Читать книгу The High Way - Caroline Atwater Mason - Страница 9

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“Reactionary, eh?” mused Douglas Gregg, regarding Hardy with a careful, considering eye. “Coming to Peterboro to get ready to fight the spirit of the age? You will have your hands full. Sorry for you, my boy, but I like your grit. Go ahead! I will see that you get what you want, since you have joined the ranks of the enemy. Hitherto we have restrained ourselves! I have fed you with milk, to use Paul’s words, and not with meat. We will see what you are able to bear.” Then, with a change of tone, “It will do you no harm, Shannon, to begin with the mental attitude you have described. It is a gallant one. If you find it by and by untenable it will be because of wider views and more serious study. There will be some painful experiences, no doubt. Nothing is harder in the realm of the spirit than the reconstruction of a man’s religious position, but, being honest yourself, I know you understand that there can be no compromise with truth. Perpetuation of the past, loyalty to tradition, these are minor considerations to the scholar. The logic of facts can never hurt us in the end, however painful when first encountered.”

“Are ‘facts’ the only truth?” Shannon asked very soberly.

“Absolutely!”

This word, spoken in a strong, aggressive voice, not heard before, startled the two men. Looking up they saw standing in the door leading from the study into the hall a man of vigorous figure and presence. It was Dr. Hugh Gregg.

“Hello, Father! Hello, Shannon!” he hailed them.

The clock on the mantel struck twelve. Professor Gregg held out his hand to his son and motioned him to a chair.

“You come like a thief in the night, Hugh,” he said impassively.

“To be sure. Else what’s the use of my latch-key? I can’t sit down. How are you, Father? How is Mother? I hope you had a good time celebrating the day. I only got in town half an hour ago. Have been operating in Kendall. Lyde came over?”

“No, the twins came, bringing gifts. Lydia sent your mother some beautiful roses. We had them on the table to-night.”

“Why didn’t Lyde come?” questioned Dr. Gregg, frowning. “She promised me to.”

“The children said she was very, very busy,” commented his father with slow, ironic emphasis.

Hardy Shannon had risen to go and by this time was slipping into his overcoat. Dr. Gregg now at his elbow bade him take a seat in his car. “I am going directly past the Seminary,” he urged.

As they drove away from the darkened house the Doctor exclaimed with a note of exasperation:

“The logic of facts! I heard what Father was giving you. The trouble with Father is his infernal inconsistency. Here he has brought me up,—brought Mother up too, as far as that goes,—on his favourite principle of unflinching facing of facts, lead where it may. Does he abide by the principle himself? By no manner of means. He stops just where he wants to,—sticks to the idea of God, immortality,—has rather a leaning, I suspect myself, to the New Testament legends,—all that, and yet talks about never compromising with truth. Now, as I grew up, I took him in earnest and so followed his teaching to its logical result, that being to believe nothing which I cannot demonstrate by natural law. Is he pleased with me because I frankly avow my adherence to the ‘logic of facts’? Don’t you believe he is. I am his thorn in the flesh,” and the Doctor laughed grimly.

Suddenly facing about upon his companion he cried:

“By Jove! I forgot you were a theologue, Shannon. I beg your pardon.”

“Beg your father’s, if you like,” was Hardy’s rather brusque response. “You have no need to beg mine.”

“I guess that’s right, too. Candidates for the ministry now, as I understand it, are given ‘judicious latitude’ in the interpretation of the creeds. That is judicious, sure enough, else how in this scientific age would the ministry get any candidates? The fact is, Shannon,” he added as he drew up and stopped before the low, long brick building with rows of unlighted windows on its low hill, “if you want to get a good church in these days you must beware of being orthodox. It isn’t the fashion. I give you that. Look at Parson Chance. He has his ear to the ground. Good-night.”

Hardy Shannon hurried through the empty echoing halls of his dormitory, up the bare stairs to his own cubicle and tumbled dizzily into bed. Sleep was slow in coming. He was furiously hungry, nervously over-strained by the long interview with Professor Gregg, bruised by the brief interview with his son. His brain seemed to swing in a mechanical iteration from Gregg the father to Gregg the son. All the while before his closed eyes, as the night wore on to morning, the figures of two marionettes whirled and danced, while their high, light voices persisted in his ears in notes of false emphasis and meaningless cajolery. Suddenly he started up in bed and stared into the dark. What were those idiotic images anyway? Then suddenly his confused impressions cleared. He remembered. Why, of course, the marionettes were Greggs, too! The third generation. A curious come-down, that. There was a gray blur of dawn in his window. Almost time to get up. With which he fell asleep.

“So you’re going to cut Primitive Christianity, are you? Do you know what time it is?” The speaker had taken his place at the foot of Shannon’s bed. A slender fellow with a twisted knee, the Senior, Barton Conrad.

“Don’t know and don’t care,” was the drowsy reply.

“Well, it’s a mere matter of ten o’clock, my lad, whether you will hear or whether you will forbear.”

Hardy Shannon sprang to his feet.

“My gracious, Conrad! Ten o’clock, and breakfast gone by the board. I never was so hungry in my life. Haven’t had solid food since yesterday noon. I’ll have to dash down-town to Walton’s or some such place and let Primitive Christianity go.”

“You come into my room as soon as you’ve had your shower and got your clothes on and I will have a cup of coffee ready, an egg and a bun,—all by electricity. Will that do?”

“Do? Rather. I am a starving man.”

“How long will it take you?”

“Fifteen minutes.”

Over the coffee, served on the student’s desk littered with books and papers in Conrad’s room, Hardy gave his friend a sketch of his adventures of the previous evening.

“So you, a Junior, dared to beard the lion in his den, old Douglas in his hall? I gaze upon you in wonder.”

“He is an old dear,” murmured Shannon. “A curious thing, isn’t it, how in his private and personal life he can keep that reverent, religious spirit? He does, you know,” frowning down the suggestion of Conrad’s raised eyebrow and shrugged shoulder.

“That is temperament. Temperament and heredity. Also early training. It may last through one man’s life,—hardly more than that.”

Hardy, reflecting on Hugh Gregg, went on in silence consuming Conrad’s bread and butter. He had not mentioned the Doctor in his recital.

“Besides Gregg deals tenderly with fledglings like you, Shannon,” Conrad persisted. “The faculty like to go easy on the Juniors. Prudent and wise, obviously. Wait till middle year! Wait till Gregg opens up Luke’s Gospel, for example, cutting out bodily the first two chapters and the last as altogether unhistorical. Then, by rejecting this and that passage as ‘lacking confirmatory evidence,’ by cancelling every vestige of miracle as legend, and keeping always in mind that the author was sure to misrepresent a lot of things because of his special purpose in writing his book, you shear off a lot more. What remains?”

Conrad had thrown himself back in his desk chair and stared at his friend, his face distorted by suppressed feeling. Hardy Shannon’s face reflected the strain in that of his friend.

“You have lost Christmas, see,” resumed Conrad, now leaning across the desk and picking up a paper knife with the care of one who acts unconsciously. “You have lost Easter. The Cross? It used to be the supreme symbol of the world’s redemption by the sacrificial, voluntary death of the Son of God. Now it merely suggests the untimely cutting short of the career of an earnest but disappointed young enthusiast. That, or something borrowed from Oriental legends. This is the kind of thing Gregg will give you.”

“But Conrad, after all, I have heard Gregg speak sympathetically of Delitzsch’s pain in witnessing the ‘soul-struggles’ of new students in his Seminary.”

“They may have wounded Delitzsch, but our invincible Gregg regards them as a kind of theological measles. ‘Soul struggles!’ I tell you, Hardy Shannon, this Seminary Hill should rightly be called Golgotha. Many a man comes here only to have his spiritual nature crucified and slain.”

“Oh, come, Conrad! You are going too far, man. It isn’t as bad as all that.”

“It is as bad as all that. Look at me! I am nearly through now, and I’m blessed if I know what I am in the ministry for. None of us is going out next Spring with any living faith in the cause to which he has vowed himself. We shall stroll out to earn our living as best we may in that state of life to which it has pleased our early delusions to call us. We shall do it, of course, in as honourable fashion as circumstances permit. But that will not be any too honourable as I look at it. The first thing we shall face will be the potent, grave and reverend Council which shall examine and ordain us. Now if you are in the country, and it is chiefly a country Council, you must be innocent of all knowledge of Radical Criticism or your ordination will be in doubt. But if you are in the city, and especially if you are in a scholastic atmosphere, you must know nothing but Radical Criticism. Otherwise prepare to be set down as a hide-bound traditionalist and a back number. A man without a future.”

“The times are out of joint for a fact, but I for one thank God for the chance to have my little part in setting them right.”

Hardly noticing the interruption Conrad went on passionately:

“Shannon, my poor father and mother saved and scrimped for years for me. I was brought up on a sterile New England farm. Hard work, hard living, small joy there was for us. My parents denied themselves everything to put me through college and seminary and have done it, oh, so gladly, in order that their son might ‘preach the Gospel.’” Conrad’s voice trembled. “How do you suppose I feel when I go back home bereft of the Gospel and meet the expectant looks in their dear old eyes. They want to hear of my advancing Christian experience, my ‘growth in grace and in the knowledge of the Lord.’ Oh, I can tell them the truth and break their hearts all right. It’s easy enough in one way. It seems the regular thing nowadays for youngsters to do that sort of thing. But, my God, Shannon, when I think of what it would really mean——”

“Don’t!” cried Hardy, striking the desk with a clenched fist. “You’re not to do that thing. You’re in a bad dream. Instead of reason having resumed her own throne, reason is trying to usurp the throne of all our being. He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh! Men will hear the laughter by and by. Conrad, the whole trouble starts with the radical assumption that there can be nothing super-rational. I tell you, I greet the supernatural with a cheer as the very crown and top of our being! You can do it, too. Higher than reason, stronger than will, the Word Incarnate remains. Supernatural? Why, religion is nothing else!”

“You had better talk to Graves,” commented Conrad. His head was propped in a weary way on his hand; his forehead gleamed wet with perspiration. He was a delicate, high-strung fellow, capable alike of collapse or of notable achievement. “All I know is that Modernism is in the seats of the mighty now.”

“I saw Graves just a moment last night, at Professor Gregg’s,” responded Shannon.

“He was in here very soon after that, I judge, for he had come direct from 17 Locust Street. He was in a cold fury.”

“I saw he was rather stirred. He worked on a New York paper before he came here and means to be a missionary, doesn’t he? I never had any talk with him.”

“Yes, he came to the Seminary bent on going to the foreign field, and I believe he was in earnest. But last night he declared that, after his interview with Professor Gregg, he had abandoned any such purpose. ‘What on earth,’ he demanded of me, ‘should I sacrifice my country and my career as a journalist for,—the thing I loved to do and could do successfully—in order to go to Africa or China for the sake of an ethical abstraction? At best the Gospel is reduced to a collection of moral precepts.’”

“What is he going to do? Go back to journalism?”

“No. He means now to cut out all Biblical and theological work and fill out his course while he stays in Peterboro with sociology, public ethics and that sort of thing. I don’t think he is quite clear as to his future, but, as for the work of a Christian minister or missionary, he kept repeating, ‘It isn’t a man’s job.’ And what could I say?”

“What could you say?” cried Hardy Shannon, now in a white heat of passion himself. “Say it is a man’s job! Never, since the early Christian centuries, was preaching the Gospel more a man’s job than now. And these onslaughts of Radical Criticism have cropped up in one shape or another all the way along. I’ve got something here I’ll read you.” Consulting his watch, “Yes, there’s just time before I have to make a dash for Jewish Eschatology.”

“Oh, that old bore!”

“That bore happens to be new to me. Now brace up and listen to this! I copied it from a book I was reading a few days ago.”

Shannon had taken a piece of paper from his pocket. He now read aloud the following:

“At a special conference of Protestant leaders the following declaration of principles was read: ‘We have full faith, First, in the supernatural power of God in the government of the world, and especially in the establishment of the Christian religion; Second, in the divine and supernatural inspiration of the Holy Books, as well as in their sovereign authority in religious matters; Third, in the eternal divinity and miraculous birth as well as in the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, God-man, Saviour and Redeemer of men.’ The man who read these propositions then addressed the Conference with these words: ‘Gentlemen, Attacks against the bases of Christianity are seen everywhere, in Germany, Switzerland, Holland, England and France. I fear nothing, provided aggression meets with resistance. It is by our faith and labour that the Christian religion must be defended.’ Conrad, my idea is, Let us resist, not Let us collapse before aggression. Let us count ourselves Defenders of the Faith. Let it be ‘On for the New Crusade.’”

“Who made that declaration?”

“Guess.”

“I can’t guess. But it is up to date all right.”

“Not precisely. It was delivered fifty years ago by M. Guizot in the Conference of the National Protestant Church of France. Now give me your hand, old fellow. Resistance is a man’s job. You and I have got to go to it.”

“But, Shannon,” Conrad spoke with sudden return of energy, “controversy and counter-attacks are going on all the time. They accomplish nothing.”

“I know that. There must be a more excellent way. It is for us to find it.”