Peradventure; or, The Silence of God. Robert Keable
He faced the crowd uncertainly for a few moments. And then the blinding conviction in which he had been nurtured swept down on him that, after all, these were but sinful souls needing the Saviour, their very complexity but making the more necessary His divine simplicity. Indecision went to the winds. As he wrote home later to his father, he, thereafter, "preached unto them Jesus."
When the circle broke up, a man bore down upon him. Paul saw him, started, hesitated, blushed and would have escaped. But it was too late. "Comin' back now?" queried Manning with a smile. "I was returning from calling on some people who live across the Piece, and saw you. We might as well walk back together and I'll brew some coffee. You'll want it after that effort."
Reassured to some extent, Paul thanked him, exchanged a word or two with Dick Hartley in explanation, and set off with the other. Clear of the crowd, they fell into step. "I congratulate you on your sermon, Kestern," said Manning. "It was a great effort."
Paul thought he detected a note of mockery in the words. He pulled himself together and mustered up all his courage. He must not, he told himself, be ashamed of his Master. "I spoke what I believe with all my heart," he said simply.
The senior man was instantly aware of the other's implied reproach. He slipped his arm into Paul's familiarly. "Exactly," he said. "No one with a grain of sense could doubt that. If you don't mind my saying so, it was a sincere, genuine and remarkable performance. It was, honestly, the best sermon I've heard for a long time."
Paul warmed naturally to the praise. The friendly appreciation cheered and encouraged him. "That's jolly good of you," he exclaimed boyishly. "I thought at first you were pulling my leg."
"My dear fellow, I know true art when I see it," protested Manning.
"Art?" queried Paul, bewildered.
"Yes, art. Skilful execution. A fine art, too, for your imagination was at work. And I'm inclined to think that you have a great gift of imagination, Kestern. You felt strongly, you saw vividly, and you knew instinctively how to express yourself. In the superlative, that's genius. That's how the great pictures come to be painted, the great books to be written, and the great orations to be made. The interesting thing about you is that one is not yet sure which you will do."
Paul was silent. He was at once elated, bewildered and disappointed. Gradually the humbler feeling predominated. He had never thought of himself as an artist, and as an evangelist he knew instinctively that he had failed with Manning. "The Gospel is not a work of art," he said shortly, and shrewdly.
"But your presentation of it was a distinct tour de force," said Manning.
Paul took his courage in both hands. "You praise the presentation, not the thing," he said. "What is the Gospel to you, Manning?"
The other smiled genially. "Ah well," he said, "if I invite an evangelist to coffee, I suppose I must expect to be asked if I am saved."
"Don't!" cried Paul. "You laugh at it. I cannot do that."
"You're wrong there," replied the other quickly. "I do not laugh at it. A man is a fool who does that. It is impossible to deny that Christianity was, and probably is, a great dynamic in the world's affairs. You cannot dismiss St. Paul, Augustine, Francis of Assisi, or even Luther and Wesley or Moody, with a gesture. But I confess that to-night's affair interested me most as an observer of men. You interest me more than your religion. But here we are. Let's talk over coffee."
Paul, in his arm-chair by the fireplace, glanced round the now familiar room with an air of hostility of which his subconscious more than his conscious mind was aware. But he had had tea that day with Hartley, and he definitely compared his friend's room at Jesus with this, for the first time. He had yet to discover that he was sensitive to an "atmosphere," but he was already well on the road to that discovery. Hartley's room was big and rather bare. He was athletic, and the wall-space was almost wholly given up to a number of oars, and a dozen or so plainly-framed groups with a cricket cap hanging from the corner of one. The exceptions were two other photographs, one of the service on the sands at Eastbourne (in which Paul had discovered Madeline) and one of the Cambridge University Missionary Campaigners in some Midland town. The mantelshelf was overcrowded with photographs of men, snapshots of children, and the cards of a variety of chiefly religious societies and activities among which a Bump Supper menu seemed out of place. The electric lights were naked; the window-curtains commonplace; the tea had been homely. The room focussed activities. It had made Paul feel instinctively "keen," as they said at the Christian Union.
Manning, kneeling before the fire, was carefully pouring boiling water into a Turkish coffee-pot of burnished copper. Delicate china coffee-cups stood by a silver cigarette-box on an Indian lacquered table. A diffused light filtered through silken lamp-shades, and two wall-sconces of candles lit the pictures with a faint radiance. The corners and distances of the room were heavy with shadows. Bronze chrysanthemums stood in a tall vase on an otherwise bare overmantel. The chairs the big footstools, the lounge, the carpet—all were soft, rich, heavy. The firelight glinted on the tooled leather bindings of books in a case opposite him. The room made him feel comfortable and introspective. Parker's Piece seemed to belong to a different world.
He pulled himself together, and deliberately continued the conversation. "But it is Christ Who matters, Manning," he said with real bravery.
The other replaced the kettle and set the coffee-pot on the table. He selected a cigarette and lit it over the lamp. Then he settled himself comfortably on the lounge. "Matters?" he queried. "Your technicalities are new to me, Kestern."
But Paul was not going to shirk issues. "Yes," he said, "matters to your soul, for life or death."
"That, then," said Manning, "is my business. My soul is my own, at any rate."
"No," said Paul, "it was bought with a price. 'Ye are not your own.'"
"I was not aware that I had put mine up for sale," retorted Manning, "and if it was purchased, on your own showing, some nineteen hundred years before it came into my possession at all, it seems to me that I don't get much of a chance."
"Christ bought you to set you free," said Paul, and he mentally recalled a favourite anecdote of his concerning a travelling Englishman and a freed slave. For the first time, perhaps, he decided not to use it in this connection.
"Thanks," said Manning drily. "Then I claim my freedom."
"But," capped Paul, "you have to choose whom you will serve."
Manning flicked off his cigarette ash with a little gesture. "Look here," he said, "words are words. They serve a purpose, but they are not ends in themselves. St. Paul used Jewish and Rabbinic phraseology, and appealed to his day with metaphors. Thus—it's as old as the hills—if you talk of purchase, you imply a seller. Did Christ buy me from Satan or from Almighty God or from whom? So far as I am aware, the point is not even yet settled. Nor is it meant to be settled. It implies a conception of the universe generally that is outworn. Neither you nor I are ancient Jews. A good deal of water has flowed under the bridges since Habakkuk."
Paul said nothing. In point of fact, he hardly understood. This was all new to him.
"Well, I see God in art and beauty. He has given me a soul that finds Him there, rather than in sacrifice of the fat of rams and the thunder of Sinai. I take it, even you do not regard Him as tied to pitch-pine, corrugated iron and Moody and Sankey's hymns. He is not to me a tribal deity, needing propitiation and ordering the slaughter of women and children, flocks and herds. 'Nothing but the Blood of Jesus,' sounded all right on Parker's Piece and offers an emotional stimulus to uneducated people. But when you come to definitions, the thought of the Old Testament leaves me rather cold. How in the world can blood wash me clean?"
"But you believe in the Bible, surely?" queried Paul, puzzled and honestly grieved.
"My dear fellow, what in the world do you mean by 'believe in'? I believe in Browning. Personally, I believe in the present Government. As a matter of fact, I believe in you."
Paul flushed. "But the Bible is the 'verbally inspired Word of God,'" he ventured to quote.