University of Virginia Library

Scene II.—Vestibule of the Hall in which the Congress is assembled.

[Great Archway of communication through which the Hall is seen with Bishop, Clergy, and Laity in full discussion. In the Vestibule, Markham and Seaford stand listening.
FIRST LAYMAN
So, for your patience, thanks. The sum of all
Is that we stand before our Age like men
Who in their book-rooms hang a classic map
And talk of Troy, but, being set to travel,
Hug their familiar Murray and depart
More wise than honest. But the time asks truth.
If they be facts, maintain your boundaries,
If not, efface them! Forth, and feel your way
And teach us more than you have learnt, for each
Hews his own path, and adds his Article
To the great ever-growing human creed
Which was, and is, and shall be, as the World.
Have done with that pale chart, which drowning men
Accuse, and say they have no right to die
Because it warned them not. Use all your wits,
Set all your sails, and when the haven holds you
Tell how you passed the rocks.

CYRIL
Your parable
Fails by its honesty.

FIRST LAYMAN
I pray you, how?

CYRIL
It offers much—but, in the last extreme,
The guardian angel which it substitutes
For our sure heritage, so sealed by deaths,
So manifest in lives, so crowned by Time,
Is only—one man's wits.

FIRST LAYMAN
You force the meaning.

CYRIL
Nay, but I show the fact.

FIRST LAYMAN
Yet speak more deeply;
We build no walls on these analogies;
I did but illustrate the one position.

CYRIL
And I, the other.

FIRST LAYMAN
Nicely parried, friends.
Let this be all your answer.

CYRIL
We are ready
For each new version of that old assault
Made first on Adam; there is nothing changed
Except the manner—‘Ye shall be as gods’
(For ever future) ‘knowing everything.’
Age after age it rises like the waves,
Always another shape, but always water,
To break against our everlasting Rock.
Your force is in the colour of your time
As clouds are fire at sunset, but in an hour
Merely grey drifting vapour. When God's hand
Has wound another turning of the skein
We shall have passed these knots, and men shall see
How doubtful were the reasons for the doubts
Which vexed their grandfathers, alas, devising
Doubts for themselves which shall not prick their sons.
So, to the last, we fail; so, to the last,
Among us all the Lord walks evermore
With eyes of patient power that mark their own!
Meantime we fight the fronting foe, and answer
That we confess our ignorance and faith
The very ground and limit of our being;
Not knowing God, nor man, nor life, nor death;
Well knowing how to live and how to die,
What we may hope and Whom we have believed;
And we are bold to say, you know no more.
Why do you talk of guidance? Where is yours?
Beyond your reason as beneath our trust
Impenetrable darkness spreads itself;
What can you show us in the abyss, where we
Go down to meet the Everlasting Arms?
Leave off your ceaseless negative, proclaim
The thing that is, let us behold your creed,
And give us something in the place of Christ.

MARKHAM
(in the vestibule)
How the voice rings, and summons as it rings
A long procession from the unceasing Past!
O, I am listening with my youth again,
And all that has been is about to be—
Take me away from this!

SEAFORD
You would not care
To tread the path anew?

MARKHAM
What man could bear
His Past to be his Future? I've not strayed
Further than others, but I hear him show
The straight path to the shining goal, as still
He showed it ere we started.—O, great God,
Undo my life and give it back to me!
It was all then, and it is nothing now;
A fragment at Thy foot.

SEAFORD
If it lie there
It shall be gathered.

MARKHAM
Who has taught you that?

SEAFORD
There's the old voice—I know you now—you seemed
Strange to my memories. In our early days
Your sympathies had been with Cyril's foe
And not with Cyril.

MARKHAM
Yes, I know it all.
I have fought that fight, and finished all that course,
And at the end, in my crowned weariness,
Have lifted empty hands and searching eyes,
But neither Heaven nor Earth has answered me:
How should they? Not for such as I the night
Breaks into Angel faces, with a shout
The Christ is born!

SEAFORD
You were not wont to feel
So keenly. I have heard you celebrate
The calms of Reason.

MARKHAM
I have lived in them
Till the storm came.

SEAFORD
And then?

MARKHAM
To die in them
Were easier. See, my friend, the ring is round
And men walk on for ever. There's content
For the strong Intellect, athirst for work,
And filled with it, and wanting nothing else;
Set him aside, he is but half a man,
Or lives with half his manhood, feeling not
That throbbing of the great wound of the world
Against his heart, in silences of night
And brief day-pauses, which being felt, may grow
Till it possesses night and day, and makes
Labour a pain and rest a sin. But they
Who in their powerless knowledge are complete
Like doctors who can analyse the death
That slays them, lo, they turn from side to side
Escaping not. One hugs the Thought and spurns
The Fact which gave it; one receives the Fact
But shapes it to his taste; one starts away
From some sharp truth which might have pierced his soul
And catches at another, soft to him
Not by its own but by his difference;
And all cry out because the Stars are pale,
Forgetting what the darkness were without them.
All weak alike, unhappy comforters,
Who scorn the lame man for his homely staff,
But cannot make him walk.

SEAFORD
I half perceive
Your meaning.

MARKHAM
Hark—he speaks to us again
Unknowing.

CYRIL
(in the hall)
Take it in a word—the man
Cries out for God; if he be perfected
He can have perfect answer—but if not
Why let him grasp the Hand that beckons him
And so grope onward till he find the Face.
Not mind, not heart, nothing but man himself,
The whole of him, with great capacities
Unfilled, and longing hopes unsatisfied;
With mighty loves, immeasurable fears;
Outsoaring joys that have no place to rest;
Eyes which Earth wearies, but which look for Heaven;
Ears which perceive all discords, and expect
Some deeper never-ceasing harmony;
Arms which relax their trembling hold on Death
And would embrace Eternity; and powers
In germ, which cannot ripen here—he, he,
Demands a creed. O, give him promises,
Glimpses of light, and mysteries of hope,
Whispers of fire that touch him everywhere,
Vast incomplete suggestions, oracles
Still undeclared, commands to be fulfilled
But not interpreted, that he may know
It is a God that speaks, that he may feel
Heaven's twilight on his face before the dawn;
But build no tabernacles for him here,
Where he is not to dwell; content him not
With fading noons of Earth, let Reason stand
Amazed, dissatisfied, submissive here;
For these confused beginnings of his life
Forestall not their clear end; he dimly sees
The depths that he shall enter, words plain now
Are not the language of another world,
And whatsoever things are fully known
Are false, for knowledge cannot compass Truth.

FIRST LAYMAN
How touches this the argument?

CYRIL
Why, even thus;
Faith is the only obstacle to faith,
The barrier is the threshold—we believe not
Because if we believe—we must believe!
Nothing but this, although the names be legion;
And, this refusal over, we may frame
For our uneasy hearts a thousand faiths
All without evidence; like one who draws
A magic circle round him and is safe
In fancy, girt by threatening images
And pressure of strange phantoms, while he thinks
If once he cross the ring, he perishes;
But let him cross it, lo, the blinding smoke
Melts from his eyes, the wide earth welcomes him,
He goes among the glorious distances
And feels the breezes and the lights of heaven!
‘Only not that,’ (so said he) ‘only not
The music of my childhood’—but it comes,
God grant it comes not late, and there is peace.

MARKHAM
(in the vestibule)
It has come now and peace shall follow it.

SEAFORD
You find him eloquent?

MARKHAM
It was his wont
To conquer all his foes by sympathy;
He sits at your heart, and so the strings must answer.
I wonder when he was a sceptic.

SEAFORD
Never.

MARKHAM
Well, I know that, yet even his anger reads
What it rejects; still he says ‘we’ not ‘you,’
And claims his brotherhood with all he hates.

SEAFORD
They touch on practice now.

MARKHAM
Let us attend.

SECOND LAYMAN
(in the hall)
But, how to stir this jelly-sort of man?
He sits among his reverend tentacles
Reaching for all the comforts, and is calm,
And tells us he is founded on a rock
(Which we believe, but want to move him from it).
Show him the sorest need, the plainest cure,
If it means work he'll say, ‘There would be risk,’
Or, ‘Nay, my friends, no zeal! Enthusiasm
Is ever digging pitfalls for the blind;
Let us be reasonable.’ You might think
That martyrs ran no risks before they died,
And saints achieved their crowns without a tear,
And great Apostles won a world for Christ
With no more toil than lilies of the field
Content with blooming. Say, what would you do
With such a placid leader?

THIRD LAYMAN
Let us have him;
The healing of some brief monotony
Is all we need—we'll make a fair exchange;
Our man's a Gladstone, breathing novelties
At every pore; under his restless hand
The sweet oldfashioned certainties are gone
And no man guesses when he goes to church
What strange device shall flout him from his prayers,
What grievous music shall afflict his ears,
What fancy-dresses mask the quiet walls
Or drape the ungainly shepherds—yet he works:
I grant him that. Would he were sooner tired!

FIRST CLERIC
O, if he works it shall be well with you;
Labour is life; still waters grow impure,
But air and action, winnowing the depths,
Maintain a healthful crystalline.

THIRD LAYMAN
Your rule
Holds strange conclusions. Work is life—or death;
But there's a trifling difference—as much,
Some might say, as between martyrdom and murder.
Is there no refuge from these working men
Who make the parish their laboratory,
The flock their corpus vile? What care we
If ten years hence, being fully educated,
He says reflectively, ‘How well I see
Where I went wrong, preferring small to great!’
We see it now, and are not satisfied
To be his matter for experiment.
I say, is there no refuge? Government
Is dying everywhere, and our rich laws
Are merely bars to action, having grown
To such luxuriance that they tangle us
Whichever way we step.

CYRIL
Our remedies
Lie ever at our feet—we tread them down
Rushing afar for help.

THIRD LAYMAN
If that were so
The body should be sounder.

CYRIL
So it should
If we were wiser, but each patient spurns
His proper cure. Systems are substitutes
(And sorry ones) for men. We want the men
For our white harvest fields—we want the men
Always and everywhere, from first to last,
The men, the multitudes that should be Christ's:
We speak not in a heathen world, like those
Who strewed the seed two thousand years ago;
The shadow of its growth should reach us all.
We stand among our brothers. All the people
Are priests and kings. What are we sent to do
For such a flock? To teach the ignorant,
Rebuke the sinful, call the wanderers home,
And minister the sacred gifts to all—
But for the men our brothers, who should know
From their youth up all that we come to teach,
Whose lives should stream to Christ, whose work should be
Not ours but one with ours, storming the breach
Beside us, if they can in front of us,
Where are they? Let the bitter disbelief,
The cold luxurious softness of the time,
Or its fierce daily labour, hardly sparing
Some scanty leisure for another world,
Answer! Nay brothers, pardon me, the sting
Pricks us no less—our scattered toilers miss
Not only strength but sympathy; the pulse
Which passing through a thousand hearts should swell
To a torrent, if it start but here and there
Is mere hysteric. 'Tis grotesque to see
The soldier at his exercise alone,
But the drilled Army is sublime. I would
A word could run along the ranks like fire
And make us, one and all, cast forth our lives
As Peter cast his net, without a hope!
That instantly, that only, that for once
Should sweep away these vapours! Nay, I am sure
That like a great wind cleansing all the air,
Our common work should purify itself
From trivial claims and foolish accidents;
The mere necessity of joining hands
Should smooth our steadfast march to victory

FOURTH LAYMAN
A goodly vision! Would the time were come!

CYRIL
We dig for ever at the roots of evil—
Plant but the good—it dies for want of room.

FOURTH LAYMAN
But how? I fix our faults upon no class;
I think all weak alike, myself among them;
I pity all the workers, and I feel
For all the loiterers, but remedy
Seems harder than disease.

CYRIL
There was a law
In wise old Athens, that in stormy times
The men who shut their doors and stayed at home
Were punished, so the calmer sort was driven
Among the fiercer, and the city throve.

FOURTH LAYMAN
How read you that for us?

CYRIL
Why thus: our critics
Should be our comrades; 'tis that element
Our blundering ardour needs. One certainty
Speaks through all contradictions, that the world
Wants mending; then, where'er the work begins,
If there be faults, and human hands we know
Do nothing perfectly, you that perceive them
Stand not aloof, but make the greater haste
To join and straighten them. When yesterday
We hurled our mission week across the land,
Who says there was not need? Some feeble voices
Talked of ‘confessing failure’—God in heaven,
Which of Thy servants thinks he has not failed?
Are all men honest? Are all women pure?
Is London as the New Jerusalem?
We fail, if one resist us to the last,
If one fall short, if one die comfortless;
O, if we have not failed, if this is all
The Cross can conquer, if with such a kingdom
Our Master is contented, eat and drink
And die to-morrow, for there is no life
Here or hereafter! Well then, having failed,
Take the child's rule and try another way,
Try all ways, and by any means save some!

THIRD LAYMAN
I hear and tremble. Wars on every side!
Contention seems the Church's atmosphere;
What chance of growth in such tempestuous seas?
Where is the ministry of peace? What hope
Is broad enough to build on?

CYRIL
Crossing threads
Make straight designs. Sages who search the skies
Find tumult in the Sun; noise of great gales
And unheard thunders round the birth of Day;
Can we believe such things? We live in them
And are amazed—but, as our world recedes
Into the quiet Future, not more dim
For us than we shall one day be for it,
These shall cease from us, while the Ages keep
The silence and the splendour which they fed,
Light, calm, beneficent, resistless Light.

ALL
Hear! hear! hear!

CYRIL
Bear with me still! I have it in my heart
To speak one word in great simplicity.
I have perceived an evil in the times
Which, if it grow, destroys us. 'Twas the fame
Of England to be truer than the world;
With this she justified her sterner ways,
For this we love her and would die for her
As for a mother, whose remembered face
Never deceived us once. But now, the work
Is hollow, and the name is not the thing,
The thought beside and not within the word,
And honesty means only not to steal,
And honour, which did once pervade us all,
Is hunted to the heights, where still she stands
Among the nobler sort, with tremulous wings
And feet that touch but rest not. Yet, believe me,
Truth holds the world back from perpetual death,
It is divine as Earth, from whose mere bosom
Grow seasons, and great trees and tender grass;
So grows the life of nations out of Truth.
Where men are false decay is natural
And certain as the very walk of Time,
Which halts not, though it linger. O my brothers,
Let us who have to mould the hearts of men
Be desperately true! No fence nor feint,
No seemly veil nor decent subterfuge,
But with our bare lives in our open palms
Let us confront the world with ‘This we are;
‘This mean and this believe; this teach and do;
‘And this, for we are human, leave undone,
‘Repenting and amending.’ So we hold
The crystal mirror straight, and keep it clean
That men may see themselves for what they are,
And feel dishonour in the least untruth
Done without speech, to compass some good end,
Never revealed. Methinks for very shame
We urge it not, being such a mere condition
Of all things good, but, if a nation's laws
Were writ in granite, and the language lost,
Should not her wise men walk through all the streets
Thundering the alphabet?

BISHOP
Here let us pause
Since the time warns us, and this final theme
Is food for meditation, not debate.
Let each man ponder in his homeward thoughts
That such a witness, whom we all revere.
Sees such a danger. Let each ask himself
If in his recent or confronting trouble
(Which all must have) there has been time or place
When any dimmer spot or blunter edge
On this first weapon in his armoury
Needed a cleansing hand, and if he find it
Let him be comforted, as having found
The root and remedy of all his evil;
And so take timely warning, one and all,
To keep our Christian honour sensitive!

[The Congress breaks up. Cyril comes out into the vestibule.