_ "You know, my dear Pontifex," said Pryer to him, some few weeks
after Ernest had become acquainted with him, when the two were
taking a constitutional one day in Kensington Gardens, "You know, my
dear Pontifex, it is all very well to quarrel with Rome, but Rome
has reduced the treatment of the human soul to a science, while our
own Church, though so much purer in many respects, has no organised
system either of diagnosis or pathology--I mean, of course,
spiritual diagnosis and spiritual pathology. Our Church does not
prescribe remedies upon any settled system, and, what is still
worse, even when her physicians have according to their lights
ascertained the disease and pointed out the remedy, she has no
discipline which will ensure its being actually applied. If our
patients do not choose to do as we tell them, we cannot make them.
Perhaps really under all the circumstances this is as well, for we
are spiritually mere horse doctors as compared with the Roman
priesthood, nor can we hope to make much headway against the sin and
misery that surround us, till we return in some respects to the
practice of our forefathers and of the greater part of Christendom."
Ernest asked in what respects it was that his friend desired a
return to the practice of our forefathers.
"Why, my dear fellow, can you really be ignorant? It is just this,
either the priest is indeed a spiritual guide, as being able to show
people how they ought to live better than they can find out for
themselves, or he is nothing at all--he has no raison d'etre. If
the priest is not as much a healer and director of men's souls as a
physician is of their bodies, what is he? The history of all ages
has shown--and surely you must know this as well as I do--that as
men cannot cure the bodies of their patients if they have not been
properly trained in hospitals under skilled teachers, so neither can
souls be cured of their more hidden ailments without the help of men
who are skilled in soul-craft--or in other words, of priests. What
do one half of our formularies and rubrics mean if not this? How in
the name of all that is reasonable can we find out the exact nature
of a spiritual malady, unless we have had experience of other
similar cases? How can we get this without express training? At
present we have to begin all experiments for ourselves, without
profiting by the organised experience of our predecessors, inasmuch
as that experience is never organised and co-ordinated at all. At
the outset, therefore, each one of us must ruin many souls which
could be saved by knowledge of a few elementary principles."
Ernest was very much impressed.
"As for men curing themselves," continued Pryer, "they can no more
cure their own souls than they can cure their own bodies, or manage
their own law affairs. In these two last cases they see the folly
of meddling with their own cases clearly enough, and go to a
professional adviser as a matter of course; surely a man's soul is
at once a more difficult and intricate matter to treat, and at the
same time it is more important to him that it should be treated
rightly than that either his body or his money should be so. What
are we to think of the practice of a Church which encourages people
to rely on unprofessional advice in matters affecting their eternal
welfare, when they would not think of jeopardising their worldly
affairs by such insane conduct?"
Ernest could see no weak place in this. These ideas had crossed his
own mind vaguely before now, but he had never laid hold of them or
set them in an orderly manner before himself. Nor was he quick at
detecting false analogies and the misuse of metaphors; in fact he
was a mere child in the hands of his fellow curate.
"And what," resumed Pryer, "does all this point to? Firstly, to the
duty of confession--the outcry against which is absurd as an outcry
would be against dissection as part of the training of medical
students. Granted these young men must see and do a great deal we
do not ourselves like even to think of, but they should adopt some
other profession unless they are prepared for this; they may even
get inoculated with poison from a dead body and lose their lives,
but they must stand their chance. So if we aspire to be priests in
deed as well as name, we must familiarise ourselves with the
minutest and most repulsive details of all kinds of sin, so that we
may recognise it in all its stages. Some of us must doubtlessly
perish spiritually in such investigations. We cannot help it; all
science must have its martyrs, and none of these will deserve better
of humanity than those who have fallen in the pursuit of spiritual
pathology."
Ernest grew more and more interested, but in the meekness of his
soul said nothing.
"I do not desire this martyrdom for myself," continued the other,
"on the contrary I will avoid it to the very utmost of my power, but
if it be God's will that I should fall while studying what I believe
most calculated to advance his glory--then, I say, not my will, oh
Lord, but thine be done."
This was too much even for Ernest. "I heard of an Irish-woman
once," he said, with a smile, "who said she was a martyr to the
drink."
"And so she was," rejoined Pryer with warmth; and he went on to show
that this good woman was an experimentalist whose experiment, though
disastrous in its effects upon herself, was pregnant with
instruction to other people. She was thus a true martyr or witness
to the frightful consequences of intemperance, to the saving,
doubtless, of many who but for her martyrdom would have taken to
drinking. She was one of a forlorn hope whose failure to take a
certain position went to the proving it to be impregnable and
therefore to the abandonment of all attempt to take it. This was
almost as great a gain to mankind as the actual taking of the
position would have been.
"Besides," he added more hurriedly, "the limits of vice and virtue
are wretchedly ill-defined. Half the vices which the world condemns
most loudly have seeds of good in them and require moderate use
rather than total abstinence."
Ernest asked timidly for an instance.
"No, no," said Pryer, "I will give you no instance, but I will give
you a formula that shall embrace all instances. It is this, that no
practice is entirely vicious which has not been extinguished among
the comeliest, most vigorous, and most cultivated races of mankind
in spite of centuries of endeavour to extirpate it. If a vice in
spite of such efforts can still hold its own among the most polished
nations, it must be founded on some immutable truth or fact in human
nature, and must have some compensatory advantage which we cannot
afford altogether to dispense with."
"But," said Ernest timidly, "is not this virtually doing away with
all distinction between right and wrong, and leaving people without
any moral guide whatever?"
"Not the people," was the answer: "it must be our care to be guides
to these, for they are and always will be incapable of guiding
themselves sufficiently. We should tell them what they must do, and
in an ideal state of things should be able to enforce their doing
it: perhaps when we are better instructed the ideal state may come
about; nothing will so advance it as greater knowledge of spiritual
pathology on our own part. For this, three things are necessary;
firstly, absolute freedom in experiment for us the clergy; secondly,
absolute knowledge of what the laity think and do, and of what
thoughts and actions result in what spiritual conditions; and
thirdly, a compacter organisation among ourselves.
"If we are to do any good we must be a closely united body, and must
be sharply divided from the laity. Also we must be free from those
ties which a wife and children involve. I can hardly express the
horror with which I am filled by seeing English priests living in
what I can only designate as 'open matrimony.' It is deplorable.
The priest must be absolutely sexless--if not in practice, yet at
any rate in theory, absolutely--and that too, by a theory so
universally accepted that none shall venture to dispute it."
"But," said Ernest, "has not the Bible already told people what they
ought and ought not to do, and is it not enough for us to insist on
what can be found here, and let the rest alone?"
"If you begin with the Bible," was the rejoinder, "you are three
parts gone on the road to infidelity, and will go the other part
before you know where you are. The Bible is not without its value
to us the clergy, but for the laity it is a stumbling-block which
cannot be taken out of their way too soon or too completely. Of
course, I mean on the supposition that they read it, which, happily,
they seldom do. If people read the Bible as the ordinary British
churchman or churchwoman reads it, it is harmless enough; but if
they read it with any care--which we should assume they will if we
give it them at all--it is fatal to them."
"What do you mean?" said Ernest, more and more astonished, but more
and more feeling that he was at least in the hands of a man who had
definite ideas.
"Your question shows me that you have never read your Bible. A more
unreliable book was never put upon paper. Take my advice and don't
read it, not till you are a few years older, and may do so safely."
"But surely you believe the Bible when it tells you of such things
as that Christ died and rose from the dead? Surely you believe
this?" said Ernest, quite prepared to be told that Pryer believed
nothing of the kind.
"I do not believe it, I know it."
"But how--if the testimony of the Bible fails?"
"On that of the living voice of the Church, which I know to be
infallible and to be informed of Christ himself." _