I passed stations were the corn was rotting by the roadside. The price had fallen and it wasn’t worth transporting. The devil must get some fun looking down upon the world.”

He had been standing by the window with his hands in his pockets. It was still twilight. He swung round suddenly.

“I believe in the Devil,” he said. “I don’t mean the devil that we sing about — the discontented angel that God has let out at the end of a chain, that is finally to be destroyed when he has served God’s purpose. But the eternal spirit of evil that is a part of all things — that brooded over chaos before God came. He also must be our father. Hate, cruelty, lust, greed: how else were we born with them? Would they have come to us from God? Evil also claims us for his children — is fighting for possession of us, is calling to us to labour with him, to turn the world into hell. Hate one another. Do ill to one another. That is his commandment. Which does the world obey: God or the Devil? Does hate or love rule the world? Whom does the world honour? The greedy man, the selfish man, the man who
‘
gets on’ by trampling on his fellows. Who are the world’s leaders? The makers of war, the preachers of hate. Who dares to follow Christ — to fight for God? How many? That’s the trouble of it. ‘If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross.’ Poverty, self-denial, contempt, loneliness. We are afraid.”

He took a cigar from his case.

“It could be done,” he said. “That’s the tragedy of it. The victory won for God: if only a few of us had the courage. There are thousands of men and women in this England of ours alone who believe — who are convinced that the only hope of the world lies in our following the teaching of Christ. If these thousands of men and women were to say, each to himself, ‘ I will no longer sin against the light that is within me. Whatever others may do — whatever the difficulties, the privations to myself may be, I will lead Christ’s life, I will obey his commandments.’ If here in Millsborough there were, say, only a handful of men and women known to be trying to lead Christ’s life, some of them rich men who had given up their possessions, feeling that so long as there is poverty in the world no man who loves his neighbour as himself can afford to p be rich. Others, poor men and women content to remain poor, knowing that to gain riches one must serve Mammon and not God. A handful of men and women, scattered, silent, putting themselves forward only when some work for Christ was to be done. A handful of men and women labouring in quietness and in confidence to prepare the way for God: teaching their children new desires, new ambitions.

“Some would fail. But others would succeed. More would follow. It needs only a few to set the example. It would appeal to all generous men and women, to the young. Fighting for God. Fighting with God to save the world. Not to save oneself — not to get one’s own sweet self into heaven. That is the mistake that has been made: Appealing to the self that is in man, instead of to the Christ that is in man. ‘Believe and thou shalt be saved.’ It is an appeal to man’s greed, to his self-interest. It is heroes God wants, not mercenaries. Never mind yourself. Forget the wages. Help God to save the world. This little land of England, this poor, sad, grimy town of Millsborough, where each man hates his neighbour and the children play with dirt. Help God to make it clean and sweet. Help God to wipe away the tears of the world. Help God to save all men.