S.S. Arcadia, December 16, 1912. (Off Aden.)

It has occurred to me that the views on the matter of religion of a person of my day with such experiences as this work records may prove of interest to some of those who come after me, and possibly, here and there, of help. So I add them to this book as a footnote which none need read unless they wish.

First I should state that I am not a theologian. Theology is a science that has no attraction for me. In this great question of our future life or death I find no place for subtleties in which many take so much delight. Such is the constitution of my mind. The fine divisions of a creed, the bitterness that rages between High Church and Low, for instance, awake in my heart neither sympathy nor echo. What are vestments or ritual when eternal life or death and salvation are at stake? Even the great gulf fixed between Anglican and Roman Catholic is to me narrow. I was bred, and doubtless shall to the end remain, a member of the Church of England. But, on the other hand, I have a great admiration for many parts of the Roman precept and practice. Its discipline seems to me beyond praise; the support it gives to the individual struggling and affrighted soul shows deep understanding of the eternal needs of human nature; while who can be blind to the abnegation of self evinced in the practice of celibacy by its devoted priesthood, resulting, as it does, in an enormous gain to its efficiency as a Church?

Further, within limits that I need not discuss, personally I think the virtue of Confession which it inculcates great, since thereby is brought the whole weight, wisdom and merit of the Church to the aid of the particular case. I am aware that Confession is allowed to Anglicans and even, in a sense, enjoined upon them. But by how many is the rite employed? And why is it not employed? The question may be answered by another. Who wishes to make confessions of his failings — to lay bare that wonderful and sometimes awful thing, the secret soul of man, to Mrs. Rector or Mrs. Archdeacon, or even to a selection of the father confessor’s brothers and priests? It may be retorted, not without indignation, that such a thing would not happen. Perhaps. Yet the average man feels a risk which he will not face. Many of us have known worthy but much married clergymen whose conjugal confidences are famous. In consequence, rightly or wrongly, other confidences are withheld from them, and with the abolition of a one-doctrined, properly controlled, responsible and non-amateur celibate priesthood, Confession has gone out of fashion. This, however, is by the way.

The trouble about the Roman Church is not only its notorious intolerance and bigotry, of which history tells, but the fact that some of the doctrines, as I understand them, are not to be found in the New Testament, which after all is the Christian’s only charter. Since the Scriptures are of no private interpretation what is not written there is, so far as they are concerned, presumably non-existent. It is this truth that keeps so many from the gates of Rome. Perhaps in some day to come she will modify her attitude in certain directions, as we may modify ours, and the two greatest divisions of the Church of Christ will draw together again. I trust and pray that this may be so and that thus an united front may be presented to the evil that is in the world, which lessens little, if at all, with the passage of the ages.

In the same way that I admire and respect the Roman Church do I admire and respect a Body which stands at the other religious pole — I refer to the Salvation Army. But this Body, splendid as is its work, makes what I consider the mistake of omitting the use of the Sacraments which seem to me to be clearly enjoined by the New Testament. As the Roman Church elaborates the sum total of the corpus of our faith, so the Salvation Army deducts from that sum. But it has been explained to me that the late General Booth did this of set purpose, because he did not think that the people with whom he had to deal understood the Sacraments.

I do but quote these two extremes, however, each of which I think so admirable in its own fashion, as evidence of the statement with which I opened these remarks, to the effect that whatever I may or may not be, I am no bigot. Now I will try to show why I believe in the simple and unadulterated doctrines of Christianity as these appear within the four corners of the New Testament and are preached by the Church to which I belong.

There are, of course, many varieties of what is known as Faith. There is, for instance, the unquestioning Faith which many profess because it is there, because they inherited or were taught it in childhood. Such persons have looked and need to look no further. Theirs not to reason why, and they are fortunate and happy in this attitude.

Others have a more difficult experience. When the intellect awakes it begins to question, and often enough finds no satisfactory answer. It becomes aware that all these divine events happened a long while ago, also that the evidence for them is not of a nature that forces conviction per se, at any rate at first sight. For instance, no judge would send an accused person to gaol on the testimony which, for some purpose beyond our ken, has been considered sufficiently strong to enable mankind to accept a very wonderful story and to build thereon the hope or rather the certainties of redemption and eternal life beyond the chances and changes of this mortality. Some are thereby entirely discouraged and, rejecting what they conclude must be a fable, set themselves sadly to make the best of things as they are, awaiting the end with resignation, with terror, or with the callous indifference of despair, according to their individual temperaments. Others start out on wild searches of their own. They examine the remaining religions, they try spiritualism, they bring themselves, or so imagine, into some faint and uncertain touch with the dead, the Unseen and the Powers that dwell therein, only after all to return unsatisfied, unsettled, hungry — frightened also at times — and doubtful of the true source of their vision. For in all these far seas they can find no sure, anchored rock on which to stand and defy the storms of Fate. Those alien religions may suit and even be sufficient to the salvation of their born votaries, but to these philosophical inquirers they are not sufficient. Moreover, they find that Christianity embodies whatever is true and good in every one of them, rejecting only the false and evil. To take but one example, all, or very nearly all, of the beautiful rules and maxims of Buddha are to be found in the teaching of our Lord. but there is this difference between the faiths they preached. Whereas that of Buddha, as I understand it, is a religion of Death, holding up cessation of mundane lives and ultimate extinction as the great reward of virtue, Christianity is a religion of Life, of continued individual being, full, glorious, sinless and eternal, to be won by those who choose to accept the revelation of its Founder. Who then can hesitate between the two? Who wishes to be absorbed into the awful peace of Nothingness? Why, such, without its precedent preparation, was the refuge of the Roman who opened his veins when things went wrong or Caesar frowned!

Thus it comes about that these seekers after spiritual truth remain drifting to and fro in their little boats of hope, that grow at length so frail and old, and mayhap in the end founder altogether.

Or perhaps they turn in despair and, aware of the overwhelming importance, of the awfulness of the issue indeed, to which all other things are as naught, face the situation afresh, study afresh, think afresh, pray afresh, perchance for years and years. If so, there is really only one work with which they need trouble themselves, the New Testament, and parts of the Old such as the Psalms. At least that is my experience — the experience of a plain man in search of truth.

I suppose that for the last fifteen or twenty years, except very occasionally through accident or a sense of unworthiness, scarcely a day has gone over my head on which I have not once (the last thing at night) and often more than once, read a portion of the Bible. The result is that now I find it fresher, stronger, more convincing, more full of hidden meaning than I did when I began this exercise. “Search the Scriptures” was a very great and potent saying, for in them I think is life.

What, it may be asked, do you find there, beyond picturesque narrative and the expression of hopes natural to the hearts of members of a race that in a few short years must throb itself to silence? I answer that in all their main facts they are true. I have been accustomed to write fiction for a space of nearly a whole generation, and I know something of the business. Having this experience at my back I declare earnestly that, with a single exception, I do not think it possible that the gospels and the rest can be the work of man’s imagination. That exception is the Book of Revelation, which might possibly have been conceived by some noble human mind in a wonderful period of spiritual exaltation. I hasten to add that I am certain this was not the case; that on the contrary it was divinely inspired, whatever the actual meaning of parts of it may be. All I say is that, in my view, it alone of the books of the New Testament might perhaps be a fruit of human powers of creation.

With the remainder of them it is different. These, I am sure, are records of things that were said or happened very much as they are written down. Who, for instance, could have invented the account of the Last Supper in St. John? A thousand touches, patent enough to the eye of one who composes romance, show that this view is true; the very inconsistencies or variations in the different accounts of certain incidents, due for the most part to the varying temperaments of the recorders that cause them to dwell upon that aspect of the matter in hand which appealed to them, rejecting or slurring over the others, suggest that it is true. Any person who has been accustomed to hear evidence knows that such evidence is most suspicious when a number of witnesses tell exactly the same story, especially as to events that happened a while before, and most credible when that story comes from sundry mouths with differences of detail.

So, the critic will say, you are prepared to swallow the miracles at a gulp? Yes, I am — or most of them. I do not see how they are to be explained away; moreover, I have known so many miracles to occur in my own time and experience that a few more or less make no difference to me. To state that miracles, which after all may be but the partial manifestation of some secret law veiled from us as yet, have ceased is, in my opinion, a profound mistake; they happen often, especially in the heart of man. Moreover, the whole circumstances of life are a miracle; the wireless instrument that at this moment I hear doing its work is a miracle; we are surrounded by miracles, unappreciated, unvalued, because so common. This, though a truism, is one from which we may argue.

I believe, therefore, that these things took place substantially as they are recorded; that a God-endowed Being of supernatural strength did show signs and wonders before the eyes of His generation, and for the subsequent instruction of mankind. If this is not true, or rather, if the greatest of these signs is not true, then Christianity falls to the ground; it is a well dug in sand that will hold no water, and what tens of millions have believed and believe to be a gateway to a better and enduring world is but a glorious morning cloud which melts away and is lost in the vastness of the ether. Then, as St. Paul says, we are of all men the most miserable; then let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die; then let us see to it, so far as is possible, that we bring none here to bear the burden of the years and know the despairing bitterness of death.

Needless to say, I refer to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. If He never rose from the grave, then, so far as I can see, there is no hope for Christian man, and we trust in a vain thing. I say, so far as I can see, for there may exist other roads of salvation with which we are unacquainted. For my part, I believe, however, that He did rise, as firmly as I believe that at this moment of writing I am sitting on the deck of a ship called the Arcadia, and that what He, born of woman, did, we shall do also.

Indeed this may be a convenient place to state my private opinion (it is no more, though I cannot find that it conflicts with the doctrines of Christianity; see, for instance, the passage in which our Lord refers to Elijah as having returned to Earth in the person of John the Baptist), to the effect that we, or at any rate that some of us, already have individually gone through this process of coming into active Being and departing out of Being more than once — perhaps very often indeed — though not necessarily in this world with which we are acquainted. In short, like the Buddhists, I am strongly inclined to believe that the Personality which animates each of us is immeasurably ancient, having been forged in so many fires, and that, as its past is immeasurable, so will its future be. This is in some ways an uncomfortable faith or instinct; thus I, for one, have no wish to live again upon our earth. Moreover, it is utterly insusceptible of proof — like everything else that has to do with the spirit — for vague memories, affinities with certain lands and races, irresistible attractions and repulsions, at times amounting in the former case to intimacies of the soul (among members of the same sex, for in discussing such matters it is perhaps better to exclude the other) so strong that they appear to be already well established, such as have drawn me so close to certain friends, and notably to one friend recently departed, are none of them proof. Nor are the revelations of persons who seem to have access to certain stores of knowledge denied to most men, for these may be anything or nothing. Nor is that strong conviction of immemorial age which haunts the hearts of some of us.

No, there is no proof, and yet reason comes to the support of these imaginings. Unless we have lived before, or the grotesque incongruities of life are to be explained in some way unknown to us, our present existence, to my mind, resembles nothing so much as a handful of what is known as “printer’s pie” cast together at hazard and struck off for the reader to interpret as he will or can. Or perhaps in this case a better example would be to compare the world to a great ball-room wherein a Puck-like Death acts as Master of Ceremonies. Here the highly born, the gifted and the successful are welcomed with shouts of praise, while the plain, the poorly dressed, the halt, are trodden underfoot; here partners, chosen at hazard, often enough seem to be dancing to a different time and step, till they are snatched asunder to meet no more; here one by one the revellers of all degrees are touched upon the shoulder by the Puck-like Death who calls the tune, and drop down, down into an impenetrable darkness, while others who knew them not are called to take their places.

But if we admit that every one of these has lived before and danced in other rooms, and will live again and dance in other rooms, then meaning informs the meaningless. Then those casual meetings and swift farewells, those loves and hatings, are not of chance; then those partners are not chosen at hazard after all. Then the dancers who in turn must swoon away beneath that awful, mocking touch, do not drop into darkness but into some new well of the water of Life. Then what we behold is but a few threads, apparently so tangled, that go to weave the Sphinx’s seamless veil, or some stupendous tapestry that enwraps the whole Universe of Creation which, when seen at last, will picture forth the Truth in all its splendour, and with it the wondrous story and the meaning of our lives.

Such, put shortly and figuratively, seems to me one of the strongest arguments for the continuity of our personal existence through various phases. It may be, however, that it is no argument at all — that there is some other explanation (beyond that of blind, black, brutal chance), perhaps so simple that we cannot grasp it, which accounts for everything.

One contention, however, I find it hard to accept — namely, that man appearing here for the first time through an accident of the flesh is placed and judged eternally in accordance with his deeds of at most about thirty waking, conscious years (even if his life be long), for childhood and the time spent in sleep must be excluded. To me such a thing is almost incredible. Final judgment I can understand after many lives of growing towards the good or towards the ill — and, indeed, the faith I follow declares it — but not an eternity of anything decreed on the deeds of ten or twenty or thirty years passed among the surroundings in which we happened to be born, weighted with the infirmities and inherited tendencies of a flesh and nature that we did not choose. Over a great period of many different existences, selected according to the elective fitness of the ego, matters and opportunities would equalise themselves, and that ego would follow the path it selected to its inevitable end. But one life of a maximum of thirty years full-stopped with doom . . . !

All this, however, is a digression from my arguments to which I now return.

I have said that I believe in the truth of the New Testament story, and that to my mind everything hinges upon the fact of the Resurrection, although I am aware that many who call themselves Christians, and expect, apparently, to receive whatever benefits Christianity can bring, give no credence to this or any other miracle. Surely these might as well expect to inherit salvation by virtue of a study of the doctrines of Confucius. I hope that they will inherit it all the same, since God, who knows what is in man and the clay whereof we are fashioned, is merciful, and there may be, and probably are, many roads to the gate of Life; but in this case it can scarcely be reached by the faint and wandering path of a materialised and eviscerated Christianity. Christianity as an effective creed depends, and always must depend, upon the Resurrection of its Founder while He dwelt on earth. Or so I hold.

How, then, is this necessary faith to be attained by those who doubt? Perhaps in many ways, though I only know of one — namely, by prayer. It is, at any rate in its higher forms, a gift accorded in answer to prayer; it is an inspiration of the Spirit of our Maker which flows down the connecting links of prayer. By prayer, too, I do not mean a few hurried or formal mumblings in the morning or at bedtime: I mean the continual, almost the hourly, conversation of the creature with his God. I mean the habitual uplifting of the heart to heaven, the constant cry of fallen nature in sorrow, in joy, in sin, in every circumstance of life, to the Highest of all natures, who remembers of what metal it is made because in the beginning (ah! what beginning?) it was from Him and is still His own. Feeble, unworthy though it be, such prayer offered on your own behalf or on that of others, I am sure is heard, is answered across the unutterable spaces — or so it has often seemed to me — if put up in faith. Sometimes even, for a little while it causes us to understand what is meant by the peace of God that passes understanding. Further, it is as necessary to the sin-stained soul as is food to the frail body. For indeed even those among us, with whom such as I cannot presume to rank ourselves, are full of faults and must appear to the Perfect Eye as though stricken with a moral leprosy. Our only hope, knowing and remembering these faults, however oft and bitterly repented of, is to say like the man in the temple, “Lord, I am a miserable sinner”; to seek for the help we cannot give to ourselves, to crave that we too may be sprinkled with the atoning Blood. Why this should be necessary I cannot say — for who can comprehend these wonders? — any more than I can understand the origin and meanings of sin, which often enough seems to consist merely in giving obedience to the imperious demands of that body with which we have been clothed. The gratification of these impulses generally becomes sin, because Nature has no laws except her own, and her ancient rule is not that revealed by Christ in the latter days.

So it is with almost everything: even true affection or any other virtue exaggerated can turn to vice. It would seem as though a man’s trials here were purposely made as hard as may be; so hard that at times we may perhaps be forgiven if we wonder whether this world, at any rate for some, is not in truth one of the chambers of the house of hell, or at least of that purgatory preached — so far as I know without warrant — as a doctrine of the Roman faith. By prayer, then, we can be purged and helped, prayer for ourselves, prayer for others, for the living, yes, and for the dead; for who will dare to say that even the dead are beyond the reach of benefit from our feeble crying in the night to the Ruler of that night? Prayer, I repeat, is heard; prayer, if it be directed to lawful ends, is answered sometimes when it seems to be made most in vain. If only we had faith enough no right thing would be refused to us. Who knows the harvest that we sow by means of earnest, faithful prayer, and, though its seed lie buried for a season, shall one day reap? But most of all, I think, should we pray for knowledge how to pray!

Now the road to this goal of faith, which must be found and kept open by prayer, still remains full of obstacles and apt to vanish quite away, leaving the weary wanderer in a desert where no water is. Light fails, dark grows the sky, again and yet again cold winds of doubt freeze him to the marrow, sins overtake and conquer him, voices mock him from the gloom. They bid him look back to the warm world he left upon his foolish quest to find a star whither no path leads that mortal can follow. They point to the bones of those who have fallen by the way. They whisper that his error lies in not taking what he may have while there is still time, since soon he must go empty to the sleep which knows no waking. Poor fare, perhaps, they say, yet better than feeding upon wind and bedewing the altar of a heedless or non-existent God with repentant tears because of half-imaginary sins begotten by a nature the sinner did not shape.

What traveller of the sort is there who has not been thrown back upon his thorny journey by such thoughts as these? Or perhaps some hideous and cruel loss has caused him to doubt whether, after all, any Power does exist that knows the name of pity or can thrill with the glow of love. Or the shock may take other forms. He may find that those whom he thought to be inspired from on high with goodness are merely stupid; that they avoid conspicuous and open error because their slow natures are shut to temptations of the larger sort, though they breed a growth of petty mischiefs not textually named among the Ten Commandments and therefore, say they, of no account. Or that some friend who............