There & Back. George MacDonald
death set me free,” he answered.
“You wouldn’t leave me behind, Arty!” said Alice; and rising, she put her arm round his neck.
“I wouldn’t if I could help it,” he replied.
“It’s a cowardly thing to want to die,” said Richard.
“I think so sometimes.”
“There’s your mother!”
“Yes,” responded Arthur, but without emotion.
“And how should I get on without you, Arty?” said his sister.
“Not very well, Ally. But it wouldn’t be for long. We should soon meet.”
“Who told you that?” said Richard almost rudely.
“Don’t you think we shall know each other afterwards?” asked Arthur, with an expression of weary rather than sad surprise.
“I would be a little surer of it before I talked so coolly of leaving a sister like that! I only wish I had one to care for!”
A faint flush rose on the pale face of the girl, and as swiftly faded.
“Do you think, then, that this life is only a dream?” she said, looking up at Richard with something in her great eyes that he did not understand.
“Anyhow,” he answered, “I would bear a good deal rather than run the risk of going so fast asleep as to stop dreaming it. A man can die any time,” he continued, “but he can’t dream when he pleases! I would wait! One can’t tell when things may take a turn! There are many chances on the cards!”
“That’s true,” replied Arthur; but plainly the very chances were a weariness to him.
“If Arthur had enough to eat, and time to read, and a little amusement, he would be as brave as you are, Mr. Tuke!” said Alice. “—But you can’t mean to say there will be no more of anything for us after this world! To think I should never see Arty again, would make me die before my time! I should be so miserable I would hardly care to keep him as long as I might. We must die some day, and what odds whether it be a few days sooner, or a few days later, if we’re never going to meet again?”
“The best way is not to think about it,” returned Richard. “Why should you? Look at the butterflies! They take what comes, and don’t grumble at their sunshine because there’s only one day of it.”
“But when there’s no sunshine that day?” suggested Alice.
“Well, when they lie crumpled in the rain, they’re none the worse that they didn’t think about it beforehand! We must make the best of what we have!”
“It’s not worth making the best of,” cried Alice indignantly, “if that’s all!”
My reader may well wonder at Richard: how could he be a lover of our best literature and talk as he did? or rather, talking as he did, how could he love it? But he had come to love it while yet under the influence of what his aunt taught him, poor as was her teaching. Then his heart and imagination were more in the ascendency. Now he had begun to admire the intellectual qualities of that literature more, and its imaginative less; for he had begun to think truth attainable through the forces of the brain, sole and supreme.
In matters of conduct, John Tuke and his wife were well agreed; in matters of opinion, they differed greatly. Jane went to church regularly, listened without interest, and accepted without question; had her husband gone, he would have listened with the interest of utter dissent. When Jane learned that her husband no longer “believed in the Bible,” she was seized with terror lest he should die without repentance and be lost. Thereupon followed fear for herself: was not an atheist a horribly wicked man?—and she could not feel that John was horribly wicked! She tried her hardest, but could not; and concluded therefore that his unbelief must be affecting her. She prayed him to say nothing against the Bible to Richard—at least before he arrived at years of discretion. This John promised; but subtle effluences are subtle influences.
John Tuke did right so far as he knew—at least he thought he did—and refused to believe in any kind of God; Jane did right, she thought, as far as she knew—and never imagined God cared about her: let him who has a mind to it, show the value of the difference!
Tuke was a thinking man;—that is, set a going in any direction that interested him, he could take a few steps forward without assistance. But he could start in no direction of himself. At a small club to which he belonged, he had been brought in contact with certain ideas new to him, and finding himself able to grasp them, felt at once as if they must be true. Certain other ideas, new to him, coming self-suggested in their train, he began immediately to imagine himself a thinker, able to generate notions to which the people around him were unequal. He began to grow self-confident, and so to despise. Taking courage then to deny things he had never believed, had only not thought about, and finding he thereby gave offence, he chose to imagine himself a martyr for the truth. He did not see that a denial involving no assertion, cannot witness to any truth; nor did he perceive that denial in his case meant nothing more than non-acceptance of things asserted. Had he put his position logically, it would have been this: I never knew such things; I do not like the notion of them; therefore I deny them: they do not exist. But no man really denies a thing which he knows only by the words that stand for it. When John Tuke denied the God in his notion, he denied only a God that could have no existence.
A man will be judged, however, by his truth toward what he professes to believe; and John was far truer to his perception of the duty of man to man than are ninety-nine out of the hundred of so-called Christians to the things they profess to believe. How many men would be immeasurably better, if they would but truly believe, that is, act upon, the smallest part of what they untruly profess to believe, even if they cast aside all the rest. John cast aside an allegiance to God which had never been more than a mockery, and set about delivering his race from the fear of a person who did not exist. For, true enough, there was no God of the kind John denied; only, what if, in delivering his kind from the tyranny of a false God, he aided in hiding from them the love of a true God—of a God that did and ought to exist? There are other passions besides fear, and precious as fear is hateful. If there be a God and one has never sought him, it will be small consolation to remember that he could not get proof of his existence. Is a child not to seek his father, because he cannot prove he is alive?
The aunt continued to take the boy to church, and expose him, for it was little more she did, to a teaching she could not herself either supply or supplement. It was the business of the church to teach Christianity! her part was to accept it, and bring the child where he also might listen and accept! But what she accepted as Christianity, is another question; and whether the acceptance of anything makes a Christian, is another still.
How much of Christianity a child may or may not learn by going to church, it is impossible to say; but certainly Richard did not learn anything that drew his heart to Jesus of Nazareth, or caught him in any heavenly breeze, or even the smallest of celestial whirlwinds! He learned nothing even that made unwelcome such remarks as his father would now and then let fall concerning the clergy and the way they followed their trade; while the grin, full of conscious superiority, with which he unconsciously accompanied them, found its reflection in the honourable but not yet humble mind, beginning to be aware of its own faculty, and not aware that the religion presented in his aunt’s church, a religion neither honourable nor elevating, was but the dullest travesty of the religion of St. Paul. Richard had, besides, read several books which, had his uncle been careful of the promise he had given his wife, he would have intentionally removed instead of unintentionally leaving about.
In the position Richard had just taken toward his new friends, he was not a little influenced by the desire to show himself untrammelled by prevailing notions, and capable of thinking for himself; but this was far from all that made him speak as he did. Many young fellows are as ready to deny as Richard, but not many feel as strongly that life rests upon what we know, that knowledge must pass into action. The denial of every falsehood under the sun would not generate one throb of life.
Richard told his adoptive parents where he had been, and asked if he might invite his new friends for the next Sunday. They made