The Altar Steps by Compton MacKenzie
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Compton MacKenzie >> The Altar Steps
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As against the prevailing Gothic of the mighty Cathedral Vicar's Walk
stood out with a simple and fragrant charm of its own, so against the
prevailing Gothic of Mark's religious experience life at the Theological
College remained in his memory as an unvexed interlude during which
flesh and spirit never sought to trouble each other. Perhaps if Mark had
not been educated at Haverton House, had not experienced conversion, had
not spent those years at Chatsea and Malford, but like his fellow
students had gone decorously from public school to University and still
more decorously from University to Theological College, he might with
his temperament have wondered if this red-brick alley closed to traffic
at either end by beautifully wrought iron gates was the best place to
prepare a man for the professional service of Jesus Christ.
Sin appeared very remote in that sunny lecture-room where to the sound
of cawing rooks the Principal held forth upon the strife between
Pelagius and Augustine, when prevenient Grace, operating Grace,
co-operating Grace and the _donum perseverantiae_ all seemed to depend
for their importance so much more upon a good memory than upon the
inscrutable favours of Almighty God. Even the Confessions of St.
Augustine, which might have shed their own fierce light of Africa upon
the dark problem of sin, were scarcely touched upon. Here in this
tranquil room St. Augustine lived in quotations from his controversial
works, or in discussions whether he had not wrongly translated [Greek]
in the Epistle to the Romans by _in quo omnes
peccaverunt_ instead of like the Pelagians by _propter quod omnes
peccaverunt_. The dim echoes of the strife between Semipelagian
Marseilles and Augustinian Carthage resounded faintly in Mark's brain;
but they only resounded at all, because he knew that without being able
to display some ability to convey the impression that he understood the
Thirty-Nine Articles he should never be ordained. Mark wondered what
Canon Havelock would have done or said if a woman taken in adultery had
been brought into the lecture-room by the beadle. Yet such a supposition
was really beside the point, he thought penitently. After all, human
beings would soon be degraded to wax-works if they could be lectured
upon individually in this tranquil and sunny room to the sound of rooks
cawing in the elms beyond the Deanery garden.
Mark made no intimate friendships among his fellows. Perhaps the
moderation of their views chilled him into an exceptional reserve, or
perhaps they were an unusually dull company that year. Of the thirty-one
students, eighteen were from Oxford, twelve from Cambridge, and the
thirty-first from Durham. Even he was looked at with a good deal of
suspicion. As for Mark, nothing less than God's prevenient grace could
explain his presence at Silchester. Naturally, inasmuch as they were
going to be clergymen, the greatest charity, the sweetest toleration was
shown to Mark's unfortunate lack of advantages; but he was never unaware
that intercourse with him involved his companions in an effort, a
distinct, a would-be Christlike effort to make the best of him. It was
the same kind of effort they would soon be making when as Deacons they
sought for the sick, poor, and impotent people of the Parish. Mark might
have expected to find among them one or two of whom it might be
prophesied that they would go far. But he was unlucky. All the brilliant
young candidates for Ordination must have betaken themselves to
Cuddesdon or Wells or Lichfield that year.
Of the eighteen graduates from Oxford, half took their religion as a hot
bath, the other half as a cold one. Nine resembled the pale young
curates of domestic legend, nine the muscular Christian that is for some
reason attributed to the example of Charles Kingsley. Of the twelve
graduates from Cambridge, six treated religion as a cricket match played
before the man in the street with God as umpire, six regarded it as a
respectable livelihood for young men with normal brains, social
connexions, and weak digestions. The young man from Durham looked upon
religion as a more than respectable livelihood for one who had plenty of
brains, an excellent digestion, and no social connexions whatever.
Mark wondered if the Bishop of Silchester's design in placing him amid
such surroundings was to cure him for ever of moderation. As was his
custom when he was puzzled, he wrote to the Rector.
The Theological College,
Silchester.
All Souls, '03.
My dear Rector,
My first impressions have not undergone much change. The young men
are as good as gold, but oh dear, the gold is the gold of
Mediocritas. The only thing that kindles a mild phosphorescence, a
dim luminousness as of a bedside match-tray in the dark, in their
eyes is when they hear of somebody's what they call conspicuous
moderation. I suppose every deacon carries a bishop's apron in his
sponge-bag or an archbishop's crosier among his golf-clubs. But in
this lot I simply cannot perceive even an embryonic archdeacon. I
rather expected when I came here that I should be up against men of
brains and culture. I was looking forward to being trampled on by
ruthless logicians. I hoped that latitudinarian opinions were going
to make my flesh creep and my hair stand on end. But nothing of the
kind. I've always got rather angry when I've read caricatures of
curates in books with jokes about goloshes and bath-buns. Yet
honestly, half my fellows might easily serve as models to any
literary cheapjack of the moment. I'm willing to admit that
probably most of them will develop under the pressure of life, but
a few are bound to remain what they are. I know we get some
eccentrics and hotheads and a few sensual knaves among the Catholic
clergy, but we do not get these anaemic creatures. I feel that
before I came here I knew nothing about the Church of England. I've
been thrown all my life with people who had rich ideas and violent
beliefs and passionate sympathies and deplorable hatreds, so that
when I come into contact with what I am bound to accept as the
typical English parson in the making I am really appalled.
I've been wondering why the Bishop of Silchester told me to come
here. Did he really think that the spectacle of moderation in the
moulding was good for me? Did he fancy that I was a young zealot
who required putting in his place? Or did he more subtly realize
from the account I gave him of Malford that I was in danger of
becoming moderate, even luke-warm, even tepid, perhaps even
stone-cold? Did he grasp that I must owe something to party as well
as mankind, if I was to give up anything worth giving to mankind?
But perhaps in my egoism I am attributing much more to his
lordship's paternal interest, a keener glance to his episcopal eye,
than I have any right to attribute. Perhaps, after all, he merely
saw in me a young man who had missed the advantages of Oxford,
etc., and wished out of regard for my future to provide me with the
best substitute.
Anyway, please don't think that I live in a constant state of
criticism with a correspondingly dangerous increase of self-esteem.
I really am working hard. I sometimes wonder if the preparation of
a "good" theological college is the best preparation for the
priesthood. But so long as bishops demand the knowledge they do, it
is obvious that this form of preparation will continue. There again
though, I daresay if I imagined myself an inspired pianist I should
grumble at the amount of scales I was set to practice. I'm not,
once I've written down or talked out some of my folly, so very
foolish at bottom.
Beyond a slight inclination to flirt with the opinions of most of
the great heresiarchs in turn, but only with each one until the
next comes along, I'm not having any intellectual adventures. One
of the excitements I had imagined beforehand was wrestling with
Doubt. But I have no wrestles. Shall I always be spared?
Your ever affectionate,
Mark.
Gradually, as the months went by, either because the students became
more mellow in such surroundings or because he himself was achieving a
wider tolerance, Mark lost much of his capacity for criticism and
learned to recognize in his fellows a simple goodness and sincerity of
purpose that almost frightened him when he thought of that great world
outside, in the confusion and complexity of which they had pledged
themselves to lead souls up to God. He felt how much they missed by not
relying rather upon the Sacraments than upon personal holiness and the
upright conduct of the individual. They were obsessed with the need of
setting a good example and of being able from the pulpit to direct the
wandering lamb to the Good Shepherd. Mark scarcely ever argued about his
point of view, because he was sure that perception of what the
Sacraments could do for human nature must be given by the grace of God,
and that the most exhaustive process of inductive logic would not avail
in the least to convince somebody on whom the fact had not dawned in a
swift and comprehensive inspiration of his inner life. Sometimes indeed
Mark would defend himself from attack, as when it was suggested that his
reliance upon the Sacraments was only another aspect of Justification by
Faith Alone, in which the effect of a momentary conversion was prolonged
by mechanical aids to worship.
"But I should prefer my idolatry of the outward form to your idolatry of
the outward form," he would maintain.
"What possible idolatry can come from the effect upon a congregation of
a good sermon?" they protested.
"I don't claim that a preacher might not bring the whole of his
congregation to the feet of God," Mark allowed. "But I must have less
faith in human nature than you have, for I cannot believe that any
preacher could exercise a permanent effect without the Sacraments. You
all know the person who says that the sound of an organ gives him holy
thoughts, makes him feel good, as the cant phrase goes? I've no doubt
that people who sit under famous preachers get the same kind of
sensation Sunday after Sunday. But sooner or later they will be
worshipping the outward form--that is to say the words that issue from
the preacher's mouth and produce those internal moral rumblings in the
pit of the soul which other listeners get from the diapason. Have your
organs, have your sermons, have your matins and evensong; but don't put
them on the same level as the Blessed Sacrament. The value of that is
absolute, and I refuse to consider It from the point of view of
pragmatic philosophy."
All would protest that Mark was putting a wrong interpretation upon
their argument; what they desired to avoid was the substitution of the
Blessed Sacrament for the Person of the Divine Saviour.
"But I believe," Mark argued, "I believe profoundly with the whole of my
intellectual, moral, and emotional self that the Blessed Sacrament _is_
our Divine Saviour. I maintain that only through the Blessed Sacrament
can we hope to form within our own minds the slightest idea of the
Person of the Divine Saviour. In the pulpit I would undertake to present
fifty human characters as moving as our Lord; but when I am at the Altar
I shall actually give Him to those who will take Him. I shall know that
I am doing as much for the lowest savage as for the finest product of
civilization. All are equal on the altar steps. Elsewhere man remains
divided into classes. You may rent the best pew from which to see and
hear the preacher; but you cannot rent a stone on which to kneel at your
Communion."
Mark rarely indulged in these outbursts. On him too Silchester exerted a
mellowing influence, and he gained from his sojourn there much of what
he might have carried away from Oxford; he recaptured the charm of that
June day when in the shade of the oak-tree he had watched a College
cricket match, and conversed with Hathorne the Siltonian who wished to
be a priest, but who was killed in the Alps soon after Mark met him.
The bells chimed from early morning until sombre eve; ancient clocks
sounded the hour with strikes rusty from long service of time; rooks and
white fantail-pigeons spoke with the slow voice of creatures that are
lazily content with the slumbrous present and undismayed by the sleepy
morrow. In Summer the black-robed dignitaries and white choristers,
themselves not more than larger rooks and fantails, passed slowly across
the green Close to their dutiful worship. In Winter they battled with
the wind like the birds in the sky. In Autumn there was a sound of
leaves along the alleys and in the Gothic entries. In Spring there were
daisies in the Close, and daffodils nodding among the tombs, and on the
grey wall of the Archdeacon's garden a flaming peacock's tail of
Japanese quince.
Sometimes Mark was overwhelmed by the tyranny of the past in
Silchester; sometimes it seemed that nothing was worth while except at
the end of living to have one's effigy in stone upon the walls of the
Cathedral, and to rest there for ever with viewless eyes and cold
prayerful hands, oneself in harmony at last with all that had gone
before.
"Yet this peace is the peace of God," he told himself. "And I who am
privileged for a little time to share in it must carry away with me
enough to make a treasure of peace in my own heart, so that I can give
from that treasure to those who have never known peace."
_The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, keep your
hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God, and of his Son
Jesus Christ our Lord; and the blessing of God Almighty, the
Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, be amongst you and remain with
you always._
When Mark heard these words sound from the altar far away in the golden
glooms of the Cathedral, it seemed to him that the building bowed like a
mighty couchant beast and fell asleep in the security of God's presence.
After Mark had been a year at the Theological College he received a
letter from the Bishop:
High Thorpe Castle.
Sept. 21, '04.
Dear Lidderdale,
I have heard from Canon Havelock that he considers you are ready to
be ordained at Advent, having satisfactorily passed the Cambridge
Preliminary Theological Examination. If therefore you succeed in
passing my examination early in November, I am willing to ordain
you on December 18. It will be necessary of course for you to
obtain a title, and I have just heard from Mr. Shuter, the Vicar of
St. Luke's, Galton, that he is anxious to make arrangements for a
curate. You had better make an appointment, and if I hear
favourably from him I will licence you for his church. It has
always been the rule in this diocese that non-graduate candidates
for Holy Orders should spend at least two years over their
theological studies, but I am not disposed to enforce this rule in
your case.
Yours very truly,
Aylmer Silton.
This expression of fatherly interest made Mark anxious to show his
appreciation of it, and whatever he had thought of St. Luke's, Galton,
or of its incumbent he would have done his best to secure the title
merely to please the Bishop. Moreover, his money was coming to an end,
and another year at the Theological College would have compelled him to
borrow from Mr. Ogilvie, a step which he was most anxious to avoid. He
found that Galton, which he remembered from the days when he had sent
Cyril Pomeroy there to be met by Dorward, was a small county town of
some eight or nine thousand inhabitants and that St. Luke's was a new
church which had originally been a chapel of ease to the parish church,
but which had acquired with the growth of a poor population on the
outskirts of the town an independent parochial status of its own. The
Reverend Arnold Shuter, who was the first vicar, was at first glance
just a nervous bearded man, though Mark soon discovered that he
possessed a great deal of spiritual force. He was a widower and lived in
the care of a housekeeper who regarded religion as the curse of good
cooking. Latterly he had suffered from acute neurasthenia, and three or
four of his wealthier parishioners--they were only relatively
wealthy--had clubbed together to guarantee the stipend of a curate. Mark
was to live at the Vicarage, a detached villa, with pointed windows and
a front door like a lychgate, which gave the impression of having been
built with what material was left over from building the church.
"You may think that there is not much to do in Galton," said Mr. Shuter
when he and Mark were sitting in his study after a round of the parish.
"I hope I didn't suggest that," Mark said quickly.
The Vicar tugged nervously at his beard and blinked at his prospective
curate from pale blue eyes.
"You seem so full of life and energy," he went on, half to himself, as
though he were wondering if the company of this tall, bright-eyed,
hatchet-faced young man might not prove too bracing for his worn-out
nerves.
"Indeed I'm glad I do strike you that way," Mark laughed. "After
dreaming at Silchester I'd begun to wonder if I hadn't grown rather too
much into a type of that sedate and sleepy city."
"But there is plenty of work," Mr. Shuter insisted. "We have the
hop-pickers at the end of the summer, and I've tried to run a mission
for them. Out in the hop-gardens, you know. And then there's Oaktown."
"Oaktown?" Mark echoed.
"Yes. A queer collection of people who have settled on a derelict farm
that was bought up and sold in small plots by a land-speculator. They'll
give plenty of scope for your activity. By the way, I hope you're not
too extreme. We have to go very slowly here. I manage an early Eucharist
every Sunday and Thursday, and of course on Saints' days; but the
attendance is not good. We have vestments during the week, but not at
the mid-day Celebration."
Mark had not intended to attach himself to what he considered a too
indefinite Catholicism; but inasmuch as the Bishop had found him this
job he made up his mind to give to it at any rate his deacon's year and
his first year as a priest.
"I've been brought up in the vanguard of the Movement," he admitted.
"But you can rely on me, sir, to be loyal to your point of view, even if
I disagreed with it. I can't pretend to believe much in moderation; but
I should always be your curate before anything else, and I hope very
much indeed that you will offer me the title."
"You'll find me dull company," Mr. Shuter sighed. "My health has gone
all to pieces this last year."
"I shall have a good deal of reading to do for my priest's examination,"
Mark reminded him. "I shall try not to bother you."
The result of Mark's visit to Galton was that amongst the various
testimonials and papers he forwarded two months later to the Bishop's
Registrar was the following:
To the Right Reverend Aylmer, Lord Bishop of Silchester.
I, Arnold Shuter, Vicar of St. Luke's, Galton, in the County of
Southampton, and your Lordship's Diocese of Silchester, do hereby
nominate Mark Lidderdale, to perform the office of Assistant Curate
in my Church of St. Luke aforesaid; and do promise to allow him the
yearly stipend of L120 to be paid by equal quarterly instalments;
And I do hereby state to your Lordship that the said Mark
Lidderdale intends to reside in the said Parish in my Vicarage; and
that the said Mark Lidderdale does not intend to serve any other
Parish as Incumbent or Curate.
Witness my hand this fourteenth day of November; in the year of our
Lord, 1904.
Arnold Shuter,
St. Luke's Vicarage,
Galton,
Hants.
I, Arnold Shuter, Incumbent of St. Luke's, Galton, in the County of
Southampton, bona fide undertake to pay Mark Lidderdale, of the
Rectory, Wych-on-the-Wold, in the County of Oxford, the annual sum
of one hundred and twenty pounds as a stipend for his services as
Curate, and I, Mark Lidderdale, bona fide intend to receive the
whole of the said stipend. And each of us, Arnold Shuter and Mark
Lidderdale, declare that no abatement is to be made out of the said
stipend in respect of rent or consideration for the use of the
Glebe House; and that I, Arnold Shuter, undertake to pay the same,
and I, Mark Lidderdale, intend to receive the same, without any
deduction or abatement whatsoever.
Arnold Shuter,
Mark Lidderdale.
CHAPTER XXXII
EMBER DAYS
Mark, having been notified that he had been successful in passing the
Bishop's examination for Deacons, was summoned to High Thorpe on
Thursday. He travelled down with the other candidates from Silchester on
an iron-grey afternoon that threatened snow from the louring North, and
in the atmosphere of High Thorpe under the rule of Dr. Oliphant he found
more of the spirit of preparation than he would have been likely to find
in any other diocese at this date. So many of the preliminaries to
Ordination had consisted of filling up forms, signing documents, and
answering the questions of the Examining Chaplain that Mark, when he was
now verily on the threshold of his new life, reproached himself with
having allowed incidental details and petty arrangements to make him for
a while oblivious of the overwhelming fact of his having been accepted
for the service of God. Luckily at High Thorpe he was granted a day to
confront his soul before being harassed again on Ember Saturday with
further legal formalities and signing of documents. He was able to spend
the whole of Ember Friday in prayer and meditation, in beseeching God to
grant him grace to serve Him worthily, strength to fulfil his vows, and
that great _donum perseverantiae_ to endure faithful unto death.
"Not everyone that saith unto me, Lord, Lord," Mark remembered in the
damasked twilight of the Bishop's Chapel, where he was kneeling. "Let me
keep those words in my heart. Not everyone," he repeated aloud. Then
perversely as always come volatile and impertinent thoughts when the
mind is concentrated on lofty aspirations Mark began to wonder if he had
quoted the text correctly. He began to be almost sure that he had not,
and on that to torment his brain in trying to recall what was the exact
wording of the text he desired to impress upon his heart. "Not everyone
that saith unto me, Lord, Lord," he repeated once more aloud.
At that moment the tall figure of the Bishop passed by.
"Do you want me, my son?" he asked kindly.
"I should like to make my confession, reverend father in God," said
Mark.
The Bishop beckoned him into the little sacristy, and putting on rochet
and purple stole he sat down to hear his penitent.
Mark had few sins of which to accuse himself since he last went to his
duties a month ago. However, he did have upon his conscience what he
felt was a breach of the Third Commandment in that he had allowed
himself to obscure the mighty fact of his approaching ordination by
attaching too much importance to and fussing too much about the
preliminary formalities.
The Bishop did not seem to think that Mark's soul was in grave peril on
that account, and he took the opportunity to warn Mark against an
over-scrupulousness that might lead him in his confidence to allow sin
to enter into his soul by some unguarded portal which he supposed firmly
and for ever secure.
"That is always the danger of a temperament like yours?" he mused. "By
all means keep your eyes on the high ground ahead of you; but do not
forget that the more intently you look up, the more liable you are to
slip on some unnoticed slippery stone in your path. If you abandoned
yourself to the formalities that are a necessary preliminary to
Ordination, you did wisely. Our Blessed Lord usually gave practical
advice, and some of His miracles like the turning of water into wine at
Cana were reproofs to carelessness in matters of detail. It was only
when people worshipped utility unduly that He went to the other extreme
as in His rebuke to Judas over the cruse of ointment."
The Bishop raised his head and gave Mark absolution. When they came out
of the sacristy he invited him to come up to his library and have a
talk.
"I'm glad that you are going to Galton," he said, wagging his long neck
over a crumpet. "I think you'll find your experience in such a parish
extraordinarily useful at the beginning of your career. So many young
men have an idea that the only way to serve God is to go immediately to
a slum. You'll be much more discouraged at Galton than you can imagine.
You'll learn there more of the difficulties of a clergyman's life in a
year than you could learn in London in a lifetime. Rowley, as no doubt
you've heard, has just accepted a slum parish in Shoreditch. Well, he
wrote to me the other day and suggested that you should go to him. But I
dissented. You'll have an opportunity at Galton to rely upon yourself.
You'll begin in the ruck. You'll be one of many who struggle year in
year out with an ordinary parish. There won't be any paragraphs about
St. Luke's in the Church papers. There won't be any enthusiastic
pilgrims. There'll be nothing but the thought of our Blessed Lord to
keep you struggling on, only that, only our Blessed Lord Jesus Christ."
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