Fiat justitia ruat coelum. Proverb
Justice, the miracle worker among men. John Bright (July
14, 1868.)
“I thought you were never coming to see me,” said Erica, putting down a newspaper and looking up with eager welcome at Charles Osmond, who had just been announced.
“It has not been for want of will,” he replied, sitting down near her couch, “but I have been overwhelmed with work the last few days. How are you getting on? I'm glad you don't altogether refuse to see your prophet of evil.”
“It would have been worse if you hadn't spoken,” she said, in the tone of one trying hard to make the best of things. “I was rather rash though to say that I should like my wheels to run down; I didn't know how terrible it is to be still. One does so grudge all the lost time.”
“But you will not let this be lost time you will read.”
“Oh, yes, happily I can do that. And Mrs. McNaughton is going to give me physiology lessons, and dear old Professor Gosse has promised to come and teach me whenever he can. He is so devoted to father, you know, I think he would do anything for me just because I am his child. It is a comfort that father has so many real good friends. What I do so hate though is the thought of having to be a passive verb for so long. You've no idea how aggravating it is to lie here and listen to all that is going on, to hear of great meetings and not to be able to go, to hear of work to be done and not to be able to do it. And I suppose one notices little things more when one is ill, for just to lie still and watch our clumsy little servant lay the table for dinner, clattering down the knives and forks and tossing down the plates, makes me actually cross. And then they let the room get so untidy; just look at that stack of books for reviewing, and that chaos of papers in the corner. If I could but get up for just five minutes I shouldn't mind.”
“Poor child,” said Charles Osmond, “this comes very hard on you.”
“I know I'm grumbling dreadfully, but if you knew how horrid it is to be cut off from everything! And, of course, it happens that another controversy is beginning about that Longstaff report. I have been reading half a dozen of today's newspapers, and each one is worse than the last. Look here! Just read that, and try to imagine that it's your father they are slandering! Oh, if I could but get up for one minute and stamp!”
“And is this untrue?” asked Charles Osmond, when he had finished the account in question.
“There is just enough truth in it to make it worse than a direct lie,” said Erica, hotly. “They have quoted his own words, but in a sense in which he never meant them, or they have quite disregarded the context. If you will give me those books on the table, I'll just show you how they have misrepresented him by hacking out single sentences, and twisting and distorting all he says in public.”
Charles Osmond looked at the passages referred to, and saw that Erica had not complained without reason.
“Yes, that is very unfair shamefully unfair,” he said. Then, after a pause, he added, abruptly: “Erica, are you good at languages?”
“I am very fond of them,” she said, surprised at the sudden turn he had given to the conversation.
“Supposing that Mr. Raeburn's speeches and doings were a good deal spoken of in Europe, as no doubt they are, and that a long time after his death one of his successors made some converts to secularism in Italy, and wrote in Italian all that he could remember of the life and words of his late teacher. Then suppose that the Italian life of Raeburn was translated into Chinese, and that hundreds of years after, a heathen Chinee sat down to read it. His Oriental mind found it hard to understand Mr. Raeburn's thoroughly Western mind; he didn't see anything noble in Mr. Raeburn's character, couldn't understand his mode of thought, read through the life, perhaps studied it after a fashion, or believed he did; then shut it up, and said there might possibly have been such a man, but the proofs were very weak, and, even if he had lived, he didn't think he was any great shakes, though the people did make such a fuss about him. Would you call that heathen Chinee fair?”
Erica could not help smiling, though she saw what he was driving at.
But Charles Osmond felt much too keenly to continue in such a light strain. He was no weak-minded, pleasant conversationalist, but a prophet, who knew how to speak hard truths sometimes.
“Erica,” he said, almost sternly, “you talk much about those who quote your father's words unfairly; but have you never misquoted the words of Christ? You deny Him and disbelieve in Him, yet you have never really studied His life. You have read the New Testament through a veil of prejudice. Mind, I am not saying one word in defense of those so-called Christians who treat you unfairly or uncharitably; but I do say that, as far as I can see, you are quite as unfair to Christ as they are to your father. Of course, you may reply that Jesus of Nazareth lived nearly nineteen hundred years ago, and that your father is still living; that you have many difficulties and doubts to combat, while our bigots can verify every fact or quotation with regard to Mr. Raeburn with perfect ease and certainty. That is true enough. But the difficulties, if honestly faced, might be surmounted. You don't honestly face them; you say to yourself, 'I have gone into all these matters carefully, and now I have finally made up my mind; there is an end of the matter!' You are naturally prejudiced against Christ; every day your prejudices will deepen unless you strike out resolutely for yourself as a truth-seeker, as one who insists on always considering all sides of the question. At present you are absolutely unfair, you will not take the trouble to study the life of Christ.”
Few people like to be told of their faults. Erica could just endure it from her father, but from no one else. She was, besides, too young yet to have learned even the meaning of the word humility. Had Charles Osmond been a few years younger, she would not even have listened to him. As it was, he was a gray-haired man, whom she loved and revered; he was, moreover, a guest. She was very angry with him, but she restrained her anger.
He had watched her attentively while he spoke. She had at first only been surprised; then her anger had been kindled, and she gave him one swift flash from eyes which looked like live coals. Then she turned her face away from him, so that he could only see one crimson cheek. There was a pause after he had said his say. Presently, with a great effort, Erica faced him once more, and in a manner which would have been dignified had it not been a trifle too frigid, made some casual remark upon a different subject. He saw that to stay longer was mere waste of time.
When the door had closed behind him, Erica's anger blazed up once more. That he should have dared to accuse her of unfairness! That he should have dared actually to rebuke her! If he had given her a good shaking she could not have felt more hurt and ruffled. And then to choose this day of all others, just when life was so hard to her, just when she was condemned to a long imprisonment. It was simply brutal of him! If any one had told her that he would do such a thing she would not have believed them. He had said nothing of the sort to her before, though they had known each other so long; but, now that she was ill and helpless and unable to get away from him, he had seen fit to come and lecture her. Well, he was a parson! She might have known that sooner or later the horrid, tyrannical, priestly side of him would show! And yet she had liked him so much, trusted him so much! It was indescribably bitter to think that he was no longer the hero she had thought him to be. That, after all, he was not a grand, noble, self-denying man, but a fault-finding priest!
She spent the rest of the afternoon in alternate wrath and grief. In the evening Aunt Jean read her a somewhat dry book which required all her attention, and, consequently, her anger cooled for want of thoughts to stimulate it. Her father did not come in till late; but, as he carried her upstairs to bed, she told him of Charles Osmond's interview.
“I told him you like a little opposition,” was his reply.
“I don't know about opposition, but I didn't like him, he showed his priestly side.”
“I am sorry,” replied Raeburn. “For my part I genuinely like the man; he seems to me a grand fellow, and I should have said not in the least spoiled by his Christianity, for he is neither exclusive, nor narrow-minded, nor opposed to progress. Infatuated on one point, of course, but a thorough man in spite of it.”
Left once more alone in her little attic room, Erica began to think over things more quietly. So her father had told him that she liked opposition, and he had doled out to her a rebuke which was absolutely unanswerable! But why unanswerable? She had been too angry to reply at the time. It was one of the few maxims her father had given her, “When you are angry be very slow to speak.” But she might write an answer, a nice, cold, cutting answer, respectful, of course, but very frigid. She would clearly demonstrate to him that she was perfectly fair, and that he, her accuser, was unfair.
And then quite quietly, she began to turn over the accusations in her mind. Quoting the words of Christ without regard to the context, twisting their meaning. Neglecting real study of Christ's character and life. Seeing all through a veil of prejudice.
She would begin, like her father, with a definition of terms. What did he mean by study? What did she mean by study? Well such searching analysis, for instance, as she had applied to the character of Hamlet, when she had had to get up one of Shakespeare's plays for her examination. She had worked very hard at that, had really taken every one of his speeches and soliloquies, and had tried to gather his true character from them as well as from his actions.
At this point she wandered away from the subject a little and began to wonder when she should hear the result of the examination, and to hope that she might get a first. By and by she came to herself with a sudden and very uncomfortable shock. If the sort of work she had given to Hamlet was study, HAD she ever studied the character of Christ?
She had all her life heard what her father had to say against Him, and what a good many well-meaning, but not very convincing, people had to say for Him. She had heard a few sermons and several lectures on various subjects connected with Christ's religion. She had read many books both for and against Him. She had read the New Testament. But could she quite honestly say that she had STUDIED the character of Christ? Had she not been predisposed to think her father in the right? He would not at all approve of that. Had she been a true Freethinker? Had she not taken a good deal to be truth because he said it? If so, she was not a bit more fair than the majority of Christians who never took the trouble to go into things for themselves, and study things from the point of view of an outsider.
In the silence and darkness of her little room, she began to suspect a good many unpleasant and hitherto unknown facts about herself.
“After all, I do believe that Mr. Osmond was right,” she confessed at length. “I am glad to get back my belief in him; but I've come to a horrid bit of lath and plaster in myself where I thought it was all good stone.” She fell asleep and dreamed of the heathen Chinee, reading the translation of the translation of her father's words, and disbelieving altogether in “that invented demagogue, Luke Raeburn.”
The next day Charles Osmond, sitting at work in his study, and feeling more depressed and hopeless than he would have cared to own even to himself, was roused by the arrival of a little three-cornered note. It was as follow:
“Dear Mr. Osmond, You made me feel very angry yesterday, and sad, too, for of course it was a case of 'Et tu, Brute.' But last night I came to the unpleasant conclusion that you were quite right, and that I was quite wrong. To prove to you that I am no longer angry, I am going to ask you a great favor. Will you teach me Greek? Your parable of the heathen Chinee has set me thinking. Yours very sincerely, Erica Raeburn.”
Charles Osmond felt the tears come to his eyes. The straightforward simplicity of the letter, the candid avowal of having been “quite wrong,” an avowal not easy for one of Erica's character to make, touched him inexpressibly. Taking a Greek grammar from his book shelves, he set off at once for Guilford Terrace.
He found Erica looking very white and fragile, and with lines of suffering about her mouth; but, though physically weary, her mind seemed as vigorous as ever. She received him with her usual frankness, and with more animation in her look than he had seen for some weeks.
“I did think you perfectly horrid yesterday!” she exclaimed. “And was miserable, besides, at the prospect of losing one of my heroes. You can be very severe.”
“The infliction of pain is only justified when the inflictor is certain, or as nearly certain as he can be, that the pain will be productive of good,” said Charles Osmond.
“I suppose that is the way you account for the origin of evil,” said Erica, thoughtfully.
“Yes,” replied Charles Osmond, pleased that she should have thought of the subject, “that to me seems the only possible explanation, otherwise God would be either not perfectly good or not omnipotent. His all-wisdom enables Him to overrule that pain which He has willed to be the necessary outcome of infractions of His order. Pain, you see, is made into a means of helping us to find out where that order has been broken, and so teaching us to obey it in the long run.”
“But if there is an all-powerful God, wouldn't it have been much better if He had made it impossible for us to go wrong?”
“It would have saved much trouble, undoubtedly; but do you think that which costs us least trouble is generally the most worth having? I know a noble fellow who has fought his way upward through sins and temptations you would like him, by the way, for he was once an atheist. He is, by virtue of all he has passed through, all he has overcome, one of the fines men I have ever known.”
“That is the friend, I suppose, whom your son mentioned to me. But I don't see your argument, for if there was an all-powerful God, He could have caused the man you speak of to be as noble and good without passing through pain and temptation.”
“But God does not work arbitrarily, but by laws of progression. Nor does His omnipotence include the working of contradictions. He cannot both cause a thing to be and not to be at the same time. If it is a law that that which has grown by struggle and effort shall be most noble, God will not arbitrarily reverse that law or truth because the creation of sinless beings would involve less trouble.”
“It all seems to me so unreal!” exclaimed Erica. “It seems like talking of thin air!”
“I expect it does,” said Charles Osmond, trying to realize to himself her position.
There was a silence.
“How did this man of whom you speak come to desert our side?” asked Erica. “I suppose, as you say he was one of the finest men you ever knew, he must, at least, have had a great intellect. How did he begin to think all these unlikely, unreal things true?”
“Donovan began by seeing the grandeur of the character of Christ. He followed his example for many years, calling himself all the time an atheist; at last he realized that in Christ we see the Father.”
“I am sorry we lost him if he is such a nice man,” was Erica's sole comment. Then, turning her beautiful eyes on Charles Osmond, she said, “I hope my note did not convey to you more than I intended. I asked you if you would teach me Greek, and I mean to try to study the character of Christ; but, quite to speak the truth, I don't really want to do it. I only do it because I see I have not been fair.”
“You do it for the sake of being a truth-seeker, the best possible reason.”
“I thought you would think I was going to do it because I hoped to get something. I thought one of your strong points was that people must come in a state of need and expecting to be satisfied. I don't expect anything. I am only doing it for the sake of honesty and thoroughness. I don't expect any good at all.”
“Is it likely that you can expect when you know so little what is there? What can you bring better than an hones mind to the search? Erica, if I hadn't known that you were absolutely sincere, I should not have dared to give you the pain I gave you yesterday. It was my trust in your perfect sincerity which brought you that strong accusation. Even then it was a sore piece of work.”
“Did you mind it a little,” exclaimed Erica. But directly she had spoken, she felt that the question was absurd, for she saw a look in Charles Osmond's eyes that made the word “little” a mockery.
“What makes that man so loving?” she thought to herself. “He reminded me almost of father, yet I am no child of his. I am opposed to all that he teaches. I have spoken my mind out to him in a way which must sometimes have pained him. Yet he cares for me so much that it pained him exceedingly to give me pain yesterday.”
His character puzzled her. The loving breath, the stern condemnation of whatever was not absolutely true, the disregard of what the world said, the hatred of shams, and most puzzling of all, the often apparent struggle with himself, the unceasing effort to conquer his chief fault. Yet this noble, honest, intellectual man was laboring under a great delusion, a delusion which somehow gave him an extraordinary power of loving! Ah, no! It could not be his Christianity, though, which made him loving, for were not most Christians hard and bitter and narrow-minded?
“I wish,” she said, abruptly, “you would tell me what makes you willing to be friends with us. I know well enough that the 'Church Chronicle' has been punishing you for your defense of my father, and that there must be a thousand disagreeables to encounter in your own set just because you visit us. Why do you come?”
“Because I care for you very much.”
“But you care, too, perhaps, for other people who will probably cut you for flying in the face of society and visiting social outcasts.”
“I don't think I can explain it to you yet,” he replied. “You would only tell me, as you told me once before, that I was talking riddles to you. When you have read your Greek Testament and really studied the life of Christ, I think you will understand. In the meantime, St. Paul, I think, answers your question better than I could, but you wouldn't understand even his words, I fancy. There they are in the Greek,” he opened a Testament and showed her a passage. “I believe you would think the English almost as great gibberish as this looks to you in its unknown characters.”
“Do you advise every one to learn Greek?”
“No, many have neither time nor ability, and those who are not apt at languages would spend their time more usefully over good translations, I think. But you have time and brains, so I am very glad to teach you.”
“I am afraid I would much rather it were for any other purpose!” said Erica. “I am somehow weary of the very name of Christianity. I have heard wrangling over the Bible till I am tired to death of it, and discussions about the Atonement and the Incarnation, and the Resurrection, till the very words are hateful to me. I am afraid I shock you, but just put yourself in my place and imagine how you would feel. It is not even as if I had to debate the various questions; I have merely to sit and listen to a never-ending dispute.”
“You sadden me; but it is quite natural that you should be weary of such debates. I want you to realize, though, that in the stormy atmosphere of your father's lecture hall, in the din and strife of controversy, it is impossible that you should gain any true idea of Christ's real character. Put aside all thought of the dogmas you have been wearied with, and study the life of the Man.”
Then the lesson began. It proved a treat to both teacher and pupil. When Charles Osmond had left, Erica still worked on.
“I should like, at any rate, to spell out his riddle,” she thought to herself, turning back to the passage he had shown her. And letter by letter, and word by word, she made out “For the love of Christ—”
The verb baffled her, however, and she lay on the sofa, chafing at her helplessness till, at length, Tom happened to come in, and brought her the English Testament she needed. Ah! There it was! “For the love of Christ constraineth us.”
Was THAT what had made him come? Why, that was the alleged reason for half the persecutions they met with! Did the love of Christ constrain Charles Osmond to be their friend, and at the same time constrain the clergy of X______ not many years before to incite the people to stone her father, and offer him every sort of insult? Was it possible that the love of Christ constrained Mr. Osmond to endure contempt and censure on their behalf, and constrained Mr. Randolph to hire a band of roughs to interrupt her father's speeches?
“He is a grand exception to the general rule,” she said to herself. “If there were many Christians like him, I should begin to think there must be something more in Christianity than we thought. Well, if only to please him I must try to study the New Testament over again, and as thoroughly as I can. No, not to please him, though, but for the sake of being quite honest. I would much rather be working at that new book of Tyndall's.”
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