She had turned on him. They looked for a moment like two mad people. Charles seemed about to speak, to spring forward, to explode; but then without warning he spun on his heel and left the room.

48.

It is immoral in a man to believe more than he can spontaneously receive as being congenial to his mental and moral nature.

-Newman, Eighteen Propositions of Liberalism (1828)

I hold it truth, with him who sings To one clear harp in divers tones, That men may rise on stepping-stones Of their dead selves to higher things.

-Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850)

He put on his most formal self as he came down to the hall. Mrs. Endicott stood at the door to her office, her mouth already open to speak. But Charles, with a briskly polite "I thank you, ma'm" was past her and into the night before she could complete her question; or notice his frock coat lacked a button.

He walked blindly away through a new downpour of rain. He noticed it no more than where he was going. His greatest desire was darkness, invisibility, oblivion in which to regain calm. But he plunged, without realizing it, into that morally dark quarter of Exeter I described earlier. Like most morally dark places it was full of light and life: of shops and taverns, of people sheltering from the rain in doorways. He took an abrupt downhill street towards the river Exe. Rows of scumbered steps passed either side of a choked central gutter. But it was quiet. At the bottom a small redstone church, built on the corner, came into sight; and Charles suddenly felt the need for sanctuary. He pushed on a small door, so low that he had to stoop to enter. Steps rose to the level of the church floor, which was above the street entrance. A young curate stood at the top of these steps, turning down a last lamp and surprised at this late visit.

"I was about to lock up, sir."

"May I ask to be allowed to pray for a few minutes?"

The curate reversed the extinguishing process and scrutinized the late customer for a long moment. A gentleman.

"My house is just across the way. I am awaited. If you would be so kind as to lock up for me and bring me the key." Charles bowed, and the curate came down beside him. "It is the bishop. In my opinion the house of God should always be open. But our plate is so valuable. Such times we live in."

Thus Charles found himself alone in the church. He heard the curate's footsteps cross the street; and then he locked the old door from the inside and mounted the steps to the church. It smelled of new paint. The one gaslight dimly illumined fresh gilding; but massive Gothic arches of a somber red showed that the church was very old. Charles seated himself halfway down the main aisle and stared through the roodscreen at the crucifix over the altar. Then he got to his knees and whispered the Lord's Prayer, his rigid hands clenched over the prayer-ledge in front of him.

The dark silence and emptiness welled back once the ritual words were said. He began to compose a special prayer for his circumstances: "Forgive me, O Lord, for my selfishness. Forgive me for breaking Thy laws. Forgive me my dishonor, forgive me my unchastity. Forgive me my dissatisfaction with myself, forgive me my lack of faith in Thy wisdom and charity. Forgive and advise me, O Lord in my travail ..." but then, by means of one of those miserable puns made by a distracted subconscious, Sarah's face rose before him, tear-stained, agonized, with all the features of a Mater Dolorosa by Grunewald he had seen in Colmar, Coblenz, Cologne ... he could not remember. For a few absurd seconds his mind ran after the forgotten town, it began with a C ... he got off his knees and sat back in his pew. How empty the church was, how silent. He stared at the crucifix; but instead of Christ's face, he saw only Sarah's. He tried to recommence his prayer. But it was hopeless. He knew it was not heard. He began abruptly to cry.

In all but a very few Victorian atheists (that militant elite led by Bradlaugh) and agnostics there was a profound sense of exclusion, of a gift withdrawn. Among friends of like persuasion they might make fun of the follies of the Church, of its sectarian squabbles, its luxurious bishops and intriguing canons, its absentee rectors* and underpaid curates, its antiquated theology and all the rest; but Christ remained, a terrible anomaly in reason. He could not be for them what he is to so many of us today, a completely secularized figure, a man called Jesus of Nazareth with a brilliant gift for metaphor, for creating a personal mythology, for acting on his beliefs. All the rest of the world believed in his divinity; and thus his reproach came stronger to the unbeliever. Between the cruelties of our own age and our guilt we have erected a vast edifice of government-administered welfare and aid; charity is fully organized. But the Victorians lived much closer to that cruelty; the intelligent and sensitive felt far more personally responsible; and it was thus all the harder, in hard times, to reject the universal symbol of compassion.

[* But who can blame them when their superiors set such an example? The curate referred a moment ago to "the bishop"-and this particular bishop, the famous Dr. Phillpotts of Exeter (then with all of Devon and Cornwall under his care), is a case in point. He spent the last ten years of his life in "a comfortable accommodation" at Torquay and was said not to have darkened his cathedral's doors once during that final decade. He was a superb prince of the Anglican Church-every inch a pugnacious reactionary; and did not die till two years after the year we are in.]

Deep in his heart Charles did not wish to be an agnostic. Because he had never needed faith, he had quite happily learned to do without it; and his reason, his knowledge of Lyell and Darwin, had told him he was right to do without its dogma. Yet here he was, not weeping for Sarah, but for his own inability to speak to God. He knew, in that dark church, that the wires were down. No communication was possible.

There was a loud clack in the silence. He turned round, hastily touching his eyes with his sleeve. But whoever had tried to enter apparently accepted that the church was now closed; it was as if a rejected part of Charles himself had walked away. He stood up and began to pace up and down the aisle between the pews, his hands behind his back. Worn names and dates, last fossil remains of other lives, stared illegibly at him from the gravestones embedded in the floor. Perhaps the pacing up and down those stones, the slight sense of blasphemy he had in doing it, perhaps his previous moments of despair, but something did finally bring calm and a kind of clarity back to him. A dialogue began to form, between his better and his worse self-or perhaps between him and that spreadeagled figure in the shadows at the church's end.

Where shall I begin?

Begin with what you have done, my friend. And stop wishing you had not done it.

I did not do it. I was led to do it.

What led you to do it?

I was deceived.

What intent lay behind the deception?

I do not know.

But you must judge.

If she had truly loved me she could not have let me go.

If she had truly loved you, could she have continued to deceive?

She gave me no choice. She said herself that marriage between us was impossible.

What reason did she give?

Our difference in social position.

A noble cause.

Then Ernestina. I have given her my solemn promise.

It is already broken.

I will mend it.

With love? Or with guilt?

It does not matter which. A vow is sacred.

If it does not matter which, a vow cannot be sacred.

My duty is clear.

Charles, Charles, I have read that thought in the cruelest eyes. Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.

She wished me to go. I could see it in her eyes-a contempt.

Shall I tell you what Contempt is doing at this moment? She is weeping her heart out.

I cannot go back.

Do you think water can wash that blood from your loins?

I cannot go back.

Did you have to meet her again in the Undercliff? Did you have to stop this night in Exeter? Did you have to go to her room? Let her hand rest on yours? Did you- I admit these things! I have sinned. But I was fallen into her snare.

Then why are you now free of her?

There was no answer from Charles. He sat again in his pew. He locked his fingers with a white violence, as if he would break his knuckles, staring, staring into the darkness. But the other voice would not let him be.

My friend, perhaps there is one thing she loves more than you. And what you do not understand is that because she truly loves you she must give you the thing she loves more. I will tell you why she weeps: because you lack the courage to give her back her gift.

What right had she to set me on the rack?

What right had you to be born? To breathe? To be rich?

I do but render unto Caesar- Or unto Mr. Freeman?

That is a base accusation.

And unto me? Is this your tribute? These nails you hammer through my palms?

With the greatest respect-Ernestina also has palms.

Then let us take one and read it. I see no happiness. She knows she is not truly loved. She is deceived. Not once, but again and again, each day of marriage.

Charles put his arms on the ledge in front of him and buried his head in them. He felt caught in a dilemma that was also a current of indecision: it was almost palpable, not passive but active, driving him forwards into a future it, not he, would choose.

My poor Charles, search your heart-you thought when you came to this city, did you not, to prove to yourself you were not yet in the prison of your future. But escape is not one act, my friend. It is no more achieved by that than you could reach Jerusalem from here by one small step. Each day, Charles, each hour, it has to be taken again. Each minute the nail waits to be hammered in. You know your choice. You stay in prison, what your time calls duty, honor, self-respect, and you are comfortably safe. Or you are free and crucified. Your only companions the stones, the thorns, the turning backs; the silence of cities, and their hate.

I am weak.

But ashamed of your weakness.

What good could my strength bring to the world?

No answer came. But something made Charles rise from his pew and go to the roodscreen. He looked through one of its wooden windows at the Cross above the altar; and then, after a hesitation, stepped through the central door and past the choir stalls to the steps to the altar table. The light at the other end of the church penetrated but feebly there. He could barely make out the features of the Christ, yet a mysterious empathy invaded him. He saw himself hanging there . . . not, to be sure, with any of the nobility and universality of Jesus, but crucified.

And yet not on the Cross-on something else. He had thought sometimes of Sarah in a way that might suggest he saw himself crucified on her; but such blasphemy, both religious and real, was not in his mind. Rather she seemed there beside him, as it were awaiting the marriage service; yet with another end in view. For a moment he could not seize it-and then it came.

To uncrucify!

In a sudden flash of illumination Charles saw the right purpose of Christianity; it was not to celebrate this barbarous image, not to maintain it on high because there was a useful profit-the redemption of sins-to be derived from so doing, but to bring about a world in which the hanging man could be descended, could be seen not with the rictus of agony on his face, but the smiling peace of a victory brought about by, and in, living men and women.

He seemed as he stood there to see all his age, its tumultuous life, its iron certainties and rigid conventions, its repressed emotion and facetious humor, its cautious science and incautious religion, its corrupt politics and immutable castes, as the great hidden enemy of all his deepest yearnings. That was what had deceived him; and it was totally without love or freedom . . . but also without thought, without intention, without malice, because the deception was in its very nature; and it was not human, but a machine. That was the vicious circle that haunted him; that was the failure, the weakness, the cancer, the vital flaw that had brought him to what he was: more an indecision than a reality, more a dream than a man, more a silence than a word, a bone than an action. And fossils!

He had become, while still alive, as if dead.

It was like coming to a bottomless brink.

And something else: a strange sense he had had, ever since entering that church-and not particular to it, but a presentiment he always had upon entering empty churches-that he was not alone. A whole dense congregation of others stood behind him. He turned and looked back into the nave.

Silent, empty pews.

And Charles thought: if they were truly dead, if there were no afterlife, what should I care of their view of me? They would not know, they could not judge.

Then he made the great leap: They do not know, they cannot judge.

Now what he was throwing off haunted, and profoundly damaged, his age. It is stated very clearly by Tennyson in the fiftieth poem of In Memoriam. Listen:

Do we indeed desire the dead Should still be near us at our side?

Is there no baseness we would hide?

No inner vileness that we dread?

Shall he for whose applause I strove, I had such reverence for his blame, See with clear eye some hidden shame And I be lessen'd in his love?

I wrong the grave with fears untrue: Shall love be blamed for want of faith?

There must be wisdom with great Death; The dead shall look me thro' and thro'.

Be near us when we climb or fall: Ye watch, like God, the rolling hours With larger other eyes than ours, To make allowance for us all.