Section 4
"I MUST be going," I said, with a curiously reinforced desire to
get away out of that room.
"My dear chap!" he insisted, "I can't think of it. Surely--there's
nothing to call you away." Then with an evident desire to shift the
venue of our talk, he asked, "You never told me what you thought
of Burble's little book."
I was now, beneath my dull display of submission, furiously angry
with him. It occurred to me to ask myself why I should defer
and qualify my opinions to him. Why should I pretend a feeling
of intellectual and social inferiority toward him. He asked what
I thought of Burble. I resolved to tell him--if necessary with
arrogance. Then perhaps he would release me. I did not sit down
again, but stood by the corner of the fireplace.
"That was the little book you lent me last summer?" I said.
"He reasons closely, eh?" he said, and indicated the armchair with
a flat hand, and beamed persuasively.
I remained standing. "I didn't think much of his reasoning powers,"
I said.
"He was one of the cleverest bishops London ever had."
"That may be. But he was dodging about in a jolly feeble case,"
said I.
"You mean?"
"That he's wrong. I don't think he proves his case. I don't think
Christianity is true. He knows himself for the pretender he is.
His reasoning's--Rot."
Mr. Gabbitas went, I think, a shade paler than his wont, and propitiation
vanished from his manner. His eyes and mouth were round, his face
seemed to get round, his eyebrows curved at my remarks.
"I'm sorry you think that," he said at last, with a catch in his
breath.
He did not repeat his suggestion that I should sit. He made a step
or two toward the window and turned. "I suppose you will admit--" he
began, with a faintly irritating note of intellectual condescension.
. . . .
I will not tell you of his arguments or mine. You will find if
you care to look for them, in out-of-the-way corners of our book
museums, the shriveled cheap publications--the publications of the
Rationalist Press Association, for example --on which my arguments
were based. Lying in that curious limbo with them, mixed up with
them and indistinguishable, are the endless "Replies" of orthodoxy,
like the mixed dead in some hard-fought trench. All those disputes
of our fathers, and they were sometimes furious disputes, have
gone now beyond the range of comprehension. You younger people, I
know, read them with impatient perplexity. You cannot understand
how sane creatures could imagine they had joined issue at all
in most of these controversies. All the old methods of systematic
thinking, the queer absurdities of the Aristotelian logic, have
followed magic numbers and mystical numbers, and the Rumpelstiltskin
magic of names now into the blackness of the unthinkable. You can
no more understand our theological passions than you can understand
the fancies that made all ancient peoples speak of their gods only
by circumlocutions, that made savages pine away and die because
they had been photographed, or an Elizabethan farmer turn back from
a day's expedition because he had met three crows. Even I, who have
been through it all, recall our controversies now with something
near incredulity.
Faith we can understand to-day, all men live by faith, but in the
old time every one confused quite hopelessly Faith and a forced,
incredible Belief in certain pseudo-concrete statements. I am
inclined to say that neither believers nor unbelievers had faith as
we understand it--they had insufficient intellectual power. They
could not trust unless they had something to see and touch and
say, like their barbarous ancestors who could not make a bargain
without exchange of tokens. If they no longer worshipped stocks and
stones, or eked out their needs with pilgrimages and images, they
still held fiercely to audible images, to printed words and formulae.
But why revive the echoes of the ancient logomachies?
Suffice it that we lost our tempers very readily in pursuit of
God and Truth, and said exquisitely foolish things on either side.
And on the whole--from the impartial perspective of my three and
seventy years--I adjudicate that if my dialectic was bad, that of
the Rev. Gabbitas was altogether worse.
Little pink spots came into his cheeks, a squealing note into his
voice. We interrupted each other more and more rudely. We invented
facts and appealed to authorities whose names I mispronounced;
and, finding Gabbitas shy of the higher criticism and the Germans,
I used the names of Karl Marx and Engels as Bible exegetes with no
little effect. A silly wrangle! a preposterous wrangle!--you must
imagine our talk becoming louder, with a developing quarrelsome
note--my mother no doubt hovering on the staircase and listening
in alarm as who should say, "My dear, don't offend it! Oh, don't
offend it! Mr. Gabbitas enjoys its friendship. Try to think whatever
Mr. Gabbitas says"--though we still kept in touch with a pretence
of mutual deference. The ethical superiority of Christianity to
all other religions came to the fore--I know not how. We dealt with
the matter in bold, imaginative generalizations, because of the
insufficiency of our historical knowledge. I was moved to denounce
Christianity as the ethic of slaves, and declare myself a disciple
of a German writer of no little vogue in those days, named Nietzsche.
For a disciple I must confess I was particularly ill acquainted
with the works of the master. Indeed, all I knew of him had come
to me through a two-column article in The Clarion for the previous
week. . . . But the Rev. Gabbitas did not read The Clarion.
I am, I know, putting a strain upon your credulity when I tell you
that I now have little doubt that the Rev. Gabbitas was absolutely
ignorant even of the name of Nietzsche, although that writer presented
a separate and distinct attitude of attack upon the faith that was
in the reverend gentleman's keeping.
"I'm a disciple of Nietzsche," said I, with an air of extensive
explanation.
He shied away so awkwardly at the name that I repeated it at once.
"But do you know what Nietzsche says?" I pressed him viciously.
"He has certainly been adequately answered," said he, still trying
to carry it off.
"Who by?" I rapped out hotly. "Tell me that!" and became mercilessly
expectant.
