Tracks of a Rolling Stone Part 29

'Yours affectionately, 'DIGBY.'

(My father was born in 1754.)

Mr. W. S. Gilbert had been a much valued friend of ours before we lived at Rickmansworth. We had been his guests for the 'first night' of almost every one of his plays-plays that may have a thousand imitators, but the speciality of whose excellence will remain unrivalled and inimitable.

His visits to us introduced him, I think, to the picturesque country which he has now made his home. When Mr. Gilbert built his house in Harrington Gardens he easily persuaded us to build next door to him.

This led to my acquaintance with his neighbour on the other side, Mr.

Walter Ca.s.sels, now well known as the author of 'Supernatural Religion.'

When first published in 1874, this learned work, summarising and elaborately examining the higher criticism of the four Gospels up to date, created a sensation throughout the theological world, which was not a little intensified by the anonymity of its author. The virulence with which it was attacked by Dr. Lightfoot, the most erudite bishop on the bench, at once demonstrated its weighty significance and its destructive force; while Mr. Morley's high commendation of its literary merits and the scrupulous equity of its tone, placed it far above the level of controversial diatribes.

In my 'Creeds of the Day' I had made frequent references to the anonymous book; and soon after my introduction to Mr. Ca.s.sels spoke to him of its importance, and asked him whether he had read it. He hesitated for a moment, then said:

'We are very much of the same way of thinking on these subjects. I will tell you a secret which I kept for some time even from my publishers-I am the author of "Supernatural Religion."'

From that time forth, we became the closest of allies. I know no man whose tastes and opinions and interests are more completely in accord with my own than those of Mr. Walter Ca.s.sels. It is one of my greatest pleasures to meet him every summer at the beautiful place of our mutual and sympathetic friend, Mrs. Robertson, on the skirts of the Ashtead forest, in Surrey.

The winter of 1888 I spent at Cairo under the roof of General Sir Frederick Stephenson, then commanding the English forces in Egypt. I had known Sir Frederick as an ensign in the Guards. He was adjutant of his regiment at the Alma, and at Inkerman. He is now Colonel of the Coldstreams and Governor of the Tower. He has often been given a still higher t.i.tle, that of 'the most popular man in the army.'

Everybody in these days has seen the Pyramids, and has been up the Nile.

There is only one name I have to mention here, and that is one of the best-known in the world. Mr. Thomas Cook was the son of the original inventor of the 'Globe-trotter.' But it was the extraordinary energy and powers of organisation of the son that enabled him to develop to its present efficiency the initial scheme of the father.

Shortly before the General's term expired, he invited Mr. Cook to dinner.

The Nile share of the Gordon Relief Expedition had been handed over to Cook. The boats, the provisioning of them, and the river transport service up to Wady Halfa, were contracted for and undertaken by Cook.

A most entertaining account he gave of the whole affair. He told us how the Mudir of Dongola, who was by way of rendering every possible a.s.sistance, had offered him an enormous bribe to wreck the most valuable cargoes on their pa.s.sage through the Cataracts.

Before Mr. Cook took leave of the General, he expressed the regret felt by the British residents in Cairo at the termination of Sir Frederick's command; and wound up a pretty little speech by a sincere request that he might be allowed to furnish Sir Frederick _gratis_ with all the means at his disposal for a tour through the Holy Land. The liberal and highly complimentary offer was gratefully acknowledged, but at once emphatically declined. The old soldier, (at least, this was my guess,) brave in all else, had not the courage to face the tourists' profanation of such sacred scenes.

Dr. Bird told me a nice story, a pendant to this, of Mr. Thomas Cook's liberality. One day, before the Gordon Expedition, which was then in the air, Dr. Bird was smoking his cigarette on the terrace in front of Shepherd's Hotel, in company with four or five other men, strangers to him and to one another. A discussion arose as to the best means of relieving Gordon. Each had his own favourite general. Presently the doctor exclaimed: 'Why don't they put the thing into the hands of Cook?

I'll be bound to say he would undertake it, and do the job better than anyone else.'

'Do you know Cook, sir?' asked one of the smokers who had hitherto been silent.

'No, I never saw him, but everybody knows he has a genius for organisation; and I don't believe there is a general in the British Army to match him.'

When the company broke up, the silent stranger asked the doctor his name and address, and introduced himself as Thomas Cook. The following winter Dr. Bird received a letter enclosing tickets for himself and Miss Bird for a trip to Egypt and back, free of expense, 'in return for his good opinion and good wishes.'

After my General's departure, and a month up the Nile, I-already disillusioned, alas!-rode through Syria, following the beaten track from Jerusalem to Damascus. On my way from Alexandria to Jaffa I had the good fortune to make the acquaintance of an agreeable fellow-traveller, Mr.

Henry Lopes, afterwards member for Northampton, also bound for Palestine.

We went to Constantinople and to the Crimea together, then through Greece, and only parted at Charing Cross.

It was easy to understand Sir Frederick Stephenson's (supposed) unwillingness to visit Jerusalem. It was probably far from being what it is now, or even what it was when Pierre Loti saw it, for there was no railway from Jaffa in our time. Still, what Loti pathetically describes as 'une ba.n.a.lite de banlieue parisienne,' was even then too painfully casting its vulgar shadows before it. And it was rather with the forlorn eyes of the sentimental Frenchman than with the veneration of Dean Stanley, that we wandered about the ever-sacred Aceldama of mortally wounded and dying Christianity.

One dares not, one could never, speak irreverently of Jerusalem. One cannot think heartlessly of a disappointed love. One cannot tear out creeds interwoven with the tenderest fibres of one's heart. It is better to be silent. Yet is it a place for unwept tears, for the deep sadness and hard resignation borne in upon us by the eternal loss of something dearer once than life. All we who are weary and heavy laden, in whom now shall we seek the rest which is not nothingness?

My story is told, but I fain would take my leave with words less sorrowful. If a man has no better legacy to bequeath than bid his fellow-beings despair, he had better take it with him to his grave.

We know all this, we know!

But it is in what we do not know that our hope and our religion lies.

Thrice blessed are we in the certainty that here our range is infinite.

This infinite that makes our brains reel, that begets the feeling that makes us 'shrink,' is perhaps the most portentous argument in the logic of the sceptic. Since the days of Laplace, we have been haunted in some form or other with the ghost of the _Mecanique Celeste_. Take one or two commonplaces from the text-books of astronomy:

Every half-hour we are about ten thousand miles nearer to the constellation of Lyra. 'The sun and his system must travel at his present rate for far more than a million years (divide this into half-hours) before we have crossed the abyss between our present position and the frontiers of Lyra' (Ball's 'Story of the Heavens').

'Sirius is about one million times as far from us as the sun. If we take the distance of Sirius from the earth and subdivide it into one million equal parts, each of these parts would be long enough to span the great distance of 92,700,000 miles from the earth to the sun,' yet Sirius is one of the _nearest_ of the stars to us.

The velocity with which light traverses s.p.a.ce is 186,300 miles a second, at which rate it has taken the rays from Sirius which we may see to-night, nine years to reach us. The proper motion of Sirius through s.p.a.ce is about one thousand miles a minute. Yet 'careful alignment of the eye would hardly detect that Sirius was moving, in . . . even three or four centuries.'

'There may be, and probably are, stars from which Noah might be seen stepping into the Ark, Eve listening to the temptation of the serpent, or that older race, eating the oysters and leaving the sh.e.l.l-heaps behind them, when the Baltic was an open sea' (Froude's 'Science of History').

Facts and figures such as these simply stupefy us. They vaguely convey the idea of something immeasurably great, but nothing further. They have no more effect upon us than words addressed to some poor 'bewildered creature, stunned and paralysed by awe; no more than the sentence of death to the terror-stricken wretch at the bar. Indeed, it is in this sense that the sceptic uses them for our warning.

'Seit Kopernikus,' says Schopenhauer, 'kommen die Theologen mit dem lieben Gott in Verlegenheit.' 'No one,' he adds, 'has so damaged Theism as Copernicus.' As if limitation and imperfection in the celestial mechanism would make for the belief in G.o.d; or, as if immortality were incompatible with dependence. Des Cartes, for one, (and he counts for many,) held just the opposite opinion.

Our sun and all the millions upon millions of suns whose light will never reach us are but the aggregation of atoms drawn together by the same force that governs their orbit, and which makes the apple fall. When their heat, however generated, is expended, they die to frozen cinders; possibly to be again diffused as nebulae, to begin again the eternal round of change.

What is life amidst this change? 'When I consider the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained, what is man that Thou art mindful of him?'

But is He mindful of us? That is what the sceptic asks. Is He mindful of life here or anywhere in all this boundless s.p.a.ce? We have no ground for supposing (so we are told) that life, if it exists at all elsewhere, in the solar system at least, is any better than it is here? 'a.n.a.logy compels us to think,' says M. France, one of the most thoughtful of living writers, 'that our entire solar system is a gehenna where the animal is born for suffering. . . . This alone would suffice to disgust me with the universe.' But M. France is too deep a thinker to abide by such a verdict. There must be something 'behind the veil.' 'Je sens que ces immensites ne sont rien, et qu'enfin, s'il y a quelque chose, ce quelque chose n'est pas ce que nous voyons.' That is it. All these immensities are not 'rien,' but they are a.s.suredly not what we take them to be. They are the veil of the Infinite, behind which we are not permitted to see.

It were the seeing Him, no flesh shall dare.

The very greatness proves our impotence to grasp it, proves the futility of our speculations, and should help us best of all though outwardly so appalling, to stand calm while the snake of unbelief writhes beneath our feet. The unutterable insignificance of man and his little world connotes the infinity which leaves his possibilities as limitless as itself.

Spectrology informs us that the chemical elements of matter are everywhere the same; and in a boundless universe where such unity is manifested there must be conditions similar to those which support life here. It is impossible to doubt, on these grounds alone, that life does exist elsewhere. Were we rashly to a.s.sume from scientific data that no form of animal life could obtain except under conditions similar to our own, would not reason rebel at such an inference, on the mere ground that to a.s.sume that there is no conscious being in the universe save man, is incomparably more unwarrantable, and in itself incredible?

Admitting, then, the hypothesis of the universal distribution of life, has anyone the hardihood to believe that this is either the best or worst of worlds? Must we not suppose that life exists in every stage of progress, in every state of imperfection, and, conversely, of advancement? Have we still the audacity to believe with the ancient Israelites, or as the Church of Rome believed only three centuries ago, that the universe was made for us, and we its centre? Or must we not believe that-infinity given-the stages and degrees of life are infinite as their conditions? And where is this to stop? There is no halting place for imagination till we reach the _Anima Mundi_, the infinite and eternal Spirit from which all Being emanates.

The materialist and the sceptic have forcible arguments on their side.

They appeal to experience and to common sense, and ask pathetically, yet triumphantly, whether aspiration, however fervid, is a pledge for its validity, 'or does being weary prove that he hath where to rest?' They smile at the flights of poetry and imagination, and love to repeat:

Fools! that so often here Happiness mocked our prayer, I think might make us fear A like event elsewhere; Make us not fly to dreams, but moderate desire.

But then, if the other view is true, the Elsewhere is not the Here, nor is there any conceivable likeness between the two. It is not mere repugnance to truths, or speculations rather, which we dread, that makes us shrink from a creed so shallow, so palpably inept, as atheism. There are many sides to our nature, and I see not that reason, doubtless our trustiest guide, has one syllable to utter against our loftiest hopes.

Our higher instincts are just as much a part of us as any that we listen to; and reason, to the end, can never dogmatise with what it is not conversant.

FOOTNOTES

{342} Alluding to the statue of Fox.