III
And as for His inner life, what can be said of that? He lay now back inhis wooden chair, thinking with closed eyes.
He could not have described it consistently even to Himself, for indeedHe scarcely knew it: He acted rather than indulged in reflex thought.But the centre of His position was simple faith. The Catholic Religion,He knew well enough, gave the only adequate explanation of the universe;it did not unlock all mysteries, but it unlocked more than any other keyknown to man; He knew, too, perfectly well, that it was the only systemof thought that satisfied man as a whole, and accounted for him in hisessential nature. Further, He saw well enough that the failure ofChristianity to unite all men one to another rested not upon itsfeebleness but its strength; its lines met in eternity, not in time.Besides, He happened to believe it.
But to this foreground there were other moods whose shifting was out ofhis control. In his _exalt_ moods, which came upon Him like a breezefrom Paradise, the background was bright with hope and drama--He sawHimself and His companions as Peter and the Apostles must have regardedthemselves, as they proclaimed through the world, in temples, slums,market-places and private houses, the faith that was to shake andtransform the world. They had handled the Lord of Life, seen the emptysepulchre, grasped the pierced hands of Him Who was their brother andtheir God. It was radiantly true, though not a man believed it; the hugesuperincumbent weight of incredulity could not disturb a fact that wasas the sun in heaven. Moreover, the very desperateness of the cause wastheir inspiration. There was no temptation to lean upon the arm offlesh, for there was none that fought for them but God. Their nakednesswas their armour, their slow tongues their persuasiveness, theirweakness demanded God's strength, and found it. Yet there was thisdifference, and it was a significant one. For Peter the spiritual worldhad an interpretation and a guarantee in the outward events he hadwitnessed. He had handled the Risen Christ, the external corroboratedthe internal. But for Silvester it was not so. For Him it was necessaryso to grasp spiritual truths in the supernatural sphere that theexternal events of the Incarnation were proved by rather than proved thecertitude of His spiritual apprehension. Certainly, historicallyspeaking, Christianity was true--proved by its records--yet to see thatneeded illumination. He apprehended the power of the Resurrection,therefore Christ was risen.
Therefore in heavier moods it was different with him. There wereperiods, lasting sometimes for days together, clouding Him when Heawoke, stifling Him as He tried to sleep, dulling the very savour of theSacrament and the thrill of the Precious Blood; times in which thedarkness was so intolerable that even the solid objects of faithattenuated themselves to shadow, when half His nature was blind not onlyto Christ, but to God Himself, and the reality of His ownexistence--when His own awful dignity seemed as the insignia of a fool.And was it conceivable, His earthly mind demanded, that He and Hiscollege of twelve and His few thousands should be right, and the entireconsensus of the civilised world wrong? It was not that the world hadnot heard the message of the Gospel; it had heard little else for twothousand years, and now pronounced it false--false in its externalcredentials, and false therefore in its spiritual claims. It was a lostcause for which He suffered; He was not the last of an august line, Hewas the smoking wick of a candle of folly; He was the _reductio adabsurdam_ of a ludicrous syllogism based on impossible premises. He wasnot worth killing, He and His company of the insane--they were no morethan the crowned dunces of the world's school. Sanity sat on the solidbenches of materialism. And this heaviness waxed so dark sometimes thatHe almost persuaded Himself that His faith was gone; the clamours ofmind so loud that the whisper of the heart was unheard, the desires forearthly peace so fierce that supernatural ambitions were silenced--sodense was the gloom, that, hoping against hope, believing againstknowledge, and loving against truth, He cried as One other had cried onanother day like this--_Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani!_ ... But that, atleast, He never failed to cry.
One thing alone gave Him power to go on, so far at least as Hisconsciousness was concerned, and that was His meditation. He hadtravelled far in the mystical life since His agonies of effort. Now Heused no deliberate descents into the spiritual world: He threw, as itwere, His hands over His head, and dropped into spacelessness.Consciousness would draw Him up, as a cork, to the surface, but He woulddo no more than repeat His action, until by that cessation of activity,which is the supreme energy, He floated in the twilight realm oftranscendence; and there God would deal with Him--now by an articulatesentence, now by a sword of pain, now by an air like the vivifyingbreath of the sea. Sometimes after Communion He would treat Him so,sometimes as He fell asleep, sometimes in the whirl of work. Yet Hisconsciousness did not seem to retain for long such experiences; fiveminutes later, it might be, He would be wrestling once more with the allbut sensible phantoms of the mind and the heart.
There He lay, then, in the chair, revolving the intolerable blasphemiesthat He had read. His white hair was thin upon His browned temples, Hishands were as the hands of a spirit, and His young face lined andpatched with sorrow. His bare feet protruded from beneath His stainedtunic, and His old brown burnous lay on the floor beside Him....
It was an hour before He moved, and the sun had already lost half itsfierceness, when the steps of the horses sounded in the paved courtoutside. Then He sat up, slipped His feet into their shoes, and liftedthe burnous from the floor, as the door opened and the lean sun-burnedpriest came through.
"The horses, Holiness," said the man.
* * * * *
The Pope spoke not one word that afternoon, until the two came towardssunset up the bridle-path that leads between Thabor and Nazareth. Theyhad taken their usual round through Cana, mounting a hillock from whichthe long mirror of Gennesareth could be seen, and passing on, alwaysbearing to the right, under the shadow of Thabor until once moreEsdraelon spread itself beneath like a grey-green carpet, a vast circle,twenty miles across, sprinkled sparsely with groups of huts, white wallsand roofs, with Nain visible on the other side, Carmel heaving its longform far off on the right, and Nazareth nestling a mile or two away onthe plateau on which they had halted.
It was a sight of extraordinary peace, and seemed an extract from someold picture-book designed centuries ago. Here was no crowd of roofs, nopressure of hot humanity, no terrible evidences of civilisation andmanufactory and strenuous, fruitless effort. A few tired Jews had comeback to this quiet little land, as old people may return to their nativeplace, with no hope of renewing their youth, or refinding their ideals,but with a kind of sentimentality that prevails so often over morelogical motives, and a few more barrack-like houses had been added hereand there to the obscure villages in sight. But it was very much as ithad been a hundred years ago.
The plain was half shadowed by Carmel, and half in dusty golden light.Overhead the clear Eastern sky was flushed with rose, as it had flushedfor Abraham, Jacob, and the Son of David. There was no little cloudhere, as a man's hand, over the sea, charged with both promise andterror; no sound of chariot-wheels from earth or heaven, no vision ofheavenly horses such as a young man had seen thirty centuries ago inthis very sky. Here was the old earth and the old heaven, unchanged andunchangeable; the patient, returning spring had starred the thin soilwith flowers of Bethlehem, and those glorious lilies to which Solomon'sscarlet garments might not be compared. There was no whisper from theThrone as when Gabriel had once stooped through this very air to hailHer who was blessed among women, no breath of promise or hope beyondthat which God sends through every movement of His created robe of life.
As the two halted, and the horses looked out with steady, inquisitiveeyes at the immensity of light and air beneath them, a soft hooting crybroke out, and a shepherd passed below along the hillside a hundredyards away, trailing his long shadow behind him, and to the mellowtinkle of bells his flock came after, a troop of obedient sheep andwilful goats, cropping and following and cropping again as they went onto the fold, called by name in that sad minor voice of him who kneweach, and led instead
of driving. The soft clanking grew fainter, theshadow of the shepherd shot once to their very feet, as he topped therise, and vanished again as he stepped down once more; and the call grewfainter yet, and ceased.
* * * * *
The Pope lifted His hand to His eyes for an instant, then smoothed itdown His face.
He nodded across to a dim patch of white walls glimmering through theviolet haze of the falling twilight.
"That place, father," He said, "what is its name?"
The Syrian priest looked across, back once more at the Pope, and acrossagain.
"That among the palms, Holiness?"
"Yes."
"That is Megiddo," he said. "Some call it Armageddon."
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