Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 096.djvu/445

Rh competent inquirers, he is bound to restrain an inclination to speak such things, even if he does believe them; otherwise, he commits an insolent and conceited action, and, moreover, a cruel and shameless one—by making miserable (if he is believed) the hearts of many virtuous persons who have never harmed him, for no immediate or demonstrable purpose except that of pleasing his own self-will. Socrates adds a panacea for scepticism—a prayerful spirit and a pure life. The sound heart will cure the unsound head; the shifting subjective retire before the eternal objective; the phenomenon merge in the absolute.

The Phaethon trio having said their say, Templeton and his clerical comrade renew their conference. Templeton typifies a large class of this generation. He is a cleverly selected and highly finished Representative Man, whom, indeed, we have previously met with, once and again, in Mr. Kingsley’s writings, but who is too real and interesting a person to be voted stale or weary, much less unprofitable, for the present uses of the world. How many hearts will he touch in sympathy with his description of his early education by an ever-beloved, open-hearted, yet narrow-minded mother! "She demanded of me," he says, "as the only grounds on which I was to consider myself safe from hell, certain fears and hopes which I did not feel, and experiences which I did not experience; and it was my fault, and a sign of my being in a wrong state—to use no harder term—that I did not feel them; and yet it was only God's grace which could make me feel them; and so I grew up with a dark secret notion that I was a very bad boy, but that it was God's fault and not mine that I was so." As he grew older, and watched his mother, and the men around her—some of them as really pious, and earnest, and charitable, as human beings could be—be began to suspect that religion and effeminacy had a good deal to do with each other; since the women, whatever their temperaments or tastes, took to this perplexing religion naturally and instinctively, while the very few men in their clique were not men at all—not well read, or well bred, or gallant, or clear-headed, or liberal-minded, or, in short, anything (generally speaking) but "silky, smooth-tongued hunt-the-slippers."

"I recollect well asking my mother once, whether there would not be five times more women than men in heaven; and her answering me sadly and seriously that she feared there would be. And in the mean time she brought me up to pray and hope that I might some day be converted, and become a child of God. … And," adds poor Templeton, with mingled irony and naïveté, "and one could not help wishing to enjoy oneself as much as possible before that event happened." And thus he has come to regard religion as something which definitively cuts a man off from all the interests of this life, and to stifle the best yearnings of his soul, and to stagnate into poco-curantism, becoming more and more of an animal—fragmentary, inconsistent, seeing to the root of nothing. His sympathy for a man so unlike himself as Professor Windrush is caused by the fact, that the professor too has broken loose in desperation from the established order of things, and can give him a peep into the unseen world, without requiring as an entrance-fee any.religious emotions and experiences—an irresistible bait to one who had been for years shut out, told that he had no business with anything pure, and noble, and good, and that to all intents and purposes he was nothing better than a very cunning animal who could be damned; because he was still