by A. J. Cronin
Chapter Forty-One
It is spring again, a day of sunshine, tempered by a soft west wind. As I enter my study and sit at my desk, the sweetness of the morning makes me disinclined to work. Gazing through the window at the green, gently swaying trees, I fall insensibly into a reverie … looking backward, in a mood of introspection, of self-analysis.
When a man surveys his past from middle age he must surely ask himself what those bygone years have taught him. If I have learned anything in the swift unrolling of the web of tune – and it seems only yesterday since I hastened through Kelvingrove to my medical classes, an eager, fresh-complexioned lad of twenty, bent on conquering the universe – it is the virtue of tolerance, of moderation in thought and deed, of forbearance towards one’s fellow men. These were qualities sadly lacking in my furious youth.
I have come also to acknowledge the great illusion which lies in the pursuit of a purely material goal. What slight satisfaction lies in temporal honour and worldly grandeur! What sad futility in that frantic desire for gain which possesses the money-changers of the world, snatching for little scraps of printed paper, feeding an appetite never satisfied! All the material possessions for which I strove so strenuously mean less to me now than a glance of love from those who are dear to me,
Above all am I convinced of the need, irrevocable and inescapable, of every human heart, for God. No matter how we try to escape, to lose ourselves in restless seeking, we cannot separate ourselves from our divine source. There is no substitute for God. Though we may not fully recognise it, we exist in the divine essence. The image of God is found in all mankind.
Yet there are some who, in blindness towards their eternal future, bury this sense of identity with God, who contend that human life springs without meaning from the beasts, that the end of all is nothingness, that they themselves are no more than shuttlecocks of circumstance, victims of sleeveless chance. Such could never be my view. Beneath its visible hills and valleys, I see a pattern in my life, shaping me towards an eventual end, an end which was stamped upon my childish features, perhaps was written even before the hour when I was born.
I was never anything but powerless to escape the creed with which I was endowed at birth. And now, after many vicissitudes, nothing on earth would induce me to abandon it. I have handed myself over, body and soul. It is this surrender, total, unquestioning, in complete and absolute humility, which is the true essential of belief. This disciple, Thomas, who, before believing, insisted upon touching the wounds of the resurrected Lord, is the prototype of all those who temper their faith with reason, who strain at the gnat of individual dogma oblivious to the inner meaning of the divine rebuke, ‘Blessed are they who have not seen and have believed.’
Every attempt to adapt Christianity to suit modern temporising, the efforts to rationalise Christ as a prophet, a great man, to explain His miracles in terms of popular science – Lazarus was not dead but in a state of coma, the blind man made to see was merely hysteric suffering from transient amaurosis – all these are no more than sorry devices to evade what is most demanded of us. When the lepers came and begged to be healed, the answer was, ‘according to thy faith, so it be done unto thee.’ Even at the Crucifixion it was the Saviour’s purpose to leave us in such balanced uncertainty that belief in His divinity still required an effort of faith. When we clamour for positive proof we become like those Roman soldiers who, mocking yet half afraid, raising on the spear to those thirsting lips the sponge dipped in gall, besought the ultimate miracle which would have made faith unnecessary. ‘If Thou art the Son of God, come down from Thy cross.’
There, then, lies the final choice – all or nothing. When we take, each one of us, that momentous, that mysterious walk to Emmaus, we do so with a Stranger. Yet in those unknown features we must trace the radiant countenance of the risen Lord. It is this voluntary act of recognition which makes faith sublime.
Despite the intensity of my conviction, I am no proselytiser. I have slight desire to go about urging my neighbours to attend my church and threatening them with eternal damnation if they fail to do so. If my early sufferings taught me anything, it was to detest the jealous feuds and malignant hatreds which I witnessed between members of rival denominations. Creed is such an accident of birth, of race and antecedents, even of latitude and longitude, that it cannot, surely, be the exclusive determinant of our salvation. I, at least, have confidence that any man of goodwill, whether he be Catholic or Calvinist, has full and undiminished opportunity of winning his eternal reward.
That dream which we all cherish, the brotherhood of man, can become reality only if co-operation supplants competition between the creeds. Then indeed would humanity be saved. Yet such a change in the heart of the world can begin only in the heart of the individual, can succeed only if every man who calls himself a Christian would cease to give smug and self-righteous lip service to his own sect and get down to the bedrock of human need. Could we but put in practice the Sermon on the Mount, all the problems of our poor tortured universe would be solved, all the difficulties, apparently insuperable, which confront mankind would melt like mist before the rising sun. Of one thing I am convinced: nothing, no philosophy, no power on earth will restore our shocked and shattered world except the teaching of Him who bore to Golgotha the burden of all mankind.
When the world seems a place of bewilderment and fatigue, that is the gleam of light on the dark horizon, the remedy which offers release from misery and strife. Have we the grace to see that light, to apply the remedy to our souls? The challenge is there, the need is desperate. Despite the cruelty which men inflict upon each other, despite the indifference and confusion, the threats of war and open hostility, the destroyings and dispersings which afflict the nations, I have an inextinguishable hope in the moral regeneration of the peoples of the earth.
All human suffering is an act of repentance. A single contrite tear, one cry out of the depths is enough. The publican, kneeling far back in the shadows of the temple, had but to bow his head in sorrow: ‘Oh Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner.’ That is the supreme prayer… the prayer for me… surely the prayer for all of us.
Copyright
First published in 1952 by Gollancz
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