The Zeit-Geist, Lily Dougall [best electronic book reader txt] 📗

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"But that is what you have said in your letters."

There was silence in the room. The misery of his loneliness took hold of Toyner till it almost felt like despair. Who was he, unlearned, very sinful, even now shaken with the palsy of recent excess--who was he to bandy words with a holy man? All words that came from his own lips that hour seemed to him horribly profane. The new idea that possessed him was what he lived by, and yet alone with it he did not gather strength from it to walk upright.

"The father tempted the prodigal," he said, "when he gave him the substance to waste with sinners. Did the father sin? The time had come when nothing but temptation--yes, and sin too--could save. Most things, sir, that you hold about God I can hold too. There are bad men, powerful and seducing men, in the world; there may easily be unseen devils. There is hell on earth, and I don't doubt but that there's the awfulest, longest depth of the same kind of hell beyond. There's heaven on earth, and all the love and pain of love we have tell us there's heaven beyond, unspeakable and eternal; but, sir, when you come to limit God--to say, here the responsibility of the faithful God stops, here man's self-destruction begins--I can't believe that. He must be responsible, not only for starting us with freedom, but responsible for the use we make of it and for all the consequence. When you say of the infinite God that hell and the devils are something outside of Him--I can't think that. The devils must live and move and have their being in Him. When you say the holy God ever said to spirit He had created, 'Depart from Me' (except in a parable meaning that as long as a spirit chose evil it would not be conscious of God's nearness), I tell you, sir, by all He has taught me out of the Bible you gave me, I don't believe it. We've studied the Bible so much now that we know that holiness is just love--the sort of love that holds holy hatred and every other good feeling within itself. We know that love can't fail and cast out the thing it loves. When we know a law, we know the way it must work. If the Bible seems to say the big law it teaches doesn't work out true, it must be like what is said of the six days of creation, something that came as near as it could to what people would understand, but that needs a new explanation."

The young preacher had withdrawn his encircling arm. He sat looking very stern and sad.

"When you begin to doubt God's word, you will soon doubt that He is, and that He is the rewarder of them that seek Him."

"Sir, it seems to me that it's doubting the incarnate Word to believe what you do, because the main plain drift of all He was and did is contradicted by some few things men supposed Him to mean because they thought them. But it's not that I would set myself up to know about doctrines, if it wasn't that this doctrine had driven me to stop believing and stop caring to do right. I can't just explain it clearly, but when I came to Him the way you told me, and thought the way you told me, I just went on and did it and was blessed and happy in the love of God as I never could have dreamed of; but all the time there was a something--I didn't know exactly what--that I couldn't bring my mind to; so I just left it. But when I got tempted, and prayed and prayed, then it came on me all of a sudden that I didn't want a God who had to do with such a little part of life as that. You see it had been simmering in my mind all the days that I stopped doing the things you told me were wrong and yet went on keeping among the publicans and sinners because He did. If I'd just stayed with the church-goers, maybe I wouldn't have felt it; but to think that I couldn't take a hand in an innocent game o' cards, or dance with the girls that hadn't had another bit of amusement--all that wasn't very important, but that sort of thing began it. And then to think that God was in me and not in them! I began, as I went down the street, wondering who had God in his heart and who hadn't, that I might know who to trust and who to try to do good to. And then, most of all, there was all my books that I liked so much. I didn't read them any more, for when I thought that God had set every word in the Bible quite true and left all the other books to be true or not just as it happened, I couldn't think to look at any book but the Bible; for one's greedy of knowing how things really are--that's what one reads for. So you see it was all in my mind God did things differently one time and another, like making one book and not the others, and only such a small part of things was His; and then when the temptation came, you see, if I'd thought God was in Markham and the girls I could have done my duty and let Him take care of them; but it was because I'd no cause to think that, and believed that He'd let them go, that I couldn't let them go. I felt that I'd rather give up the sort of a God I thought on and look after them a bit. It wasn't that I thought it out clear at the time; but that was how it came about, and I was ready to kick religion over. And, sir, if God hadn't taught me that when I went down to hell He was there, I don't think I'd want to be religious again; but now I do want it with all my might and main, and I'll never let go of it, just as I know He won't let go of me--no, not if some of these days they have to shovel me into a drunkard's grave; but I believe that God's got the same strength for me just as He had when you converted me." Toyner looked round him despairingly as a man might look for something that is inexplicably lost. "I can't think how it is, but I can't get hold of His strength."

The preacher meditated. It had already been given to him to pray with great persistency and faith for this back-slider, and he had come sure of bringing with him adequate help; but now his hope was less. In a moment he threw himself upon his knees and prayed aloud: "Heavenly Father, open the heart of Thine erring child to see that it was the craft and subtlety of the devil that devised for him a temptation he could not resist,--none other but the devil could have been so subtle; and show him that this same devil, clothed as an angel of light, has feigned Thy voice and whispered in his ear, and that until he returns to the simple faith as it is in the gospel Thou _canst_ not help him as of old."

"Stop!" (huskily). "I have not let go of His faith. His faith was in the Father of sinners."

Then the preacher strove in words to show him the greatness of his error, and why he could not hold to it and live in the victory which faith gives. It was no narrow or weak view that the preacher took of the universe and God's scheme for its salvation; for he too lived at a time when men were learning more of the love of God, and he too had spoken with God. The hard outline of his creed had grown luminous, fringed with the divine light from beyond, as the bars of prison windows grow dazzling and fade when the prisoner looks at the sun. All that the preacher said was wise and strong, and the only reason he failed to convince was that Toyner felt that the thought in which his own storm-tossed soul had anchored was a little wiser and stronger--only a little, for there was not a great difference between them, after all.

"I take in all that you say, sir; but you see I can't help feeling sure that it's true that God is living with us as much and as true when we're in the worst sort of sin, and the greater sin that it brings--for the punishment of sin is more and more sin--and being sure, I know that everything else that is true will come to fit in with it, though I may not be able rightly to put it in now, and what won't come to fit in with it can't be true."

The preacher perceived that the evil which he had set himself to slay was giantlike in strength. He chose him smooth stones for his sling. His heart was growing heavy with fear of failure, his spirit within him still raised its face heavenward in unceasing prayer. He began to tell the history of God's ways with man from the first. He spoke of Abraham. He urged that the great strength had always come to men who had trusted God's word against reason and against sight. And he saw then that for the first time Toyner raised up his head and seemed stirred with a reviving strength.

The preacher paused, hoping to hear some encouraging word in correspondence to the gesture, but none came.

Then he spoke of Moses and of Joshua, for he was following the tale of God's rejection of sinful nations.

Toyner answered now. His eye was clearer, his hand steadier. "I have read there's many that say that God could not have told His people to slay whole nations, men, women, and children. I think it's the shallowest thing that was ever said. I don't know about His _telling people_ to do it--that may be a poem; but that He gave it to them to do, that He gives it to winds and floods and fires and plagues to do, time and time and again, is as certain as that if there's a God He must have things His way or He isn't God. But I don't believe that in this world, or in the next, He ever left man, woman, or child, but lived with each one all through the sin and the destruction. And, sir, I take it that men couldn't see that until at last there came One who looked into God's heart and saw the truth, and He wanted to tell it, but there were no words, so though He had power in Him to be King over the whole earth, He chose instead to be the companion of sinners, and to go down into all the depths of pain and shame and death and hell. And He said His Father had been doing it always, and He did it to show forth the Father. That is what it means. I am sure that is what it means."

The preacher was surprised to see the transformation that was going on in the man before him. That wonderful law which gives to some centre of energy in the brain the control of bodily strength, if but the right relationship between mind and body can be established, was again working, although in a lesser degree than formerly, to restore this man before his eyes. Bart, who had appeared