The vision of Christ that thou dost see Is my vision’s greatest enemy. Thine has a great hook nose like thine Mine has a snub nose like to mine.         
          THE EVERLASTING GOSPEL.

TWELVE middle-class Englishmen and an official sat in inquest on the body of Frederic. They gazed shyly and uninterestedly upon it and then heard the evidence to the effect that he was most happily married and was without financial worry of any kind. . . . The verdict, in view of the fact that the revolver was in the deceased’s overcoat pocket, was one of death by misadventure.

Francis learned the truth from Mr. Clibran-Bell. Mrs. Folyat was not told, neither was Jessie. Queer things were rumoured, however, and Mrs. Folyat began to feel—not absolutely without foundation—that she was looked upon askance. She went into deep mourning and raised Frederic to sainthood, and surrounded herself with relics from among his personal belongings. She brooded over the past and began to piece together her scattered memories. Nothing took clear shape except, what she had not seen at the time, the long coolness between her husband and her son, and she began to charge and reproach Francis with it. By vilifying Francis she had the illusion that she was exalting Frederic. She kept insisting that Francis must be sorry now that her poor angel was dead. Francis was remorseful. He was probing deeper and deeper into the unillumined past, groping his way through tortuous mole-galleries. The perpetual false deification of Frederic bothered him, his wife’s voice, lachrymose and thin, dinning in his ears, was [Pg 335]an exasperation. He was busy, frantically busy, forcing his way with all the strength of his nature out of the slough of despond into which he had fallen, and she seemed intent on thrusting him out of the slough into a sea of treacly mud. At length, one day, when she had raised Frederic a peg higher in her idolatrous beatification, suddenly the truth was wrenched from him:

“Can you not see that he meant to kill himself?”

“Oh! Frank . . . !”

He could despitefully have bitten his tongue out for having said it, but, having done so, he owed it to her to go on. It might prove her salvation. It might bring her back to him so that together they might perceive and win to the ways of brightness.

“He took the pistol with him in his pocket. He had no luggage with him. He had locked the door of his office and paid up his clerks’ wages and the premiums of his pupils.”

“Oh! Frank . . . Oh! Frank!”

And Francis hoped that she would turn to him and understand, but her very anguish of sorrow she must turn to self-indulgence, and she moved from the luxury of worship to the luxury of self-accusation:

“We drove him to it. All of us. We never understood him.”

She told Jessie, who was prostrated by the knowledge, and Mr. Clibran-Bell refused ever to enter the Folyats’ house again.

Francis passed through the very blackest hours of all after that. He prayed to his God but was not comforted; his mind would run only in the harshest channels of the faith he had spent his life in teaching. The God he found was a jealous God, a God of cruelty and vengeance and punishment. In vain he told himself that this was the just visitation of sins. He could not believe it. All his spirit craved for the belief in mercy, the living eternity, the life everlasting. He was hemmed in by the habit of years, and long familiarity with things sacred, all the vocabulary of paradox that had flowed so easily from his lips week in, week out, year after year. He [Pg 336]wanted the truth of it, but it was all words, words, words, a rain of fine dust falling upon his intelligence, blinding his eyes. He needed that in his religion which could square with and illuminate the facts of his existence, but ever the darkness grew more impenetrable.

For three weeks he went on mechanically with his work, going blindly through the ritual which he had fought so hard to establish, but always when he came to the Benediction and commended the congregation to the Peace of God, he knew, could not away with the knowledge, that there was no peace in his own heart, and he rebuked himself and called himself Hypocrite.

He could not take refuge in self-torment. His need was too great. He told himself that he no longer believed, and prayed for help in his unbelief. But there had always been faith in him. Nothing had ever shaken it. His necessity lay in the fact that the symbols he had always used were cheapened, worn, debased. His mind could not change. It was definitely cast in the story of the Godhead in Man in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, born of the Virgin birth, persecuted and slain by the Jews to rise again in glory to the eternal salvation of souls. . . . The teaching of this gospel should, if it had any purpose, lead to noble life, a superb preparation for eternity. But whither had it led himself? To the smallest of small lives, to the ruin of two of his children, fallen into the very snares against which they had been warned with all the threats of eternal punishment and Hell fire at the command of an appointed minister of the Christian religion. . . . He tried to look beyond his own family, to see what effect the Gospel had had upon his parishioners and he could not disguise from himself the pitifulness of their condition. To consider the effect of the Christian religion upon the history of the world was too large an undertaking for him.

Serge had said that he was of those who believe that understanding is not vouchsafed to us. What did he mean? . . . Words haunted him:—“To justify the works of Man to God,” or was it “To justify the works of God to Man”? Surely the last. The works of Man could [Pg 337]not be justified. He felt himself to be near the clue he was seeking, but the effort to follow it was beyond him. For him the only tie between Man and God was Jesus Christ.

He read the Gospels, and soon gave up trying to unravel the hard sayings, but he read again and again every passage in which the words Love and Mercy occurred. They soothed him, and, reading over and over the gentleness of Jesus under persecution, he became softened and very tender, and sought the company of children, his grandchildren.

He res............