The Green Bough. E. Temple Thurston
and the divine throne of God. Lest we should drift into such distress of error as that, let us understand the mystery of the Immaculate Conception, however much as a mystery we allow it to be beyond our comprehension. Being the Son of God, Christ must have been born without sin, yet being the Son of Man, He must, with His manhood, have shared all the inheritance of suffering which is the accompaniment of our earthly life. How else could He have been tempted in the Wilderness? How else could He have passed through His agony on the Cross?
"To what conclusion then are we thus led? It is to the conclusion that Mary, the Mother of that manhood in Christ, must have suffered as all women suffer. She had found favor with God; but the Angel did not say she had found immunity from that nature which, being born in sin as are we all, was her inevitable portion.
"So, lest we fall into the temptation of raising her in dignity to the very throne of God, lest we succumb to the false teaching of those who would address their prayers to her, it becomes incumbent upon us to see the Virgin Mary in a clear and no uncertain light. Mystery in her conception there must always be, but in her giving birth in that manger of Bethlehem, it is as Mary the wife of Joseph, the carpenter of Nazareth, we must regard her."
To all those present in the congregation this was no more than one of the many tirades the Vicar had so often preached against the Roman Catholic Church. They listened as they had always listened before, with patience but without interest. It was no real matter of concern to them. They had no desire to be converted. They had not in the silence of their homes been reading the works of Roman Catholic authorities as the Vicar had done. They did not entertain the spirit of rivalry or feel the sense of competition as he felt it. They listened because it was their duty to listen and one and all of them except Mary, thinking of their warm firesides, hoped that he would soon make an end.
Only Mary amongst them all sat now with heart and mind attentive to what he said, pursuing not the meaning he intended to convey, but a train of thought, the sudden illumination of an idea which yet she dared not find words in her consciousness to express.
"We must think of her," the Vicar continued, "as a woman passing through the hours of her travail. We must think of her brought in secret haste by the fear of consequence and the expedience of necessity to that manger in Bethlehem, where, upon her bed of straw, with the cattle all about her in their stalls, she gave birth to a man child in all the suffering and all the pain it is the lot of women to endure. For here is the origin of that manhood in which we must place our faith if we are to appreciate the fullness of sacrifice our Savior made upon the Cross. It was a woman, as any one of you, who was the mother of Our Lord. A woman, blessed above all women to be the link between the divinity of God the Father and the manhood of God the Son. It was a woman who had found favor in the eyes of her Creator, such favor as had sought her out to be the instrument of the will and mercy of God.
"And the Angel said unto her--'Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found favor with God.'"
So often had Mary's name been repeated that by now no association was left in Fanny's mind with her sister. She turned and looked at her no more. But to Mary herself, with this last reiteration of all, the sound of it throbbed in every vein and beat in violent echoes in her heart. For now no longer could she keep back the conscious words that sought expression of those thoughts in her mind. She knew beyond concealment the idea which had forced itself in a suspicion upon her acceptance.
In all his eagerness to lead their minds away from worship of the Virgin Mary, the Vicar had destroyed for her every shred of that mystery it had been his earnest intention to maintain. Now indeed it seemed she did understand and nothing was left that lay beyond her comprehension.
It was the woman, as he had urged them, whom she saw, the woman on her bed of straw, with that look in the eyes, the look of a woman waiting for her hour which often she had seen in the eyes of others it had been her duty to visit in Bridnorth. It was the woman, eager and suffering, with that eagerness she sometimes had felt as though it were a vision seen within herself. He had substituted a woman--just such a woman it might be as herself.
And here it was then that the thought leapt upon her like some ambushed thing, bearing her down beneath its weight; beating at her heart, lacerating her mind so that she knew she never in any time to come could hide from herself the scars it made.
"If she had suffered," Mary asked herself--"must she not also have known?" And then, shaking her with the terror of its blasphemy, there sprang upon her mind the words--
"Who was the father of the Son of Man?"
"In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost!" a voice intoned in a far distance and with all the others she rose automatically to her feet. Her eyes were glazed. She scarcely could see the Vicar as he descended from the pulpit. Her heart was thumping in her breast. She could hear only that.
X
They walked home in groups and in couples when the service was over. Only Fanny kept alone. A verse of poetry was building itself in her mind. One couplet already had formed a rounded phrase. It had been revolving in her thoughts all through the sermon. Round and about she had beaten it as with a pestle in a mortar until she had pounded it into shape.
"Were all the trees as green to you
As they were green to me?"
It was not so much what rhymed with "you" or "me" that was troubling her as what more she could continue to make the full matter of her verse. She could think of no more. The whole substance of life was summed up in those two lines to her. She walked alone that morning, cutting words to a measure that would not meet and had no meaning.
Mary walked with Jane. The sound of the voice and the laughter of others behind her in that sharp air was like the breaking of china falling upon a floor as hard as that beaten snow beneath their feet. She was still in an amaze with the bewilderment of what she had thought. Every long-trained sense in her was horrified at the knowledge of its blasphemy. She tried to believe she had never thought it. To induce that belief, she would have persuaded herself if she could that the Vicar had never preached his sermon, that it was not to church they had been, that it was all a dream, horrible and more vivid than life itself, but a dream.
For life was peaceful and sweet enough there in Bridnorth. Notwithstanding the song the hoofs of the coach horses had always beaten out for her on the roads, she had been well content with it. Often doubtless the call of life had come to her there beyond the hill; it came with its cry of pain and joy, its voice of sorrow as well as happiness. But now, here amongst the peace and the sweetness, where none of these vital contrasts had ever existed, there had come something more terrible than pain, more cruel and relentless than sorrow.
In moments she was astonished at herself that she did not dismiss it all with one sweep of her mind, dismiss it all as lies and blasphemy, as machinations of the Devil himself. For what was the good just of telling herself it was a dream, of pretending to hide her thoughts from it as though it were not there? It was there! She had thought it and so had the thought come to her like a light suddenly in dark corners, that she knew it was true. Never now could she cast out its significance from the processes of her mind. In the desperate fear that the very foundations of her religious beliefs were shaken, she might buttress her faith with the determined exclusion of all blasphemy in her thoughts. Never again might she allow her mind to dwell upon the origin of the manhood of that figure of Christ, still dearer to her than life itself. With persistent effort of will, she knew she could make blind her vision of that scene in the manger at Bethlehem which the Vicar in his ignorance and the pettiness of his apprehensions had conjured forth so clearly in her sight.
All this she might do, clinging to the faith in which she had been brought up; but never could she efface the change which in those few moments had been made in her. How could she know so soon what that change might be? She knew only it was there. She was a different being. Already she felt apart and aloof from her sisters. Even Jane, walking there beside her, appeared at a strange distance in which was a clearer light for her to see by, a crystal atmosphere through which she could distinguish nothing but the truth.
Suddenly as they walked together, these two in silence, Jane looked up and said--