Герберт Джордж Уэллс
The Soul of a Bishop
He felt that something of the general tension would be relieved if they could all three be got to sit down.
“I’ve been talking for just upon two hours,” he said to Lady Ella. “It’s good to see the water boiling for tea.”
He put a chair for Lady Sunderbund to the right of Lady Ella, got her into it by infusing an ecclesiastical insistence into his manner, and then went and sat upon the music-stool on his wife’s left, so as to establish a screen of tea-things and cakes and so forth against her more intimate enthusiasm. Meanwhile he began to see his way clearer and to develop his line.
“Well, Lady Sunderbund,” he said, “I can assure you that I think you will be no small addition to the church life of Princhester. But I warn you this is a hard-working and exacting diocese. We shall take your money, all we can get of it, we shall take your time, we shall work you hard.”
“Wo’k me hard!” cried Lady Sunderbund with passion.
“We will, we will,” said the bishop in a tone that ignored her passionate note.
“I am sure Lady Sunderbund will be a great help to us,” said Lady Ella. “We want brightening. There’s a dinginess…”
Lady Sunderbund beamed an acknowledgment. “I shall exact a ‘eturn,” she said. “I don’t mind wo’king, but I shall wo’k like the poo’ students in the Middle Ages did, to get my teaching. I’ve got my own soul to save as well as help saving othas. Since oua last talk – ”
She found the bishop handing her bread and butter. For a time the bishop fought a delaying action with the tea-things, while he sought eagerly and vainly in his mind for some good practical topic in which he could entangle and suppress Lady Sunderbund’s enthusiasms. From this she broke away by turning suddenly to Lady Ella.
“Youa husband’s views,” she said, “we’e a ‘eal ‘evelation to me. It was like not being blind – all at once.”
Lady Ella was always pleased to hear her husband praised. Her colour brightened a little. “They seem very ordinary views,” she said modestly.
“You share them?” cried Lady Sunderbund.
“But of course,” said Lady Ella.
“Wondyful!” cried Lady Sunderbund.
“Tell me, Lady Sunderbund,” said the bishop, “are you going to alter the outer appearance of the old doctor’s house?” And found that at last he had discovered the saving topic.
“Ha’dly at all,” she said. “I shall just have it pointed white and do the doa – I’m not su’ how I shall do the doa. Whetha I shall do the doa gold or a vehy, vehy ‘itch blue.”
For a time she and Lady Ella, to whom these ideas were novel, discussed the animation of grey and sombre towns by house painting. In such matter Lady Sunderbund had a Russian mind. “I can’t bea’ g’ey,” she said. “Not in my su’oundings, not in my k’eed, nowhe’e.” She turned to the bishop. “If I had my way I would paint you’ cathed’al inside and out.”
“They used to be painted,” said the bishop. “I don’t know if you have seen Ely. There the old painting has been largely restored…”
From that to the end there was no real danger, and at last the bishop found himself alone with his wife again.
“Remarkable person,” he said tentatively. “I never met any one whose faults were more visible. I met her at Wimbush House.”
He glanced at his watch.
“What did she mean,” asked Lady Ella abruptly, “by talking of your new views? And about revelations?”
“She probably misunderstood something I said at the Garstein Fellows’,” he said. “She has rather a leaping mind.”
He turned to the window, looked at his nails, and appeared to be suddenly reminded of duties elsewhere…
It was chiefly manifest to him that the difficulties in explaining the changes of his outlook to Lady Ella had now increased enormously.
(7)
A day or so after Lady Sunderbund’s arrival in Princhester the bishop had a letter from Likeman. The old man was manifestly in doubt about the effect of their recent conversation.
“My dear Scrope,” it began. “I find myself thinking continually about our interview and the difficulties you laid bare so frankly to me. We touched upon many things in that talk, and I find myself full of afterthoughts, and not perfectly sure either quite of what I said or of what I failed to say. I feel that in many ways I was not perhaps so clear and convincing as the justice of my case should have made me, and you are one of my own particular little company, you were one of the best workers in that band of good workers, your life and your career are very much my concern. I know you will forgive me if I still mingle something of the paternal with my fraternal admonitions. I watched you closely. I have still my old diaries of the St. Matthew’s days, and I have been looking at them to remind me of what you once were. It was my custom to note my early impressions of all the men who worked with me, because I have a firm belief in the soundness of first impressions and the considerable risk one runs of having them obscured by the accidents and habituations of constant intercourse. I found that quite early in your days at St. Matthew’s I wrote against your name ‘enthusiastic, but a saving delicacy.’ After all our life-long friendship I would not write anything truer. I would say of you to-day, ‘This man might have been a revivalist, if he were not a gentleman.’ There is the enthusiast, there is the revivalist, in you. It seems to me that the stresses and questions of this great crisis in the world’s history have brought it nearer to the surface than I had ever expected it to come.
“I quite understand and I sympathize with your impatience with the church at the present time; we present a spectacle of pompous insignificance hard to bear with. We are doing very little, and we are giving ourselves preposterous airs. There seems to be an opinion abroad that in some quasi-automatic way the country is going to collapse after the war into the arms of the church and the High Tories; a possibility I don’t accept for a moment. Why should it? These forcible-feeble reactionaries are much more likely to explode a revolution that will disestablish us. And I quite understand your theological difficulties – quite. The creeds, if their entire symbolism is for a moment forgotten, if they are taken as opaque statements of fact, are inconsistent, incredible. So incredible that no one believes them; not even the most devout. The utmost they do is to avert their minds – reverentially. Credo quia impossibile. That is offensive to a Western mind. I can quite understand the disposition to cry out at such things, ‘This is not the Church of God!’ – to run out from it —
“You have some dream, I suspect, of a dramatic dissidence.
“Now, my dear Brother and erstwhile pupil, I ask you not to do this thing. Wait, I implore you. Give me – and some others, a little time. I have your promise for three months, but even after that, I ask you to wait. Let the reform come from within the church. The church is something more than either its creeds, its clergy, or its laymen. Look at your cathedral rising out of and dominating Princhester. It stands not simply for Athanasius; it stands but incidentally for Athanasius; it stands for all religion. Within that fabric – let me be as frank here as in our private conversation – doctrine has altered again and again. To-day two distinct religions worship there side by side; one that fades and one that grows brighter. There is the old quasi-materialistic belief of the barbarians, the belief in such things, for example, as that Christ the physical Son of God descended into hell and stayed there, seeing the sights I suppose like any tourist and being treated with diplomatic civilities for three terrestrial days; and on the other hand there is the truly spiritual belief that you and I share, which is absolutely intolerant of such grotesque ideas. My argument to you is that the new faith, the clearer vision, gains ground; that the only thing that can prevent or delay the church from being altogether possessed by what you call and I admit is, the true God, is that such men as yourself, as the light breaks upon you, should be hasty and leave the church. You see my point of view, do you not? It is not one that has been assumed for our discussion; it is one I came to long years ago, that I was already feeling my way to in my St. Matthew’s Lenton sermons.
“A word for your private ear. I am working. I cannot tell you fully because I am not working alone. But there are movements afoot in which I hope very shortly to be able to ask you to share. That much at least I may say at this stage. Obscure but very powerful influences are at work for the liberalizing of the church, for release from many narrow limitations, for the establishment of a modus vivendi with the nonconformist and dissentient bodies in Britain and America, and with the churches of the East. But of that no more now.
“And in conclusion, my dear Scrope, let me insist again upon the eternal persistence of the essential Religious Fact:”
(Greek Letters Here)
(Rev. i. 18. “Fear not. I am the First and Last thing, the Living thing.”)
And these promises which, even if we are not to take them as promises in the exact sense in which, let us say, the payment of five sovereigns is promised by a five-pound note, are yet assertions of practically inevitable veracity:
(Greek Letters Here)
(Phil. i. 6. “He who began… will perfect.” Eph. v. 14. “He will illuminate.”)
The old man had written his Greek tags in shakily resolute capitals. It was his custom always to quote the Greek Testament in his letters, never the English version. It is a practice not uncommon with the more scholarly of our bishops. It is as if some eminent scientific man were to insist upon writing H2O instead of “water,” and “sodium chloride” instead of “table salt” in his private correspondence. Or upon hanging up a stuffed crocodile in his hall to give the place tone. The Bishop of Princhester construed these brief dicta without serious exertion, he found them very congenial texts, but there were insuperable difficulties in the problem why Likeman should suppose they had the slightest weight upon his side of their discussion. The more he thought the less they seemed to be on Likeman’s side, until at last they began to take on a complexion entirely opposed to the old man’s insidious arguments, until indeed they began to bear the extraordinary interpretation of a special message, unwittingly delivered.
(8)
The bishop was still thinking over this communication when he was interrupted by Lady Ella. She came with a letter in her hand to ask him whether she might send five-and-twenty pounds to a poor cousin of his, a teacher in a girls’ school, who had been incapacitated from work by a dislocation of the cartilage of her knee. If she could go to that unorthodox but successful practitioner, Mr. Barker, the bone-setter, she was convinced she could be restored to efficiency. But she had no ready money. The bishop agreed without hesitation. His only doubt was the certainty of the cure, but upon that point Lady Ella was convinced; there had been a great experience in the Walshingham family.
“It is pleasant to be able to do things like this,” said Lady Ella, standing over him when this matter was settled.
“Yes,” the bishop agreed; “it is pleasant to be in a position to do things like this…”
CHAPTER THE SEVENTH – THE SECOND VISION
(1)
A MONTH later found the bishop’s original state of perplexity and insomnia returned and intensified. He had done none of all the things that had seemed so manifestly needing to be done after his vision in the Athenaeum. All the relief and benefit of his experience in London had vanished out of his life. He was afraid of Dr. Dale’s drug; he knew certainly that it would precipitate matters; and all his instincts in the state of moral enfeeblement to which he had relapsed, were to temporize.
Although he had said nothing further about his changed beliefs to Lady Ella, yet he perceived clearly that a shadow had fallen between them. She had a wife’s extreme sensitiveness to fine shades of expression and bearing, and manifestly she knew that something was different. Meanwhile Lady Sunderbund had become a frequent worshipper in the cathedral, she was a figure as conspicuous in sombre Princhester as a bird of paradise would have been; common people stood outside her very very rich blue door on the chance of seeing her; she never missed an opportunity of hearing the bishop preach or speak, she wrote him several long and thoughtful letters with which he did not bother Lady Ella, she communicated persistently, and manifestly intended to become a very active worker in diocesan affairs.
It was inevitable that she and the bishop should meet and talk occasionally in the cathedral precincts, and it was inevitable that he should contrast the flexibility of her rapid and very responsive mind with a certain defensiveness, a stoniness, in the intellectual bearing of Lady Ella.
If it had been Lady Sunderbund he had had to explain to, instead of Lady Ella, he could have explained a dozen times a day.
And since his mind was rehearsing explanations it was not unnatural they should overflow into this eagerly receptive channel, and that the less he told Lady Ella the fuller became his spiritual confidences to Lady Sunderbund.
She was clever in realizing that they were confidences and treating them as such, more particularly when it chanced that she and Lady Ella and the bishop found themselves in the same conversation.
She made great friends with Miriam, and initiated her by a whole collection of pretty costume plates into the mysteries of the “Ussian Ballet” and the works of Mousso’gski and “Imsky Ko’zakof.”
The bishop liked a certain religiosity in the texture of Moussorgski’s music, but failed to see the “significance “ – of many of the costumes.
(2)
It was on a Sunday night – the fourth Sunday after Easter – that the supreme crisis of the bishop’s life began. He had had a feeling all day of extreme dulness and stupidity; he felt his ministrations unreal, his ceremonies absurd and undignified. In the night he became bleakly and painfully awake. His mind occupied itself at first chiefly with the tortuousness and weakness of his own character. Every day he perceived that the difficulty of telling Lady Ella of the change in his faith became more mountainous. And every day he procrastinated. If he had told her naturally and simply on the evening of his return from London – before anything material intervened – everything would have been different, everything would have been simpler…
He groaned and rolled over in his bed.
There came upon him the acutest remorse and misery. For he saw that amidst these petty immediacies he had lost touch with God. The last month became incredible. He had seen God. He had touched God’s hand. God had been given to him, and he had neglected the gift. He was still lost amidst the darkness and loneliness, the chaotic ends and mean shifts, of an Erastian world. For a month now and more, after a vision of God so vivid and real and reassuring that surely no saint nor prophet had ever had a better, he had made no more than vague responsive movements; he had allowed himself to be persuaded into an unreasonable and cowardly delay, and the fetters of association and usage and minor interests were as unbroken as they had been before ever the vision shone. Was it credible that there had ever been such a vision in a life so entirely dictated by immediacy and instinct as his? We are all creatures of the dark stream, we swim in needs and bodily impulses and small vanities; if ever and again a bubble of spiritual imaginativeness glows out of us, it breaks and leaves us where we were.
“Louse that I am!” he cried.
He still believed in God, without a shadow of doubt; he believed in the God that he had seen, the high courage, the golden intention, the light that had for a moment touched him. But what had he to do with God, he, the loiterer, the little thing?
He was little, he was funny. His prevarications with his wife, for example, were comic. There was no other word for him but “funny.”
He rolled back again and lay staring.
“Who will deliver me from the body of this death?” What right has a little bishop in a purple stock and doeskin breeches, who hangs back in his palace from the very call of God, to a phrase so fine and tragic as “the body of this death?”
He was the most unreal thing in the universe. He was a base insect giving himself airs. What advantage has a bishop over the Praying Mantis, that cricket which apes the attitude of piety? Does he matter more – to God?
“To the God of the Universe, who can tell? To the God of man, – yes.”
He sat up in bed struck by his own answer, and full of an indescribable hunger for God and an indescribable sense of his complete want of courage to make the one simple appeal that would satisfy that hunger. He tried to pray. “O God!” he cried, “forgive me! Take me!” It seemed to him that he was not really praying but only making believe to pray. It seemed to him that he was not really existing but only seeming to exist. He seemed to himself to be one with figures on a china plate, with figures painted on walls, with the flimsy imagined lives of men in stories of forgotten times. “O God!” he said, “O God,” acting a gesture, mimicking appeal.
“Anaemic,” he said, and was given an idea.
He got out of bed, he took his keys from the night-table at the bed head and went to his bureau.
He stood with Dale’s tonic in his hand. He remained for some time holding it, and feeling a curious indisposition to go on with the thing in his mind.
He turned at last with an effort. He carried the little phial to his bedside, and into the tumbler of his water-bottle he let the drops fall, drop by drop, until he had counted twenty. Then holding it to the bulb of his reading lamp he added the water and stood watching the slow pearly eddies in the mixture mingle into an opalescent uniformity. He replaced the water-bottle and stood with the glass in his hand. But he did not drink.
He was afraid.
He knew that he had only to drink and this world of confusion would grow transparent, would roll back and reveal the great simplicities behind. And he was afraid.
He was afraid of that greatness. He was afraid of the great imperatives that he knew would at once take hold of his life. He wanted to muddle on for just a little longer. He wanted to stay just where he was, in his familiar prison-house, with the key of escape in his hand. Before he took the last step into the very presence of truth, he would – think.
He put down the glass and lay down upon his bed…
(3)
He awoke in a mood of great depression out of a dream of wandering interminably in an endless building of innumerable pillars, pillars so vast and high that the ceiling was lost in darkness. By the scale of these pillars he felt himself scarcely larger than an ant. He was always alone in these wanderings, and always missing something that passed along distant passages, something desirable, something in the nature of a procession or of a ceremony, something of which he was in futile pursuit, of which he heard faint echoes, something luminous of which he seemed at times to see the last fading reflection, across vast halls and wildernesses of shining pavement and through Cyclopaean archways. At last there was neither sound nor gleam, but the utmost solitude, and a darkness and silence and the uttermost profundity of sorrow…
It was bright day. Dunk had just come into the room with his tea, and the tumbler of Dr. Dale’s tonic stood untouched upon the night-table. The bishop sat up in bed. He had missed his opportunity. To-day was a busy day, he knew.
“No,” he said, as Dunk hesitated whether to remove or leave the tumbler. “Leave that.”
Dunk found room for it upon the tea-tray, and vanished softly with the bishop’s evening clothes.
The bishop remained motionless facing the day. There stood the draught of decision that he had lacked the decision even to touch.
From his bed he could just read the larger items that figured upon the engagement tablet which it was Whippham’s business to fill over-night and place upon his table. He had two confirmation services, first the big one in the cathedral and then a second one in the evening at Pringle, various committees and an interview with Chasters. He had not yet finished his addresses for these confirmation services…
The task seemed mountainous – overwhelming.
With a gesture of desperation he seized the tumblerful of tonic and drank it off at a gulp.
(4)
For some moments nothing seemed to happen.
Then he began to feel stronger and less wretched, and then came a throbbing and tingling of artery and nerve.
He had a sense of adventure, a pleasant fear in the thing that he had done. He got out of bed, leaving his cup of tea untasted, and began to dress. He had the sensation of relief a prisoner may feel who suddenly tries his cell door and finds it open upon sunshine, the outside world and freedom.
He went on dressing although he was certain that in a few minutes the world of delusion about him would dissolve, and that he would find himself again in the great freedom of the place of God.
This time the transition came much sooner and much more rapidly. This time the phases and quality of the experience were different. He felt once again that luminous confusion between the world in which a human life is imprisoned and a circumambient and interpenetrating world, but this phase passed very rapidly; it did not spread out over nearly half an hour as it had done before, and almost immediately he seemed to plunge away from everything in this life altogether into that outer freedom he sought. And this time there was not even the elemental scenery of the former vision. He stood on nothing; there was nothing below and nothing above him. There was no sense of falling, no terror, but a feeling as though he floated released. There was no light, but as it were a clear darkness about him. Then it was manifest to him that he was not alone, but that with him was that same being that in his former vision had called himself the Angel of God. He knew this without knowing why he knew this, and either he spoke and was answered, or he thought and his thought answered him back. His state of mind on this occasion was altogether different from the first vision of God; before it had been spectacular, but now his perception was altogether super-sensuous.
(And nevertheless and all the time it seemed that very faintly he was still in his room.)
It was he who was the first to speak. The great Angel whom he felt rather than saw seemed to be waiting for him to speak.
“I have come,” he said, “because once more I desire to see God.”
“But you have seen God.”
“I saw God. God was light, God was truth. And I went back to my life, and God was hidden. God seemed to call me. He called. I heard him, I sought him and I touched his hand. When I went back to my life I was presently lost in perplexity. I could not tell why God had called me nor what I had to do.”
“And why did you not come here before?”
“Doubt and fear. Brother, will you not lay your hand on mine?”
The figure in the darkness became distincter. But nothing touched the bishop’s seeking hands.
“I want to see God and to understand him. I want reassurance. I want conviction. I want to understand all that God asks me to do. The world is full of conflict and confusion and the spirit of war. It is dark and dreadful now with suffering and bloodshed. I want to serve God who could save it, and I do not know how.”
It seemed to the bishop that now he could distinguish dimly but surely the form and features of the great Angel to whom he talked. For a little while there was silence, and then the Angel spoke.
“It was necessary first,” said the Angel, “that you should apprehend God and desire him. That was the purport of your first vision. Now, since you require it, I will tell you and show you certain things about him, things that it seems you need to know, things that all men need to know. Know then first that the time is at hand when God will come into the world and rule it, and when men will know what is required of them. This time is close at hand. In a little while God will be made manifest throughout the earth. Men will know him and know that he is King. To you this truth is to be shown – that you may tell it to others.”
“This is no vision?” said the bishop, “no dream that will pass away?”
“Am I not here beside you?”
(5)
The bishop was anxious to be very clear. Things that had been shapelessly present in his mind now took form and found words for themselves.
“The God I saw in my vision – He is not yet manifest in the world?”
“He comes. He is in the world, but he is not yet manifested. He whom you saw in your vision will speedily be manifest in the world. To you this vision is given of the things that come. The world is already glowing with God. Mankind is like a smouldering fire that will presently, in quite a little time, burst out into flame.
“In your former vision I showed you God,” said the Angel. “This time I will show you certain signs of the coming of God. And then you will understand the place you hold in the world and the task that is required of you.”
(6)
And as the Angel spoke he lifted up his hands with the palms upward, and there appeared above them a little round cloud, that grew denser until it had the likeness of a silver sphere. It was a mirror in the form of a ball, but a mirror not shining uniformly; it was discoloured with greyish patches that had a familiar shape. It circled slowly upon the Angel’s hands. It seemed no greater than the compass of a human skull, and yet it was as great as the earth. Indeed it showed the whole earth. It was the earth. The hands of the Angel vanished out of sight, dissolved and vanished, and the spinning world hung free. All about the bishop the velvet darkness broke into glittering points that shaped out the constellations, and nearest to them, so near as to seem only a few million miles away in the great emptiness into which everything had resolved itself, shone the sun, a ball of red-tongued fires. The Angel was but a voice now; the bishop and the Angel were somewhere aloof from and yet accessible to the circling silver sphere.
At the time all that happened seemed to happen quite naturally, as things happen in a dream. It was only later, when all this was a matter of memory, that the bishop realized how strange and incomprehensible his vision had been. The sphere was the earth with all its continents and seas, its ships and cities, its country-sides and mountain ranges. It was so small that he could see it all at once, and so great and full that he could see everything in it. He could see great countries like little patches upon it, and at the same time he could see the faces of the men upon the highways, he could see the feelings in men’s hearts and the thoughts in their minds. But it did not seem in any way wonderful to the bishop that so he should see those things, or that it was to him that these things were shown.
“This is the whole world,” he said.
“This is the vision of the world,” the Angel answered.
“It is very wonderful,” said the bishop, and stood for a moment marvelling at the compass of his vision. For here was India, here was Samarkand, in the light of the late afternoon; and China and the swarming cities upon her silvery rivers sinking through twilight to the night and throwing a spray and tracery of lantern spots upon the dark; here was Russia under the noontide, and so great a battle of artillery raging on the Dunajec as no man had ever seen before; whole lines of trenches dissolved into clouds of dust and heaps of blood-streaked earth; here close to the waiting streets of Constantinople were the hills of Gallipoli, the grave of British Imperialism, streaming to heaven with the dust and smoke of bursting shells and rifle fire and the smoke and flame of burning brushwood. In the sea of Marmora a big ship crowded with Turkish troops was sinking; and, purple under the clear water, he could see the shape of the British submarine which had torpedoed her and had submerged and was going away. Berlin prepared its frugal meals, still far from famine. He saw the war in Europe as if he saw it on a map, yet every human detail showed. Over hundreds of miles of trenches east and west of Germany he could see shells bursting and the men below dropping, and the stretcher-bearers going back with the wounded. The roads to every front were crowded with reserves and munitions. For a moment a little group of men indifferent to all this struggle, who were landing amidst the Antarctic wilderness, held his attention; and then his eyes went westward to the dark rolling Atlantic across which, as the edge of the night was drawn like a curtain, more and still more ships became visible beating upon their courses eastward or westward under the overtaking day.
The wonder increased; the wonder of the single and infinitely multitudinous adventure of mankind.
“So God perhaps sees it,” he whispered.
(7)
“Look at this man,” said the Angel, and the black shadow of a hand seemed to point.
It was a Chinaman sitting with two others in a little low room separated by translucent paper windows from a noisy street of shrill-voiced people. The three had been talking of the ultimatum that Japan had sent that day to China, claiming a priority in many matters over European influences they were by no means sure whether it was a wrong or a benefit that had been done to their country. From that topic they had passed to the discussion of the war, and then of wars and national aggressions and the perpetual thrusting and quarrelling of mankind. The older man had said that so life would always be; it was the will of Heaven. The little, very yellow-faced, emaciated man had agreed with him. But now this younger man, to whose thoughts the Angel had so particularly directed the bishop’s attention, was speaking. He did not agree with his companion.
“War is not the will of Heaven,” he said; “it is the blindness of men.”
