“What if he has shown himself to me some time—one
of those nights, perhaps, when I was out till the
sun rose—and I didn’t know him!—How
frightful if there should be nobody at all up there—nobody
anywhere all round!”
She stared into the milky, star-sapphire-like blue,
as if, out of the sweetly veiled terror-gulf, she
would, by very gazing, draw the living face of God.
Verily the God that knows how not to reveal
himself, must also know how best to reveal
himself! If there be a calling child, there must
be an answering father!
A HUMAN GADFLY.
From so early an age had Richard been accustomed to
despise a certain form he called God, which stood
in the gallery of his imagination, carved at by the
hands of successive generations of sculptors, some
hard, some feeble, some clever, some stupid, all conventional
and devoid of prophetic imagination, that his antagonism
had long taken the shape of an angry hostility to
the notion of any God whatever. Richard could
see a thing to be false, that is, he could deny, but
he was not yet capable either of discovering or receiving
what was true, because he had not yet set himself
to know the truth. To oppose, to refuse, to deny,
is not to know the truth, is not to be true
any more than it is to be false. Whatever good
may lie in the destroying of the false, the best hammer
of the iconoclast will not serve withal to carve the
celestial form of the Real; and when the iconoclast
becomes the bigot of negation, and declares the non-existence
of any form worthy of worship, because he has destroyed
so many unworthy, he passes into a fool. That
he has never conceived a deity such as he could worship,
is a poor ground to any but the man himself for saying
such cannot exist; and to him it is but a ground lightly
vaulted over the vacuity self-importance. Such
a divine form may yet stand in the adytum of this
or that man whom he and the world count an idiot.
Into the workshop of Richard’s mind was now
introduced, by this one disclosure of the mind of
Barbara, a new idea of divinity, vague indeed as new,
but one with which he found himself compelled to have
some dealing. One of the best services true man
can do a neighbour, is to persuade him—I
speak in a parable—to house his children
for a while, that he may know what they are:
the children of another may be the saving of his children
and his whole house. Alas for the man the children
of whose brain are the curse of the household into
which they are received! But from Barbara’s
house Richard had taken into his a vital protoplasmic
idea that must work, and would never cease to work
until the house itself was all divine—the
idea, namely, of a being to call God, who was a delight
to think of, a being concerning whom the great negation
was that of everything Richard had hitherto associated
with the word God. The one door to admit this
formal notion was hard to open; and when admitted,
the figure was not easy to set up so that it could
be looked at. The human niche where the idea
of a God must stand, was in Richard’s house occupied
by the most hideous falsity. On the pedestal crouched
the goblin of a Japanese teapot.
