The Young Men’s Debating Society was a newly formed branch of the multifarous activity of the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel. It met on Sunday because Sunday was the only day that would suit everybody; and at six in the morning for two reasons. The obvious reason was that at any other hour its meetings would clash either with other activities or with the solemnity of Sabbath meals. This obvious reason could not have stood by itself; it was secretly supported by the reason that the hour of 6 a.m. appealed powerfully to something youthful, , silly, fanatical, and fine in the youths. They discovered the ’s joy in robbing themselves of sleep and in chills, and in disturbing households and chapel-keepers. They thought it was a great thing to be discussing intellectual topics at an hour when a town that ignorantly scorned intellectuality was snoring in all its heavy brutishness. And it was a great thing. They considered themselves the salt of the earth, or of that part of the earth. And I have an idea that they were.
Edwin had joined this Society partly because he did not possess the art of refusing, partly because the notion of it appealed spectacularly to the in him, and partly because it gave him an excuse for ceasing to attend the afternoon Sunday school, which he . Without such an excuse he could never have told his father that he meant to give up Sunday school. He could never have dared to do so. His father had what Edwin deemed to be a and hypocritical regard for the Sunday school. Darius never went near the Sunday school, and assuredly in business and in home life he did not practise the inculcated at the Sunday school, and yet he always of the Sunday school with what was to Edwin a ridiculous . Another of those problems in his father’s character which Edwin gave up in disgust!
Two.
The Society met in a small classroom. The secretary, arch ascetic, arrived at 5:45 and lit the fire which the chapel-keeper (a man with no enthusiasm whatever for flagellation, the hairshirt, or intellectuality) had laid but would not get up to light. The chairman of the Society, a little Welshman named Llewelyn Roberts, fifty, but a youth because a bachelor, sat on a chair at one side of the fire, and some dozen members sat round the room on forms. A single gas jet flamed from the ceiling. Everybody wore his overcoat, and within the collars of overcoats could be seen glimpses of rich neckties; the hats, some , dotted the hat-rack which ran along two walls. A was sung, and then all knelt, some spreading handkerchiefs on the dusty floor to protect fine trousers, and the chairman the of God on their discussions. The proper mental and emotional atmosphere was now established. The secretary read the minutes of the last meeting, while the chairman surreptitiously the fire with a piece of wood from the lower works of a chair, and then the chairman, as he signed the minutes with a pen dipped in an ink-bottle that stood on the narrow mantelpiece, said in his dry voice—
“I call upon our young friend, Mr Edwin Clayhanger, to open the debate, ‘Is Colenso, considered as a Biblical , a force for good?’”
“I’m a damned fool!” said Edwin to himself , as he stood on his feet. But to look at his wistful and smiling face, no one would have guessed that he was thus swearing in the privacy of his own brain.
He had been into the situation in which he found himself. It was not until after he had joined the Society that he had learnt of a rule which made it for every member to speak at every meeting attended, and for every member to open a debate at least once in a year. And this was not all; the use of notes while the was ‘up’ was absolutely forbidden. A drastic Society! It had commended itself to elders by claiming to be a nursery for ready speakers.
Three.
Edwin had chosen the subject of Bishop Colenso—the ultimate wording of the resolution was not his—because he had been reading about the intellectually Bishop in the “Manchester Examiner.” And, although eleven years had passed since the publication of the first part of “The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua Critically Examined,” the Colenso question was only just filtering down to the thinking classes of the Five Towns; it was an actuality in the Five Towns, if in in London. Even Hugh Miller’s “The Old Red Sandstone, or New Walks in an Old Field,” then over thirty years old, was still being looked upon as dangerously original in the Five Towns in 1873. However, the effect of its disturbing geological evidence that the earth could scarcely have been begun and finished in a little under a week, was happily nullified by the suicide of its author; that pistol-shot had been a striking proof of the literal inspiration of the Bible.
Bishop Colenso had, in Edwin, an admirer. Edwin and hesitatingly gave a preliminary of his life; how he had been by Convocation and from his See by his
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