Soul of a Bishop

H >> H. G. Wells >> Soul of a Bishop


In his study he consoled himself for this diminution of his intention.
It had taken him five years, he reflected, to get to his present real
sense of God's presence and to his personal subordination to God's
purpose. It had been a little absurd, he perceived, to expect these
girls to leap at once to a complete understanding of the halting hints,
the allusive indications of the thoughts that now possessed his soul. He
tried like some maiden speaker to recall exactly what it was he had said
and what it was he had forgotten to say.... This was merely a beginning,
merely a beginning.

After the girls had gone to bed, Lady Ella came to him and she was
glowing and tender; she was in love again as she had not been since the
shadow had first fallen between them. "I was so glad you spoke to them,"
she said. "They had been puzzled. But they are dear loyal girls."

He tried to tell her rather more plainly what he felt about the whole
question of religion in their lives, but eloquence had departed from
him.

"You see, Ella, life cannot get out of tragedy--and sordid
tragedy--until we bring about the Kingdom of God. It's no unreality that
has made me come out of the church."

"No, dear. No," she said soothingly and reassuringly. "With all these
mere boys going to the most dreadful deaths in the trenches, with death,
hardship and separation running amok in the world--"

"One has to do something," she agreed.

"I know, dear," he said, "that all this year of doubt and change has
been a dreadful year for you."

"It was stupid of me," she said, "but I have been so unhappy. It's
over now--but I was wretched. And there was nothing I could say....
I prayed.... It isn't the poverty I feared ever, but the disgrace.
Now--I'm happy. I'm happy again.

"But how far do you come with me?"

"I'm with you."

"But," he said, "you are still a churchwoman?"

"I don't know," she said. "I don't mind."

He stared at her.

"But I thought always that was what hurt you most, my breach with the
church."

"Things are so different now," she said.

Her heart dissolved within her into tender possessiveness. There came
flooding into her mind the old phrases of an ancient story: "Whither
thou goest I will go... thy people shall be my people and thy God my
God.... The Lord do so to me and more also if aught but death part thee
and me."

Just those words would Lady Ella have said to her husband now, but she
was capable of no such rhetoric.

"Whither thou goest," she whispered almost inaudibly, and she could get
no further. "My dear," she said.

(18)


At two o'clock the next morning Scrope was still up. He was sitting over
the snoring gas fire in his study. He did not want to go to bed. His
mind was too excited, he knew, for any hope of sleep. In the last twelve
hours, since he had gone out across the park to his momentous talk with
Lady Sunderbund, it seemed to him that his life had passed through its
cardinal crisis and come to its crown and decision. The spiritual voyage
that had begun five years ago amidst a stormy succession of theological
nightmares had reached harbour at last. He was established now in the
sure conviction of God's reality, and of his advent to unify the lives
of men and to save mankind. Some unobserved process in his mind had
perfected that conviction, behind the cloudy veil of his vacillations
and moods. Surely that work was finished now, and the day's experience
had drawn the veil and discovered God established for ever.

He contrasted this simple and overruling knowledge of God as the supreme
fact in a practical world with that vague and ineffective subject for
sentiment who had been the "God" of his Anglican days. Some theologian
once spoke of God as "the friend behind phenomena"; that Anglican deity
had been rather a vague flummery behind court and society, wealth,
"respectability," and the comfortable life. And even while he had lived
in lipservice to that complaisant compromise, this true God had been
here, this God he now certainly professed, waiting for his allegiance,
waiting to take up the kingship of this distraught and bloodstained
earth. The finding of God is but the stripping of bandages from the
eyes. Seek and ye shall find....

He whispered four words very softly: "The Kingdom of God!"

He was quite sure he had that now, quite sure.

The Kingdom of God!

That now was the form into which all his life must fall. He recalled his
vision of the silver sphere and of ten thousand diverse minds about the
world all making their ways to the same one conclusion. Here at last was
a king and emperor for mankind for whom one need have neither contempt
nor resentment; here was an aim for which man might forge the steel
and wield the scalpel, write and paint and till and teach. Upon this
conception he must model all his life. Upon this basis he must found
friendships and co-operations. All the great religions, Christianity,
Islam, in the days of their power and honesty, had proclaimed the advent
of this kingdom of God. It had been their common inspiration. A religion
surrenders when it abandons the promise of its Millennium. He had
recovered that ancient and immortal hope. All men must achieve it, and
with their achievement the rule of God begins. He muttered his faith. It
made it more definite to put it into words and utter it. "It comes.
It surely comes. To-morrow I begin. I will do no work that goes not
Godward. Always now it shall be the truth as near as I can put it.
Always now it shall be the service of the commonweal as well as I can
do it. I will live for the ending of all false kingship and priestcraft,
for the eternal growth of the spirit of man...."

He was, he knew clearly, only one common soldier in a great army that
was finding its way to enlistment round and about the earth. He was not
alone. While the kings of this world fought for dominion these others
gathered and found themselves and one another, these others of the faith
that grows plain, these men who have resolved to end the bloodstained
chronicles of the Dynasts and the miseries of a world that trades in
life, for ever. They were many men, speaking divers tongues. He was
but one who obeyed the worldwide impulse. He could smile at the artless
vanity that had blinded him to the import of his earlier visions, that
had made him imagine himself a sole discoverer, a new Prophet, that had
brought him so near to founding a new sect. Every soldier in the new
host was a recruiting sergeant according to his opportunity.... And none
was leader. Only God was leader....

"The achievement of the Kingdom of God;" this was his calling.
Henceforth this was his business in life....

For a time he indulged in vague dreams of that kingdom of God on earth
of which he would be one of the makers; it was a dream of a shadowy
splendour of cities, of great scientific achievements, of a universal
beauty, of beautiful people living in the light of God, of a splendid
adventure, thrusting out at last among the stars. But neither his
natural bent nor his mental training inclined him to mechanical or
administrative explicitness. Much more was his dream a vision of
men inwardly ennobled and united in spirit. He saw history growing
reasonable and life visibly noble as mankind realized the divine aim.
All the outward peace and order, the joy of physical existence finely
conceived, the mounting power and widening aim were but the expression
and verification of the growth of God within. Then we would bear
children for finer ends than the blood and mud of battlefields. Life
would tower up like a great flame. By faith we reached forward to that.
The vision grew more splendid as it grew more metaphorical. And the
price one paid for that; one gave sham dignities, false honour, a
Levitical righteousness, immediate peace, one bartered kings and
churches for God.... He looked at the mean, poverty-struck room, he
marked the dinginess and tawdriness of its detail and all the sordid
evidences of ungracious bargaining and grudging service in its
appointments. For all his life now he would have to live in such rooms.
He who had been one of the lucky ones.... Well, men were living in
dug-outs and dying gaily in muddy trenches, they had given limbs and
lives, eyes and the joy of movement, prosperity and pride, for a smaller
cause and a feebler assurance than this that he had found....

(19)


Presently his thoughts were brought back to his family by the sounds of
Eleanor's return. He heard her key in the outer door; he heard her move
about in the hall and then slip lightly up to bed. He did not go out to
speak to her, and she did not note the light under his door.

He would talk to her later when this discovery of her own emotions no
longer dominated her mind. He recalled her departing figure and how she
had walked, touching and looking up to her young mate, and he a little
leaning to her....

"God bless them and save them," he said....

He thought of her sisters. They had said but little to his clumsy
explanations. He thought of the years and experience that they must
needs pass through before they could think the fulness of his present
thoughts, and so he tempered his disappointment. They were a gallant
group, he felt. He had to thank Ella and good fortune that so they were.
There was Clementina with her odd quick combatant sharpness, a harder
being than Eleanor, but nevertheless a fine-spirited and even more
independent. There was Miriam, indefatigably kind. Phoebe too had a real
passion of the intellect and Daphne an innate disposition to service.
But it was strange how they had taken his proclamation of a conclusive
breach with the church as though it was a command they must, at least
outwardly, obey. He had expected them to be more deeply shocked; he had
thought he would have to argue against objections and convert them to
his views. Their acquiescence was strange. They were content he should
think all this great issue out and give his results to them. And his
wife, well as he knew her, had surprised him. He thought of her words:
"Whither thou goest--"

He was dissatisfied with this unconditional agreement. Why could not
his wife meet God as he had met God? Why must Miriam put the fantastic
question--as though it was not for her to decide: "Are we still
Christians?" And pursuing this thought, why couldn't Lady Sunderbund set
up in religion for herself without going about the world seeking for
a priest and prophet. Were women Undines who must get their souls from
mortal men? And who was it tempted men to set themselves up as priests?
It was the wife, the disciple, the lover, who was the last, the most
fatal pitfall on the way to God.

He began to pray, still sitting as he prayed.

"Oh God!" he prayed. "Thou who has shown thyself to me, let me never
forget thee again. Save me from forgetfulness. And show thyself to those
I love; show thyself to all mankind. Use me, O God, use me; but keep my
soul alive. Save me from the presumption of the trusted servant; save me
from the vanity of authority....

"And let thy light shine upon all those who are so dear to me.... Save
them from me. Take their dear loyalty...."

He paused. A flushed, childishly miserable face that stared indignantly
through glittering tears, rose before his eyes. He forgot that he had
been addressing God.

"How can I help you, you silly thing?" he said. "I would give my own
soul to know that God had given his peace to you. I could not do as you
wished. And I have hurt you!... You hurt yourself.... But all the time
you would have hampered me and tempted me--and wasted yourself. It was
impossible.... And yet you are so fine!"

He was struck by another aspect.

"Ella was happy--partly because Lady Sunderbund was hurt and left
desolated...."

"Both of them are still living upon nothings. Living for nothings. A
phantom way of living...."

He stared blankly at the humming blue gas jets amidst the incandescent
asbestos for a space.

"Make them understand," he pleaded, as though he spoke confidentially of
some desirable and reasonable thing to a friend who sat beside him. "You
see it is so hard for them until they understand. It is easy enough when
one understands. Easy--" He reflected for some moments--"It is as if
they could not exist--except in relationship to other definite people.
I want them to exist--as now I exist--in relationship to God. Knowing
God...."

But now he was talking to himself again.

"So far as one can know God," he said presently.

For a while he remained frowning at the fire. Then he bent forward,
turned out the gas, arose with the air of a man who relinquishes a
difficult task. "One is limited," he said. "All one's ideas must fall
within one's limitations. Faith is a sort of tour de force. A feat of
the imagination. For such things as we are. Naturally--naturally.... One
perceives it clearly only in rare moments.... That alters nothing...."






Mr. WELLS has also written the following novels:

LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM
KIPPS
MR. POLLY
THE WHEELS OF CHANCE
THE NEW MACHIAVELLI
ANN VERONICA
TONO BUNGAY
MARRIAGE
BEALBY
THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS
THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN
THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT
MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH

The following fantastic and imaginative romances:
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
THE TIME MACHINE
THE WONDERFUL VISIT
THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU
THE SEA LADY
THE SLEEPER AWAKES
THE FOOD OF THE GODS
THE WAR IN THE AIR
THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON
IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET
THE WORLD SET FREE

And numerous Short Stories now collected in
One Volume under the title of
THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND

A Series of books upon Social, Religious and
Political questions:
ANTICIPATIONS (1900)
MANKIND IN THE MAKING
FIRST AND LAST THINGS (RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY)
NEW WORLDS FOR OLD
A MODERN UTOPIA
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE WORLD
WHAT IS COMING?
WAR AND THE FUTURE
GOD THE INVISIBLE KING

And two little books about children's play, called:
FLOOR GAMES and LITTLE WARS