‘The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed;’
that is, if they need something more than a musical performance or a conventional observance?
‘Do you mean to say,’ said the actress to a clergyman’s wife, ‘that you can follow the psalms of the day, and ask God to crush your enemies and make them perish for ever?’
‘Oh,’ said the lady, ‘I always repeat them all. You know, one does not believe exactly all one says. All you have to do is to give a general assent.’
This was what the actress could not do. Her Bible was a constant difficulty. She could believe it was the Word of God, but not all of it. Its contradictions puzzled and perplexed her. Give it up, said her worldly friends. Be happy in Agnosticism. Leave off thinking about the hereafter and a God. Believe what you see and hear. Life is short; it has not too much of joy in it. Be happy while you may.
In her distress she consulted a clergyman of the class more common now than they were then, who reject the term Protestant, and whose aim is the revival of what they call the Church Primitive and Apostolic.
‘A mere form,’ was the reply. ‘Our Church teaches that man is made a member of Christ, the child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven, in and by holy baptism.’
‘Then you are shut out, unless you are baptized, from the sacrament in which the body and blood of Christ are given to every one who receives the sacramental bread and wine.’
‘Prove it: I don’t want to prove it. I fear you are in grievous error. Your duty and that of everyone is to obey the Book of God: a book not to be dealt with upon the same rules which are applicable to the works of man.’
And then they parted; he stern and resolved, she sorrowful and sad; he intimating something about it was a pity that people could not remain satisfied with the station of life in which they were born, which did not pour balm into a wounded soul. Happily for herself, however, she could exclaim with Sir Thomas Browne, ‘As for those mazy mysteries in divinity and airy subtleties in religion which have unhinged the minds of many, they have never stretched the _pia mater_ of mine.’ But to gain this position was a work of time.
With an aching heart, once more the actress sought a clergyman. He was a Broad Churchman. There were no difficulties for him. In antiquated forms, in vain repetitions, in decaying creeds, there were difficulties, it might be; but one was not to bother one’s self about them. It was true that one had to conform to outward form, but the spirit was greater than the form. The time would come when the Church would burst its bonds, but at present all they had to do was to make the best of a bad situation. It seemed to her such church-worship was a sham. The man in the pulpit, the man in the pew, alike ignored the dead creed, and instead revelled in glib phraseology, in poetical nothings, in much-sounding rhetoric and ecclesiastical show and ritual. The chief things were the music, the millinery, and the show—the white-robed choristers, the dim religious light.