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 scum-bered 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 scruti-nized 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 som-ber 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 anti-quated 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. Be-tween 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 ex-ample? 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 mo-ments 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............