Here he paused, for there was a distinct movement of surprise among his audience, which till now, had remained to a man so still that the buzz of a fly on the window-pane sounded almost as loud as the drone of a bag-pipe, — then with a faint smile on his lips he resumed, —
“I hope you all heard my words distinctly! I said, the false position I have attained among you. I repeat it lest there should be any mistake. It IS a false position and always has been. I have never for an instant believed half what I have asked you to believe! And I have preached to you what I have never dreamed of practising! Yet I venture to say that I am not worse than most of my brethren. The intellectual men of France, whether clergy or laity, are in a difficult situation. Their brains are keen and clear; and, intellectually speaking, they are totally unable to accept the Church superstitions of the tenth and twelfth centuries. But in rejecting superstition it would have been quite possible to have held them fast to a sublime faith in God and an Immortal Future, had the Church caught them when slipping, and risen to the mental demand made upon her resources. But the old worn-out thunder of the Vatican, which lately made a feeble noise in America, has rolled through France with the same assertion, ‘Discussion cannot be tolerated’; and what has been the result? Simply this, — that all the intellectual force of the country is arrayed against priestcraft; — and the spirit of an insolent, witty, domineering atheism and materialism rules us all. Even young children can be found by the score who laugh at the very idea of a God, and who fling a jeer at the story of the Crucifixion of Christ, — while vice and crime are tolerated and often excused. Moral restraint is being less and less enforced, and the clamouring for sensual indulgence has become so incessant that the desire of the whole country, if put into one line, might be summed up in the impotent cry of the Persian voluptuary Omar Khayyam to his god, ‘Reconcile the law to my desires’. This is as though a gnat should seek to build a cathedral, and ask for the laws of architecture to be altered in order to suit his gnat-like capacity. The Law is the Law; and if broken, brings punishment. The Law makes for good, — and if we pull back for evil, destroys us in its outward course. Vice breeds corruption in body and in soul; and history furnishes us with more than sufficient examples of that festering disease. It is plainly demanded of us that we should assist God’s universe in its way towards perfection; if we refuse, and set a drag on the majestic Wheel, we are ourselves crushed in its progress. Here is where our Church errs in the present generation. It is setting itself as a drag on the Wheel. Meanwhile, Truth advances every day, and with no uncertain voice proclaims the majesty of God. Heaven’s gates are thrown open; — the secrets of the stars are declared, — the mysteries of light and sound are discovered; and we are approaching possibly to the time when the very graves shall give up their dead, and the secrets of all men’s hearts shall be made manifest. Yet we go on lying, deceiving, cajoling, humbugging each other and ourselves; — living a daily life of fraud and hypocrisy, with a sort of smug conviction in our souls that we shall never be found out. We make a virtue of animalism, and declare the Beast-Philosophy to be in strict keeping with the order of nature. We gloat over our secret sins, and face the world with a brazen front of assumed honour. Oh, we are excellent liars all! But somehow we never seem to think we are fools as well! We never remember that all we do and all we say, is merely the adding of figures to a sum which in the end must be made up to the grand total, and paid! Every figure tells; — the figure ‘nought’ especially, puts an extra thousand on the whole quantity! But the light in us being darkness, how great is that darkness! So great that we refuse to look an inch before us! We will not see, we will not understand, — we utterly decline to accept any teaching or advice which might inflict some slight inconvenience on our own Ego. And so we go on day after day, till all at once a reckoning is called and death stares us in the face. What! So soon finished? All over? Must we go at once, and no delay? Must we really and truly drop all our ridiculous lies and conventions and be sent away naked-souled into the Living Unknown? Not the Dead Unknown remember! — for nothing is actually dead! The whole universe palpitates and burns with ever re-created life. What have we done with the past life? — and what shall we do with this other life? Oh, but there is no time to ask questions now, — we should have asked them before; the hour of departure is come, and there is not a moment’s breathing time! Our dear friends (if we have any), and our paid doctors and servants stand around us awe-struck, — they watch out last convulsive shudder — and weep — not so much for sorrow sometimes as terror, — and then when all is over, they say we are ‘gone’. Yes, — we are gone — but where? Well, we shall each of us find that out, my friends, when we pass away from Popes, Churches, Creeds, and Conventions to the majesty of the actual Glory! Shall we pray then? Shall we weep? Shall we talk of rituals? Shall we say this or that form of prayer was the true one? — this or that creed was the ‘only’ one? Shall we complain of our neighbours? — or shall we not suddenly realise that there never was but one way of life and progress through creation, — the good and pure, the truthful and courageous, as taught with infinite patience by the God-Man, and that wheresoever we have followed our own inclinations rather than His counsel, then our OWN action, not God’s punishment, condemns us, — our OWN words, not God’s, re-echo back our sins upon ourselves!”
He paused, looking everywhere around him, — all his hearers were listening with an almost breathless attention.
“Oh, yes! I know the charm of sin!” he continued with mingled mockery and passion vibrating in his voice;— “The singular fascination of pure devilry! All of you know it too, — those of you who court the world’s applause on the stage, or in the salons of art and literature, and who pretend that by your work you are elevating and assisting humanity, while in your own private lives you revel in such vice as the very dogs you keep might be ashamed of! There is no beast so bestial as man at his worst! And some of you whom I know, glory in being seen at your worst always. There are many among you here to-day whose sole excuse for a life of animalism is, that it is your nature, ‘I live according to my temperament, — my disposition, — I do not wish to change myself — you cannot change me; I am as I am made’! So might the thief argue as he steals his neighbour’s money, — so may the murderer console himself as he stabs his victim! ‘It is my nature to stab and to steal — it is my nature to live as a beast — I do not wish to change; you cannot change me’. Now if these arguments were true, and hold good, man would be still where he begun, — in the woods and caves, — an uncouth savage with nothing save an animal instinct to lead him where he could find food. But even this earliest instinct, savage though it was, taught him that something higher than himself had made him, and so he began to creep on by slow degrees towards that higher at once; hence instinct led to reason, and reason to culture and civilization. And now having touched as high a point of experience and knowledge as the ancient Assyrians and Egyptians attained before their decline, he is beginning even as they did, to be weary and somewhat afraid of what lies beyond in the as yet unfathomed realms of knowledge; and he half wishes to creep back again on all-fours to the days when he was beast merely. The close contemplation of the Angel terrifies him, — he dare not grow his wings! Further than life, as life appears to him on its material side, he is afraid to soar, — what lies in the far distance he dare not consider! This is where the Pause comes in all progress, — the hesitation, the doubt, the fear; — the moment when the Creature draws so near to his Creator that he is dazzled and confounded. And it is a strange fact that he is always left alone, — alone with his own Will, in every such grand crisis. He has been helped so much by divine influences, that he is evidently considered strong enough to decide his own fate. He is strong enough, — he has sufficient reason and knowledge to decide it for the Highest, if he would. But, with national culture goes national luxury, — the more civilised a community, the greater its bodily ease, — the more numerous the temptations against which we are told we must fight.
Spirit flies forward — Body pulls back. But Spirit is one day bound to win! We have attained in this generation a certain knowledge of Soul-forces — and we are on a verge, where, if we hesitate, we are lost, and must recoil upon our own Ego as the centre of all desire. But if we go on boldly and leave our own Ego behind, we shall see the gates of Heaven opening indeed, and all the Mysteries unveiled! How often we pause on the verge of better things, doubting whether to rise or grovel! The light in us is darkness, and how great is that darkness! Such is the state of mind in which I, your preacher, have found myself for many years! I do not know whether to rise or grovel, — to sink or soar! To be absolutely candid with you, I am quite sure that I should not sink in your opinion for confessing myself to be as outrageous in my conceptions of mortality as many of you are. You would possibly pretend to be ashamed of me, but in your hearts you would like me all the better. The sinking or the soaring of my nature has therefore nothing whatever to do with you. It is a strictly personal question. But what I specially wish to advise you of this morning, — taking myself as an example, — is that none of you, whether inclined to virtue or to vice, should remain such arrant fools as to imagine that your sins will not find you out. They will, — the instant they are committed, their sole mission is to start on your track, and hunt you down! I cannot absolutely vouch to you that there is a God, — but I am positive there is a hidden process of mathematics going on in the universe which sums up our slightest human affairs with an exactitude which at the least is amazing. Twenty-five years ago I did a great wrong to a human creature who was innocent, and who absolutely trusted me. There is no crime worse than this, yet it seemed to me quite a trifling affair, — an amusement — a nothing! I was perfectly aware that by some excessively straightlaced people it might be termed a sin; but my ideas of sin were as easy and condoning as yours are. I never repented it, — I can hardly say I ever thought of it, — if I did I excused myself quickly, and assured my own conscience in the usual way, that the fault was merely the result of circumstances over which I had no control. Oh, those uncontrollable circumstances! How convenient they are! And what a weak creature they make of man, who at other times than those of temptation, is wont to assert himself master of this planet! Master of a planet and cannot control a vice! Excellent! Well, — I never, as I say, thought of the wrong I had done, — but if I forgot it, some One or some Thing remembered it! Yes — remembered it! — put it down — chronicled it with precision as to time and place, — and set it, a breathing fact, before me in my old age, — a living witness of my own treachery.”
He paused, the congregation stirred, — the actor Miraudin looked up at him with a surprised half-smile. Angela Sovrani lifted her beautiful violet eyes towards him in amazed compassion, — Cardinal Bonpre, recalling the Abbe previous confession to him, bent his head, deeply moved.
“Treachery,” resumed Vergniaud determinedly, “Is always a covert thing. We betray each other in the dark, with silent foot-steps and sibilant voices. We whisper our lies. We concoct our intrigues with carefully closed doors. I did so. I was a priest of the Roman Church as I am now; it would never have done for a priest to be a social sinner! I therefore took every precaution to hide my fault; — but out of my lie springs a living condemnation; from my carefully concealed hypocrisy comes a blazonry of truth, and from my secret sin comes an open vengeance . . .”
At the last words the loud report of a pistol sounded through the building . . . there was a puff of smoke, a gleam of flame, and a bullet whizzed straight at the head of the preacher! The congregation rose, en masse, uttering exclamations of terror, — but before anyone could know exactly what had happened the smoke cleared, and the Abbe Vergniaud was seen leaning against the steps of the pulpit, pale but uninjured, and in front of him stood the boy Manuel with arms outstretched, and a smile on his face. The bullet had split the pulpit immediately above him. An excited group assembled round them immediately, and the Abbe was the first to speak.
“I am not hurt!—” he said quickly— “See to the boy! He sprang in front of me and saved my life.”
Delphi Collected Works of Marie Corelli (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Eight Book 22) Page 475