_ The foregoing conversation and others like it made a deep impression
upon my hero. If next day he had taken a walk with Mr Hawke, and
heard what he had to say on the other side, he would have been just
as much struck, and as ready to fling off what Pryer had told him,
as he now was to throw aside all he had ever heard from anyone
except Pryer; but there was no Mr Hawke at hand, so Pryer had
everything his own way.
Embryo minds, like embryo bodies, pass through a number of strange
metamorphoses before they adopt their final shape. It is no more to
be wondered at that one who is going to turn out a Roman Catholic,
should have passed through the stages of being first a Methodist,
and then a free thinker, than that a man should at some former time
have been a mere cell, and later on an invertebrate animal. Ernest,
however, could not be expected to know this; embryos never do.
Embryos think with each stage of their development that they have
now reached the only condition which really suits them. This, they
say, must certainly be their last, inasmuch as its close will be so
great a shock that nothing can survive it. Every change is a shock;
every shock is a pro tanto death. What we call death is only a
shock great enough to destroy our power to recognise a past and a
present as resembling one another. It is the making us consider the
points of difference between our present and our past greater than
the points of resemblance, so that we can no longer call the former
of these two in any proper sense a continuation of the second, but
find it less trouble to think of it as something that we choose to
call new.
But, to let this pass, it was clear that spiritual pathology (I
confess that I do not know myself what spiritual pathology means--
but Pryer and Ernest doubtless did) was the great desideratum of the
age. It seemed to Ernest that he had made this discovery himself
and been familiar with it all his life, that he had never known, in
fact, of anything else. He wrote long letters to his college
friends expounding his views as though he had been one of the
Apostolic fathers. As for the Old Testament writers, he had no
patience with them. "Do oblige me," I find him writing to one
friend, "by reading the prophet Zechariah, and giving me your candid
opinion upon him. He is poor stuff, full of Yankee bounce; it is
sickening to live in an age when such balderdash can be gravely
admired whether as poetry or prophecy." This was because Pryer had
set him against Zechariah. I do not know what Zechariah had done; I
should think myself that Zechariah was a very good prophet; perhaps
it was because he was a Bible writer, and not a very prominent one,
that Pryer selected him as one through whom to disparage the Bible
in comparison with the Church.
To his friend Dawson I find him saying a little later on: "Pryer
and I continue our walks, working out each other's thoughts. At
first he used to do all the thinking, but I think I am pretty well
abreast of him now, and rather chuckle at seeing that he is already
beginning to modify some of the views he held most strongly when I
first knew him.
"Then I think he was on the high road to Rome; now, however, he
seems to be a good deal struck with a suggestion of mine in which
you, too, perhaps may be interested. You see we must infuse new
life into the Church somehow; we are not holding our own against
either Rome or infidelity." (I may say in passing that I do not
believe Ernest had as yet ever seen an infidel--not to speak to.)
"I proposed, therefore, a few days back to Pryer--and he fell in
eagerly with the proposal as soon as he saw that I had the means of
carrying it out--that we should set on foot a spiritual movement
somewhat analogous to the Young England movement of twenty years
ago, the aim of which shall be at once to outbid Rome on the one
hand, and scepticism on the other. For this purpose I see nothing
better than the foundation of an institution or college for placing
the nature and treatment of sin on a more scientific basis than it
rests at present. We want--to borrow a useful term of Pryer's--a
College of Spiritual Pathology where young men" (I suppose Ernest
thought he was no longer young by this time) "may study the nature
and treatment of the sins of the soul as medical students study
those of the bodies of their patients. Such a college, as you will
probably admit, will approach both Rome on the one hand, and science
on the other--Rome, as giving the priesthood more skill, and
therefore as paving the way for their obtaining greater power, and
science, by recognising that even free thought has a certain kind of
value in spiritual enquiries. To this purpose Pryer and I have
resolved to devote ourselves henceforth heart and soul.
"Of course, my ideas are still unshaped, and all will depend upon
the men by whom the college is first worked. I am not yet a priest,
but Pryer is, and if I were to start the College, Pryer might take
charge of it for a time and I work under him nominally as his
subordinate. Pryer himself suggested this. Is it not generous of
him?
"The worst of it is that we have not enough money; I have, it is
true, 5000 pounds, but we want at least 10,000 pounds, so Pryer
says, before we can start; when we are fairly under weigh I might
live at the college and draw a salary from the foundation, so that
it is all one, or nearly so, whether I invest my money in this way
or in buying a living; besides I want very little; it is certain
that I shall never marry; no clergyman should think of this, and an
unmarried man can live on next to nothing. Still I do not see my
way to as much money as I want, and Pryer suggests that as we can
hardly earn more now we must get it by a judicious series of
investments. Pryer knows several people who make quite a handsome
income out of very little or, indeed, I may say, nothing at all, by
buying things at a place they call the Stock Exchange; I don't know
much about it yet, but Pryer says I should soon learn; he thinks,
indeed, that I have shown rather a talent in this direction, and
under proper auspices should make a very good man of business.
Others, of course, and not I, must decide this; but a man can do
anything if he gives his mind to it, and though I should not care
about having more money for my own sake, I care about it very much
when I think of the good I could do with it by saving souls from
such horrible torture hereafter. Why, if the thing succeeds, and I
really cannot see what is to hinder it, it is hardly possible to
exaggerate its importance, nor the proportions which it may
ultimately assume," etc., etc.
Again I asked Ernest whether he minded my printing this. He winced,
but said "No, not if it helps you to tell your story: but don't you
think it is too long?"
I said it would let the reader see for himself how things were going
in half the time that it would take me to explain them to him.
"Very well then, keep it by all means."
I continue turning over my file of Ernest's letters and find as
follows -
"Thanks for your last, in answer to which I send you a rough copy of
a letter I sent to the Times a day or two back. They did not insert
it, but it embodies pretty fully my ideas on the parochial
visitation question, and Pryer fully approves of the letter. Think
it carefully over and send it back to me when read, for it is so
exactly my present creed that I cannot afford to lose it.
"I should very much like to have a viva voce discussion on these
matters: I can only see for certain that we have suffered a
dreadful loss in being no longer able to excommunicate. We should
excommunicate rich and poor alike, and pretty freely too. If this
power were restored to us we could, I think, soon put a stop to by
far the greater part of the sin and misery with which we are
surrounded."
These letters were written only a few weeks after Ernest had been
ordained, but they are nothing to others that he wrote a little
later on.
In his eagerness to regenerate the Church of England (and through
this the universe) by the means which Pryer had suggested to him, it
occurred to him to try to familiarise himself with the habits and
thoughts of the poor by going and living among them. I think he got
this notion from Kingsley's "Alton Locke," which, High Churchman
though he for the nonce was, he had devoured as he had devoured
Stanley's Life of Arnold, Dickens's novels, and whatever other
literary garbage of the day was most likely to do him harm; at any
rate he actually put his scheme into practice, and took lodgings in
Ashpit Place, a small street in the neighbourhood of Drury Lane
Theatre, in a house of which the landlady was the widow of a cabman.
This lady occupied the whole ground floor. In the front kitchen
there was a tinker. The back kitchen was let to a bellows-mender.
On the first floor came Ernest, with his two rooms which he
furnished comfortably, for one must draw the line somewhere. The
two upper floors were parcelled out among four different sets of
lodgers: there was a tailor named Holt, a drunken fellow who used
to beat his wife at night till her screams woke the house; above him
there was another tailor with a wife but no children; these people
were Wesleyans, given to drink but not noisy. The two back rooms
were held by single ladies, who it seemed to Ernest must be
respectably connected, for well-dressed gentlemanly-looking young
men used to go up and down stairs past Ernest's rooms to call at any
rate on Miss Snow--Ernest had heard her door slam after they had
passed. He thought, too, that some of them went up to Miss
Maitland's. Mrs Jupp, the landlady, told Ernest that these were
brothers and cousins of Miss Snow's, and that she was herself
looking out for a situation as a governess, but at present had an
engagement as an actress at the Drury Lane Theatre. Ernest asked
whether Miss Maitland in the top back was also looking out for a
situation, and was told she was wanting an engagement as a milliner.
He believed whatever Mrs Jupp told him. _