In the Beauty of the Lilies Read online

  Yet would he call it back, his shaky half-faith, with its burden of falsity and equivocation, even if he could? In his present state he was a husk, depleted but at last distinct in shape, as if, after a long, enfeebling captivity, a secret anger and resentment at his captors could be felt moving tinglingly through his veins. The cowardice of men and women in the face of the natural facts had forced upon him the discreditable role of magician. Ingersoll, among his other thunders, had promised the clergy liberation, unchaining them from mouldy books and musty creeds. He must look up the passage. He was shaking, a look at his hands discovered. A slight lumpy soreness, as if after a mismanaged swallow, had intruded itself into his throat. Anxious now not to deflect the women’s attention from the ham to himself, he walked with Indian stealth, suppressing the scrape of his leather soles, back through the spot on the dark wood floor where his theocentric universe had collapsed. The milled and carved configurations of the spiky staircase and the inner vestibule door with its big frosted-glass pane rimmed in milky translucent colors were as they had been ten minutes ago. The cap of the walnut newel post nearest him was an elongated four-sided pyramid upon a brief neck of several turnings of half-round molding; the detail presented itself to him as having a glowering Oriental aspect, as if the Gothic and Chinese styles were carved by the same barbaric hand, guided by the benighted, hopeless mentality which seeks ornament as a distraction from the intolerable severity of the universe. Bare, pure, devoid: even the Bible contained the information, in its less exegized verses. All is vanity and vexation of spirit. How dieth the wise man? as the fool. If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable. My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?

  Clarence had preached on these texts, sought with his striving, affecting, rather fragile tenor voice to find the way around them, but there was, it now clearly appeared, no way. He went back into his study, his book-lined cave that smelled of himself, scented with the odor of his tobacco and of paper piled on paper, undusted books and yellowing magazines, pamphlets, manuscripts from his own hand, never to be again consulted. Miss Brubeck, the church secretary, kept a superior semblance of order at his office in the adjoining church building, where his sermons and blurred carbons of his letters, struck off on that frenetic modern device the typewriter, filled green metal filing cabinets with the tidy hopefulness of bodies awaiting Resurrection; here in his home study the disarray of death reigned, its musty surrender to chaos. The door was a somewhat ecclesiastical yellow oak construction with a rounded top that in the humid heat of summer tended to stick, unless one pressed with some force down on the knob; the embossed knob had been worn to a crescent of polished brass on its top side by years of such pressure from his and predecessor palms. His hand was unnerved and enfeebled by the physical shock that a motion of his mind had imparted. The latch clicked and he took a consciously deep breath, stepping in and closing the sticky door behind him.

  He was safe among books, books which had so much danger in them. He wanted to look up that quotation from Ingersoll. Some Mistakes of Moses rested in its rusty-red covers sideways on his much-consulted row of the Kegan Paul Pulpit commentaries, next to those of The Expositor’s Bible; the passage came early, in the first chapter, ministers leading the parade of those—teachers, politicians—that Ingersoll wished to free from the tyranny of the Bible. Here it was:

  The hands of wives and babes now stop their mouths. They must have bread, and so the husbands and fathers are forced to preach a doctrine that they hold in scorn.

  Well, not exactly scorn. In pity, more. The doctrine had for these years past felt to Clarence like an invalid, a tenuous ghost scattered invisibly among the faces that from sickbeds and Sunday pews and the oilcloth-covered kitchen tables of disrupted, impoverished households beseeched him for hope and courage, for that thing which Calvin in his Gallic lucidity called la grâce. Grace Clarence had pictured when his faith was healthy as an interplay between men and God, achieved within the mystery—imagined as a glass globe, transparent only in decorative spots and bands where the frosting had been buffed away—of Christ and His placation of that otherwise ineradicable sin inherited from Adam, leaving men with, in a phrasing Clarence had once found delightful, “a lively tendency to disobey God.” This faith that he offered to represent lay not in them, the aggrieved and wounded and disappointed, and not in Clarence, housed and paid that he might serve them with this elusive commodity, but between them, in their agreeing thus to meet in faint hope of daily miracles. Not an invalid, perhaps, so much as an infant that he must tenderly nurture and indulge and take great care not to harm. Ingersoll went on with his own, lively evangelical vigor:

  It is a part of their business to malign and vilify the Voltaires, Humes, Paines, Humboldts, Tyndalls, Haeckels, Darwins, Spencers, and Drapers, and to bow with uncovered heads before the murderers, adulterers, and persecutors of the world. They are, for the most part, engaged in poisoning the minds of the young, prejudicing children against science, teaching the astronomy and geology of the Bible, and inducing all to desert the sublime standard of reason.

  Clarence stopped reading. This sentence, like hundreds of others mocking and scourging the Christian faith, which he had turned aside at the time of initial reading with a hardened skepticism of his own, a thick skin bred of his education in apologetics, must have sunk in—each bit of scoffery a drip carrying away his vocation’s modest mountain. He looked at his pallid hands resting on his green desk blotter, hands as fumbling and blind as Mavie’s, though twenty years older, coarser with masculinity and weathered with age. A nerve in the flesh connecting his thumb and forefinger jumped. He lifted his eyes to the wall of books opposite his desk, rows of books in subtly ridged cloth the careful dull colors of moss and clay, the dour greens and browns of putrescence, their titles in fading, sinking gold: Apostolic History and Literature and Systematic Theology and What Is Darwinism? by Charles Hodge, The Atonement and Popular Lectures on Theological Themes by his son Archibald Alexander Hodge, both professors at the Princeton Seminary before Clarence Wilmot arrived there in 1888. He did take a course with Benjamin Warfield—as erect at the lectern as a Prussian general, with snowy burnsides—whose Introduction to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament, lost in this wall of accumulated titles, should have fortified him forever against Ingersoll’s easy sneers, and with William Henry Green, whose Higher Criticism of the Pentateuch and Grammar of the Hebrew Language had given the slender young seminarian many a headachy midnight back in Alexander Hall. In those student days, hungry for knowledge and fearless in his youthful sense of God’s protection close at hand, he had plunged into the chilly Baltic sea of Higher Criticism—all those Germans, Semler and Eichhorn, Baur and Wellhausen, who dared to pick up the Sacred Book without reverence, as one more human volume, more curious and conglomerate than most, but the work of men—of Jews in dirty sheepskins, rotten-toothed desert tribesmen with eyes rolled heavenward, men like flies on flypaper caught fast in a historic time, among myths and conceptions belonging to the childhood of mankind. They called themselves theologians, these Teutonic ravagers of the text that Luther had unchained from the altar and translated out of Latin, and accepted their bread from the devout sponsors of theological chairs, yet were the opposite of theologians, as in the dank basement of Greek and Aramaic researches they undermined Christianity’s ancient supporting walls and beams.

  It had given Clarence as a divinity student a soaring sense of being a trapeze artist to look down into these depths of dubiousness and facticity—Mark, the oldest of the Gospels, ends in air in the best manuscripts, at verse 16:8, with the tomb simply empty and the women bearing sweet spices for the corpse confused and afraid!—and then to return from the daze of the library to the firm and reassuring ground of Gothic, semi-bucolic Princeton, where his eminent instructors radiated an undisturbed piety and his fellow students, though festively disputatious, appeared uniformly stout in their vocations, vigorou
sly proof against disabling spiritual wounds. Melodious bells would toll six o’clock; dinner would be served. Now, while yet another dinner in his life’s long but finite chain of meals was being prepared, the spines of his books formed a comfortless wall, as opaque and inexorable as a tidal wave. The two volumes of Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu stood out as a square of fusty darkness, a blot almost absorbing their slimmer companion, the crimson-bound Vie de Jésus, by Renan. There was a tide behind these books that crested in mad Nietzsche and sickly Darwin and boil-plagued Marx. For all its muscular missions to the heathen and fallen women and lost souls of the city slums, the nineteenth century had been a long erosion, and the books of this century that a conscientious clergyman collected—the sermons of Henry Sloane Coffin and the apologetics of George William Knox, the fervent mission reports of Robert Speer and the ponderous Biblical dictionaries of Hastings, Selbie, and Lambert—Clarence now saw as so much flotsam and rubble, perishing and adrift, pathetic testimony to belief’s flailing attempt not to drown. New Light on the New Testament. Life on God’s Plan. From Fact to Faith. Our New Edens. The Principles of Jesus Applied to Some Questions of Today. Calvin, Twisse and Edwards on the Universal Salvation of Those Dying in Infancy. Clarence had groped his way around his desk, in his study’s perpetual twilight, and stood reading the titles, looking for one he might take hold of in his terrible sinking, his descent through the shadows of this stifling afternoon into the bottomless, featureless depths of Godlessness. The stout old books—Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, and the forty-four volumes of Calvin’s Commentaries, with uniform spines a bright ivory like that of unplayed piano keys—were ignorant but not pathetic in the way of the attempts of the century just now departed to cope with God’s inexorable recession: the gallant poems of Tennyson and Longfellow, phrasing doubt in the lingering hymnal music; the blustering historical novels Quo Vadis? and Ben Hur; the cunning pseudo-affirmations of Emerson and his hyperactive spiritual descendant Theodore Roosevelt, after whom Stella had insisted on naming their youngest child, as if to infuse into their progeny a vitality from above. Clarence’s spectral white hand floated past his copy of The Strenuous Life and tugged out The Origin of Species, its cover stained and warped by his frequent if discontinuous readings—blood-chilling dips into the placid flow of calm, close, inarguable natural evidence, collected from stag beetles and starfishes. As if by Providential guidance but in truth owing to the binding’s having absorbed the effect of his recurrent reference to the passage, the pages fell open to a paragraph which had more than once made him smile with its hypocritical benignity. Darwin, a clergyman’s son, reaches out to the dismayed reader with reassurance:

  I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one. It is satisfactory, as showing how transient such impressions are, to remember that the greatest discovery ever made by man, namely, the law of the attraction of gravity, was also attacked by Leibnitz, as “subversive of natural, and inferentially of revealed, religion.” A celebrated author and divine has written to me that “he has gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws.

  But how little, Darwin could not have but noticed, he had left “Him” to do. “His” laws as elicited by the great naturalist’s patient observation were so invariable, as well as so impersonal and cruel, as to need no executor. Leibnitz had not been wrong; Newton had led to Deism, from which it was but a brief step to Diderot, Robespierre, Saint-Just, and the horrific, but authentic, philosophy of the Marquis de Sade. Was it in here, or in The Descent of Man, where Darwin offered the missionary Livingston’s numbness while in the mouth of a lion as a possible consolation for all the slaughter tirelessly exerting its sway over the world? Clarence flipped about in hopes of recovering the passage, gave up this hope, slipped the volume back into its place on the shelf, and permitted himself a deep inhalation and exhalation of breath. Life’s mechanisms persist in the condemned man even as he mounts the steps of the gallows. There is no God.

  The fault was in himself. Not Darwin or Nietzsche or Ingersoll or scientific materialism with all its thousandfold modern persuasive corroborations was to blame for this collapse, this invasion of his soul by the void: the failure was his own, an effeminate yielding where virile strength was required. Faith is a force of will whereby a Christian defines himself against the temptations of an age. Each age presents its own competing philosophies, the equivalents of Godless stoicism and hedonism, of Mithraism and astrology, of ecstatic and murderous and obscene cults such as still rampage through Asia and Africa. The body suffers its pain and seeks its pleasure; what more, without revelation, is there to know than this? Skepticism and mockery surrounded the first apostles and wrought their deaths and tortures. Christ risen was no more easily embraced by Paul and his listeners than by modern skeptics. The stumbling blocks have never dissolved. The scandal has never lessened. Even in the age of the cathedrals, Vikings razed the coastal monasteries and Saracens slaughtered armies of the faithful, calling them infidels. Sweeping negations lurked in the reasonings of Abelard and Duns Scotus. Luther’s terror and bile flavored the Reformation; Calvin could not reason his way around preordained, eternal damnation, an eternal burning fuelled by a tirelessly vengeful and perfectly remorseless God. The Puritans likened men to spiders suspended above a roaring hearth fire; election cleaves the starry universe with iron walls infinitely high, as pitiless as the iron walls of a sinking battleship to the writhing, screaming damned trapped within. The rational alternative to absolute pre-election, it was painstakingly demonstrated by more than one lecturer, was a God somehow imperfect, maimed, enfeebled, confined to a quarantined corner of things. What all the genteel professors at Princeton Seminary had smilingly concealed, Warfield and Green and the erect, pedantic rest, and the embowering trees and Gothic buildings had in their gracious silence masked, was the possibility that this was all about nothing, all these texts and rites and volumes and exegeses and doctrinal splits (within Scots Presbyterianism alone, the Cameronians, the Burghers and Antiburghers, the Auld Lichts and New, the Relief Church and the United Secession Church, the United Free Church and the Free Church and the further seceding “Wee Frees”)—that all these real-enough historical entities might be twigs of an utterly dead tree, ramifications of no more objective validity than the creeds of the Mayan and Pharaonic and Polynesian priesthoods, and Presbyterianism right back to its Biblical roots one more self-promoting, self-protective tangle of wishful fancy and conscious lies. Jesus the Son of God? The Son of Man? What could either mean? The church fathers who had thrashed through their epic distinctions had been centuries ago reduced to rat-gnawed bones and scraps of brown skin in their catacombs: clots of dust circling about a non-existent sun. Two copies of The Presbyterian on his desk, folded open to the “Books and Book News” pages, testified in every phrase to the problematic, euphemized absence at the heart of all this cheerful church activity:

  “Christ Invisible Our Gain,” by A. H. Drysdale, D.D.… Dr. Drysdale’s arguments are cumulative, and his last chapters are the best. There is a vital connection between the absent (but present) Christ and our spiritual life.

  In another issue, Clarence had marked, for possible purchase, in his tidy blue pen—marks left as if by an extinct creature, the believing clergyman, looking to bridge the unbridgeable—The Next Step in Evolution:

  His argument is that the promise of the coming is fulfilled in the spread of Christ’s doctrine and the reproduction of his life and spirit in the world, and that, therefore, he is coming, and, in a sense, has done, now. Those who cannot agree with Dr. Funk’s understanding of it, will nevertheless admire his spirit and share his love and adoration for the divine Redeemer.

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sp; Below this, Judge West’s Opinion, Reported by a Neighbor:

  Judge West’s opinions of the world and all things therein, are those of a cheerful optimist who has a substantial faith in the goodness of God and the excellence of his creation. The neighbor puts various hard questions to him, concerning life, death and the experience of mankind, and gets more or less satisfactory answers from the optimist’s point of view. The collection of the Judge’s opinions does not make a great book, but a cheerful one, and will help a questioner to see the bright side of things, where perhaps he thought there was none.

  What sad pap, Clarence thought. Cheerful optimist, substantial faith, goodness of God, excellence of his creation. Paper shields against the molten iron of natural truth. With its fantastic doctrines and preposterous rationalizations the church ministers to life—credulous, pathetic human life. Hope is our sap, our warm blood. Clarence had lost his sap—not suddenly but over the nearly twenty years since seminary, when he and his cohorts, like soldiers training to brave the terrors and shadows that beset Christendom, had brimmed with the jolly, noisy juices of militant, masculine faith. It had been his vow, his vocation, to keep the faith, and he felt his failure within him as an extensive sore place, which rendered all his actions at his desk stiff and careful.

  Mechanically in his pale steady hand he wrote a few letters, one to an enterprising salesman of church supplies who had attended service and now was offering at reasonable rates a whole range of padded kneeling cushions, with rolled or fringed seams, to replace Fourth Presbyterian’s tattered, compressed, faded array, and another to a former parishioner, now moved to Paramus, who wished him to perform a memorial service for his father, who had died in Leghorn, Italy, and whom Clarence had never met. In both letters, he politely regretted his inability to oblige. He marvelled that his handwriting still flowed, with a light evenness of pressure and studied care of letter formation, much as it had before his soul had been upended and emptied. The envelopes licked and stamped with George Washington’s pigtailed violet profile, Clarence looked over the financial figures preparatory to tonight’s meeting of the Building Requirements Committee, and satisfied himself that the church could by no means afford the new addition, to accommodate church socials and an expanded Sunday school, which some of its headstrong and overzealous members were proposing. Pearls before swine, good money after bad. Why add to all the echoing, underused ecclesiastical structures in Christendom when Irish and Polish immigrants slept six to a room a few blocks distant?