The Seeker by Harry Leon Wilson

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Affectionately yours,
BERNAL LINFORD.

(From the Reverend Allan Delcher to Bernal Linford.)

_My Boy:_ For one bitten with skepticism there is little
argument--especially if he be still in youth, which is a time of raw and
ready judgments and of great spiritual self-sufficiency. You wanted to go
to Harvard. I wanted you to go to Princeton, because of its
Presbyterianism and because, too, of Harvard's Unitarianism. We
compromised on Yale--my own alma mater, as it was my father's. To my
belief, this was still, especially as to its pulpit, the stronghold of
orthodox Congregationalism. Was I a weak old man, compromising with Satan?
Are you to break my heart in these my broken years? For love of me, as for
the love of your own soul, _pray_. Leave the God of Moses until your
soul's stomach can take the strong meat of him--for he _is_ strong
meat--and come simply to Jesus, the meek and gentle--the Redeemer, who
died that his blood might cleanse our sin-stained souls. Centre your
aspirations upon Him, for He is the rock of our salvation, if we believe,
_or the rock of our wrecking to endless torment if we disbelieve_. Do not
deny our God who is Jesus, nor disown Jesus who is our God, nor yet
question the inerrance of Holy Writ--yea, with its everlasting burnings.
"He that believeth and is baptised shall be saved, but he that believeth
not shall be damned."

I am sad. I have lived too long.

GRANDFATHER.

(From Bernal Linford to the Reverend Allan Delcher.)

_Grandad:_ It's all so plain, you must see it. I told you I had crossed to
the farther bank. Here is what one finds there: Taking him as God, Jesus
is ineffectual. Only as an obviously fallible human man does he become
beautiful; only as a man is he dignified, worthy, great--or even
plausible.

The instinct of the Jews did not mislead them. Jesus was too fine, too
good, to have come from their tribal god; yet too humanly limited to have
come from God, save as we all come from Him.

Since you insist that he be considered as God, I shall point out those
things which make him small--as a God. I would rather consider him as a
man and point out those things which make him great to me--things which I
cannot read without wet eyes--but you will not consider him as man, so let
him be a God, and let us see what we see. It is customary to speak of his
"sacrifice." What was it? Our catechism says, "Christ's humiliation
consisted in his being born, and that in a low condition, made under the
law, undergoing the miseries of this life, the wrath of God and the cursed
death of the cross; in being buried and continuing under the power of
death for a time."

As I write the words I wonder that the thing should ever have seemed to
any one to be more than a wretched piece of God-jugglery, devoid of
integrity. Are we to conceive God then as a being of carnal appetites,
humiliated by being born into the family of an honest carpenter, instead
of into the family of a King? This is the somewhat snobbish imputation.

Let us be done with gods playing at being human, or at being half god and
half human. The time has come when, to prolong its usefulness, the Church
must concede--nay, proclaim--the manhood of Jesus; must separate him from
that atrocious scheme of human sacrifice, the logical extension of a
primitive Hebrew mythology--and take him in the only way that he commands
attention: As a man, one of the world's great spiritual teachers.
Insisting upon his godship can only make him preposterous to the modern
mind. Jesus, born to a carpenter's wife of Nazareth, declares himself, one
day about his thirtieth year, to be the Christ, the second person in the
universe, who will come in a cloud of glory to judge the world. He will
save into everlasting life those who believe him to be of divine origin.
Yet he has been called meek! Surely never was a more arrogant character in
history--never one less meek than this carpenter's son who ranks himself
second only to God, with power to send into everlasting hell those who
disbelieve him! He went abroad in fine arrogance, railing at lawyers and
the rich, rebuking, reproving, hurling angry epithets, attacking what we
to-day call "the decent element." He called the people constantly "Fools,"
"Blind Leaders of the Blind," "faithless and perverse," "a generation of
vipers," "sinful," "evil and adulterous," "wicked," "hypocrites," "whited
sepulchres."

As the god he worshipped was a tribal god, so he at first believed himself
to be a tribal saviour. He directed his disciples thus: "Go not into the
way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not. But
go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel"--(who emphatically
rejected and slew him for his pretensions). To the woman of Canaan whose
daughter was vexed with a devil, he said: "It is not meet to take the
children's bread to cast it to dogs." Imagine a God calling a woman a dog
_because she was not of his own tribe!_

And the vital test of godhood he failed to meet: It is his own test,
whereby he disproves his godship out of his own mouth. Compare these
sayings of Jesus, each typical of him:

"Resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn
to him the other also." Yet he said to his Twelve:

"And whosoever shall not receive you nor hear you, when you depart thence
shake off the dust of your feet for a testimony against them."

Is that the consistency of a God or a man?

Again: "Blessed are the merciful," _but_ "Verily I say unto you it shall
be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for
that city." Is this the mercy which he tells us is blessed?

Again: "And as ye would that men should do to you do ye also to them
likewise." Another: "Woe unto thee, Chorazin, woe unto thee, Bethsaida ...
and thou, Capernaum, which are exalted unto heaven, shall be brought down
to hell." Is not this preaching the golden rule and practicing something
else, as a man might?

Again: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that
hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you.

"For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? Do not even the
publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren, what do ye more than
others? Do not even the publicans so?" That, sir, is a sentiment that
proves the claim of Jesus to be a teacher of morals. Here is one which,
placed beside it, proves him to have been a man.

"_Whosoever shall confess me before men, him shall the son of man also
confess before the angels of God_;

"_but whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my
father, which is in heaven._"

Is it God speaking--or man? "_Do not even the publicans so?_"

Beside this very human contradiction, it is hardly worth while to hear him
say "Resist not evil," yet make a scourge of cords to drive the
money-changers from the temple in a fit of rage, human--but how ungodlike!

Believe me, the man Jesus is better than the god Jesus; the man is worth
while, for all his inconsistencies, partly due to his creed and partly to
his emotional nature. Indeed, we have not yet risen to the splendour of
his ideal--even the preachers will not preach it.

And the miracles? We need say nothing of those, I think. If a man disprove
his godship out of his own mouth, we shall not be convinced by a coin in a
fish's mouth or by his raising Lazarus, four days dead. So long as he
says, "I will confess him that confesseth me and deny him that denieth
me," we should know him for one of us, though he rose from the dead before
our eyes.

Then at the last you will say, "By their fruits ye shall know them." Well,
sir, the fruits of Christianity are what one might expect. You will say it
stands for the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. That it has
always done the reverse is Christianity's fundamental defect, and its
chief absurdity in this day when the popular unchurchly conception of God
has come to be one of some dignity.

"That ye may know how that the Lord doth put a difference between the
Egyptians and Israel." There is the rock of separation upon which the
Church builded; the rock upon which it will presently split. The god of
the Jews set a difference between Israel and Egypt. So much for the
fatherhood of God. The Son sets the same difference, dividing the sheep
from the goats, according to the opinions they form of his claim to
godship. So much for the brotherhood of man. Christianity merely
caricatures both propositions. Nor do I see how we can attain any worthy
ideal of human brotherhood while this Christianity prevails: We must be
sheep and goats among ourselves, some in heaven, some in hell, still
seeking out reasons "Why the Saints in Glory Should Rejoice at the
Sufferings of the Damned." We shall be saints and sinners, sated and
starving. A God who separates them in some future life will have children
that separate themselves here upon His own very excellent authority. That
is why one brother of us must work himself to death while another idles
himself to death--because God has set a difference, and his Son after him,
and the Church after that. The defect in social Christendom to-day, sir,
is precisely this defect of the Christian faith--its separation, its
failure to teach what it chiefly boasts of teaching. We have, in
consequence, a society of thinly veneered predatoriness. And this, I
believe, is why our society is quite as unstable today as the Church
itself. They are both awakening to a new truth--which is _not_ separation.

The man who is proud of our Christian civilisation has ideals susceptible
of immense elevation. Christianity has more souls in its hell and fewer in
its heaven than any other religion whatsoever. Naturally, Christian
society is one of extremes and of gross injustice--of oppression and
indifference to suffering. And so it will be until this materialism of
separation is repudiated: until we turn seriously to the belief that men
are truly brothers, not one of whom can be long happy while any other
suffers.

Come, Grandad, let us give up this God of Moses. Doubtless he was good
enough for the early Jews, but man has always had to make God in his own
image, and you and I need a better one, for we both surpass this one in
all spiritual values--in love, in truth, in justice, in common decency--as
much as Jesus surpassed the unrepentant thief at his side. Remember that
an honest, fearless search for truth has led to all the progress we can
measure over the brutes. Why must it lose the soul?

BERNAL.

(From the Reverend Allan Delcher to Bernal Linford.)

My boy, I shall not believe you are sane until I have seen you face to
face. I cannot believe you have fallen a victim to Universalism, which is
like the vale of Siddim, full of slime-pits. I am an old man, and my mind
goes haltingly, yet that is what I seem to glean from your rambling
screed. Come when you are through, for I must see you once more.

"For God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that
the world through him might be saved. He that believeth on him is not
condemned; but he that believeth not is condemned already because he hath
not believed in the name of the only begotten son of God."

Lastly--doubt in infinite things is often wise, but doubt of God must be
blasphemy, else he would not be God, the all-perfect.

I pray it may be your mind is still sick--and recall to you these words of
one I will not now name to you: "Father, forgive them, for they know not
what they do."

ALLAN DELCHER.

CHAPTER V

"IS THE HAND OF THE LORD WAXED SHORT?"

A dismayed old man, eagerly trying to feel incredulous, awaited the
home-coming of his grandsons at the beginning of that vacation.

Was the hand of the Lord waxed short, that so utter a blasphemer--unless,
indeed, he were possessed of a devil--could walk in the eye of Jehovah,
and no breach be made upon him? Even was the world itself so lax in these
days that one speaking thus could go free? If so, then how could God
longer refrain from drowning the world again? The human baseness of the
blaspheming one and the divine toleration that permitted it were alike
incredible.

A score of times the old man nerved himself to laugh away his fears. It
could not be. The young mind was still disordered.

On the night of the home-coming he greeted the youth quite as if all were
serene within him, determined to be in no haste and to approach the thing
lightly on the morrow--in the fond hope that a mere breath of authority
might blow it away.

And when, the next morning, they both drifted to the study, the old man
called up the smile that made his wrinkles sunny, and said in light tones,
above the beating of an anxious heart:

"So it's your theory, boy, that we must all be taken down with typhoid
before we can be really wise in matters of faith?"

But the youth answered, quite earnestly:

"Yes, sir; I really believe nothing less than that would clear most
minds--especially old ones. You see, the brain is a muscle and thought is
its physical exercise. It learns certain thoughts--to go through certain
exercises. These become a habit, and in time the muscle becomes stiff and
incapable of learning any new movements--also incapable of leaving off
the old. The religion of an old person is merely so much reflex nervous
action. It is beyond the reach of reason. The individual's mind can
affect it as little as it can teach the other muscles of his body new
suppleness."

He spoke with a certain restrained nervousness that was not reassuring.
But the old man would not yet be rebuffed from his manner of lightness.

"Then, wanting an epidemic of typhoid, we of the older generation must die
in error."

"Yes, sir--I doubt even the efficacy of typhoid in most cases; it's as
difficult for an old person to change a habit of thought as to take the
wrinkles from his face. That is why what we very grandly call 'fighting
for the truth' or 'fighting for the Lord' is merely fighting for our own
little notions; they have become so vital to us and we call them 'truth.'"

The youth stopped, with a palpable air of defiance, before which the old
man's assumption of ease and lightness was at last beaten down. He had
been standing erect by the table, still with the smile toning his
haggardness. Now the smile died; the whole man sickened, lost life
visibly, as if a dozen years of normal aging were condensed into the dozen
seconds.

He let himself go into the big chair, almost as if falling, his head
bowed, his eyes dulled to a look of absence, his arms falling weakly over
the chair's sides. A sigh that was almost a groan seemed to tell of pain
both in body and mind.

Bernal stood awkwardly regarding him, then his face lighted with a sudden
pity.

"But I thought _you_ could understand, sir; I thought you were different;
you have been like a chum to me. When I spoke of old persons it never
occurred to me that you could fall into that class! I never knew you to be
unjust, or unkind, or--narrow--perhaps I should say, unsympathetic."

The other gave no sign of hearing.

"My body was breaking so fast--and you break my heart!"

"There you are, sir," began the youth, a little excitedly. "Your heart is
breaking _not_ because I'm not good, but because I form a different
opinion from yours of a man rising from the dead, after he has been
crucified to appease the anger of his father."

"God help me! I'm so human. I _can't_ feel toward you as I should. Boy, I
_won't_ believe you are sane." He looked up in a sudden passion of hope.
"I won't believe Christ died in vain for my girl's little boy. Bernal,
boy, you are still sick of that fever!"

The other smiled, his youthful scorn for the moment overcoming his deeper
feeling for his listener.

"Then I must talk more. Now, sir, for God's sake let us have the plain
truth of the crucifixion. Where was the sacrifice? Can you not picture the
mob that would fight for the honour of crucifixion to-morrow, if it were
known that the one chosen would sit at the right hand of God and judge all
the world? I say there was no sacrifice, even if Christian dogma be
literal truth. Why, sir, I could go into the street and find ten men in
ten minutes who would be crucified a hundred times to save the souls of us
from hell--_not_ if they were to be rewarded with a seat on the throne of
God where they could send into hell those who did not believe in them--but
for no reward whatever--out of a sheer love for humanity. Don't you see,
sir, that we have magnified that crucifixion out of all proportion to the
plainest truth of our lives? You know I would die on a cross to-day, not
to redeem the world, but to redeem one poor soul--your own. If you deny
that, at least you won't dare deny that you would go on the cross to
redeem _my_ soul from hell--the soul of one man--and do you think you
would demand a reward for doing it, beyond knowing that you had ransomed
me from torment? Would it be necessary to your happiness that you also
have the power to send into hell all those who were not able to believe
you had actually died for me?

"One moment more, sir--" The thin, brown, old hand had been raised in
trembling appeal, while the lips moved without sound.

"You see every day in the papers how men die for other men, for one man,
for two, a dozen! Why, sir, you know you would die to save the lives of
five little children--their bare carnal lives, mind you, to say nothing of
their immortal souls. I believe I'd die myself to save two thousand--I
_know_ I would to save three--if their faces were clean and they looked
funny enough and helpless. Here, in this morning's paper, a negro
labourer, going home from his work in New York yesterday, pushed into
safety one of those babies that are always crawling around on railroad
tracks. He had time to see that he could get the baby off but not himself,
and then he went ahead. Doubtless it was a very common baby, and certainly
he was a very common man. Why, I could go down to Sing Sing tomorrow, and
I'll stake my own soul that in the whole cageful of criminals there isn't
one who would not eagerly submit to crucifixion if he believed that he
would thereby ransom the race from hell. And he wouldn't want the power to
damn the unbelievers, either. He would insist upon saving them with the
others."

"Oh, God, forgive this insane passion in my boy!"

"It was passion, sir--" he spoke with a sudden relenting--"but try to
remember that I've sought the truth honestly."

"You degrade the Saviour."

"No; I only raise man out of the muck of Christian belief about him. If
common men all might live lives of greater sacrifice than Jesus did,
without any pretensions to the supernatural, it only means that we need a
new embodiment for our ideals. If we find it in man--in God's creature--so
much the better for man and so much the more glory to God, who has not
then bungled so wretchedly as Christianity teaches."

"God forgive you this tirade--I know it is the sickness."

"I shall try to speak calmly, sir--but how much longer can an educated
clergy keep a straight face to speak of this wretchedly impotent God?
Christians of a truth have had to bind their sense of humour as the
Chinese bound their women's feet. But the laugh is gathering even now.
Your religion is like a tree that has lain long dead in the forest--firm
wood to the eye but dust to the first blow. And this is how it will
go--from a laugh--not through the solemn absurdities of the so-called
higher criticism, the discussing of this or that miracle, the tracing of
this or that myth of fall or deluge or immaculate conception or trinity to
its pagan sources; not that way, when before the inquiring mind rises the
sheer materialism of the Christian dogma, bristling with absurdities--its
vain bungling God of one tribe who crowns his career of impotencies--in
all but the art of slaughter--by instituting the sacrifice of a Son
begotten of a human mother, to appease his wrath toward his own creatures;
a God who even by this pitiful device can save but a few of us. Was ever
god so powerless? Do you think we who grow up now do not detect it? Is it
not time to demand a God of virtue, of integrity, of ethical dignity--a
religion whose test shall be moral, and not the opinion one forms of
certain alleged material phenomena?"

When he had first spoken the old man cowered low and lower in his chair,
with little moans of protest at intervals, perhaps a quick, almost
gasping, "God forgive him!" or a "Lord have mercy!" But as the talk went
on he became slowly quieter, his face grew firmer, he sat up in his chair,
and at the last he came to bend upon the speaker a look that made him
falter confusedly and stop.

"I can say no more, sir; I should not have said so much. Oh, Grandad, I
wouldn't have hurt you for all the world, yet I had to let you know why I
could not do what you had planned--and I was fool enough to think I could
justify myself to you!"

The old eyes still blazed upon him with a look of sorrow and of horror
that was yet, first of all, a look of power; the look of one who had
mastered himself to speak calmly while enduring uttermost pain.

"I am glad you have spoken. You were honest to do so. It was my error not
to be convinced at first, and thus save myself a shock I could ill bear.
But you have been sick, and I felt that I should not believe without
seeing you. I had built so much--so many years--on your preaching the
gospel of--of my Saviour. This hope has been all my life these last
years--now it is gone. But I have no right to complain. You are free; I
have no claim upon you; and I shall be glad to provide for you--to educate
you further for any profession you may have chosen--to start you in any
business--away from here--from this house--"

The young man flushed--wincing under this, but answered:

"Thank you, sir. I could hardly take anything further. I don't know what I
want to do, what I can do--I'm at sea now. But I will go. I'm sure only
that I want to get out--away--I will take a small sum to go with--I know
you would be hurt more if I didn't; enough to get me away--far enough
away."

He went out, his head bowed under the old man's stern gaze. But when the
latter had stepped to the door and locked it, his fortitude was gone.
Helplessly he fell upon his knees before the big chair--praying out his
grief in hard, dry sobs that choked and shook his worn body.

When Clytie knocked at the door an hour later, he was dry-eyed and
apparently serene, but busy with papers at his table.

"Is it something bad about Bernal, Mr. Delcher," she asked, "that he's
going away so queer and sudden?"

"_You_ pray for him, too, Clytie--you love him--but it's nothing to talk
of."

But the alarm of Clytemnestra was not to be put down by this.

"Oh, Mr. Delcher--" a look of horror grew big in her eyes--"You don't mean
to say he's gone and joined the Universalists?"

The old man shook his head.

"And he ain't a _Unitarian_?"

"No, Clytie; but our boy has been to college and it has left him rather
un--unconforming in some little matters--some details--doubtless his
doctrine is sound at core."

"But I supposed he'd learn everything off at that college, only I know he
never got fed half enough. What with all its studies and football and
clubs and things I thought it was as good as a liberal education."

"Too liberal, sometimes! Pray for Bernal--and we won't talk about it
again, Clytie, if you please."

Presently came Allan, who had heard the news.

"Bernal tells me he will not enter the ministry, sir; that he is going
away."

"We have decided that is best."

"You know, sir, I have suspected for some time that Bernal was not as
sound doctrinally as you could wish. His mind, if I may say it, is a
peculiarly literal one. He seems to lack a certain spiritual
comprehensiveness--an enveloping intuition, so to say, of the spiritual
value in a material fact. During that unhappy agitation for the revision
of our creed, I have heard him, touching the future state of unbaptised
infants, utter sentiments of a heterodoxy that was positively effeminate
in its sentimentality--sentiments which I shall not pain you by repeating.
He has often referred, moreover, with the same disordered sentimentality,
to the sad fate of our father--about whose present estate no churchman can
have any doubt. And then about our belief that even good works are an
abomination before God if performed by the unregenerate, the things I have
heard him--"

"Yes--yes--let us not talk of it further. Did you wish to see me
especially, Allan?"

"Well, yes, sir, I _had_ wished to, and perhaps now is the best moment. I
wanted to ask you, sir, how you would regard my becoming an Episcopalian.
I am really persuaded that its form of worship, translating as it does so
_much_ of the spiritual verity of life into visible symbols, is a form
better calculated than the Presbyterian to appeal to the great throbbing
heart of humanity. I hope I may even say, without offense, sir, that it
affords a wider scope, a broader sweep, a more stimulating field of
endeavour, to one who may have a capacity for the life of larger aspects.
In short, sir, I believe there is a great future for me in that church."

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