21. CHAPTER XXI.
BOLTON AND ST. JOHN.
ST. JOHN was seated in his study, with a book of
meditations before him on which he was endeavoring
to fix his mind. In the hot, dusty, vulgar atmosphere
of modern life, it was his daily effort to bring
around himself the shady coolness, the calm conventual
stillness, that breathes through such writers as St.
Francis de Sales and Thomas à Kempis, men with a
genius for devotion, who have left to mankind records
of the mile-stones and road-marks by which they traveled
towards the highest things. Nor should the most
stringent Protestant fail to honor that rich and grand
treasury of the experience of devout spirits of which
the Romish Church has been the custodian. The hymns
and prayers and pious meditations which come to us
through this channel are particularly worthy of a cherishing
remembrance in this dusty, materialistic age.
To St. John they had a double charm, by reason of their
contrast with the sterility of the religious forms of his
early life. While enough of the Puritan and Protestant
remained in him to prevent his falling at once into the
full embrace of Romanism, he still regarded the old
fabric with a softened, poetic tenderness; he “took
pleasure in her stones and favored the dust thereof.”
Nor is it to be denied that in the history of the
Romish Church are records of heroism and self-devotion
which might justly inspire with ardor the son of a line
of Puritans. Who can go beyond St. Francis Xavier in
the signs of an apostle? Who labored with more utter
self-surrender than Father Claver for the poor negro
slaves of South America? And how magnificent are those
standing Orders of Charity, composed of men and women
of that communion, that have formed from age to age
a life-guard of humanity, devoted to healing the sick,
sheltering and educating the orphans, comforting the
dying!
A course of eager reading in this direction might
make it quite credible even that a Puritan on the rebound
should wish to come as near such a church as is possible
without sacrifice of conscience and reason.
In the modern Anglican wing of the English Church
St. John thought he had found the blessed medium.
There he believed were the signs of the devotion, the
heroism and self-sacrifice of the primitive Catholic
Church, without the hindrances and incrustations of
superstition. That little record, “Ten Years in St.
George's Mission,” was to him the seal of their calling.
There he read of men of property devoting their entire
wealth, their whole time and strength, to the work of
regenerating the neglected poor of London. He read
of a district that at first could be entered only under the
protection of the police, where these moral heroes began
their work of love amid the hootings and howlings of
the mob and threats of personal violence,—the scoff and
scorn of those they came to save; and how by the might
of Christian love and patience these savage hearts were
subdued, these blasphemies turned to prayers; and how
in this dark district arose churches, schools, homes for
the destitute, reformatories for the lost. No wonder St.
John, reading of such a history, felt, “This is the church
for me.” Perhaps a wider observation might have shown
him that such labors and successes are not peculiar to
the ritualist, that to wear the cross outwardly is not
essential to bearing the cross inwardly, and that without
signs and the symbolism of devout forms, the spirit of
love, patience and self-denial can and does accomplish
the same results.
St. John had not often met Bolton before that evening
at the Henderson's. There, for the first time, he
had had a quiet, uninterrupted conversation with him;
and, from the first, there had been felt between them that
constitutional sympathy that often unites widely varying
natures, like the accord of two different strings of an
instrument.
Bolton was less of an idealist than St. John, with a
wider practical experience and a heavier mental caliber.
He was in no danger of sentimentalism, and yet there
was about him a deep and powerful undertone of feeling
that inclined him in the same direction with Mr. St. John.
There are men, and very strong men, whose natures
gravitate towards Romanism with a force only partially
modified by intellectual convictions: they would be glad
to believe it if they could.
Bolton was an instance of a man of high moral and
intellectual organization, of sensitive conscience and intense
sensibility, who, with the highest ideal of manhood
and of the purposes to which life should be devoted, had
come to look upon himself as an utter failure. An
infirmity of the brain and the flesh had crept upon him
in the unguarded period of youth, had struck its poison
through his system, and weakened the power of the will,
till all the earlier part of his life had been a series of the
most mortifying failures. He had fallen from situation
after situation, where he had done work for a season:
and, each time, the agony of his self-reproach and despair
had been doubled by the reproaches and expostulations
of many of his own family friends, who poured upon bare
nerves the nitric acid of reproach. He had seen the hair
of his mother slowly and surely whitening in the sickening
anxieties and disappointments which he had brought.
Loving her with almost a lover's fondness, desiring above
all things to be her staff and stay, he had felt himself to
be to her only an anxiety and a disappointment.
When, at last, he had gained a foothold and a place
in the press, he was still haunted with the fear of recurring
failure. He who has two or three times felt his
sanity give way, and himself become incapable of rational
control, never thereafter holds himself secure.
And so it was with this overpowering impulse to which
Bolton had been subjected; he did not know at what
time it might sweep over him again.
Of late, his intimacy had been sought by Eva, and
he had yielded to the charm of her society. It was
impossible for a nature at once so sympathetic and so
transparent as hers to mingle intimately with another
without learning and betraying much. The woman's
tact at once divined that his love for Caroline had only
grown with time, and the scarce suppressed eagerness with
which he listened to any tidings from her led on from
step to step in mutual confidence, till there was nothing
more to be told, and Bolton felt that the only woman he
had ever loved, loved him in return with a tenacity and
intensity which would be controlling forces in her life.
It was with a bitter pleasure nearly akin to pain that
this conviction entered his soul. To a delicate moral
organization, the increase of responsibility, with distrust
of ability to meet it, is a species of torture. He feared
himself destined once more to wreck the life and ruin
the hopes of one dearer than his own soul, who was
devoting herself to him with a woman's uncalculating
fidelity.
This agony of self-distrust, this conscious weakness
in his most earnest resolutions and most fervent struggles,
led Bolton to wish with all his heart that the beautiful
illusion of an all-powerful church in which still
resided the visible presence of Almighty God might be a
reality. His whole soul sometimes cried out for such a
visible Helper—for a church with power to bind and
loose, with sacraments which should supplement human
weakness by supernatural grace, with a priesthood competent
to forgive sin and to guide the penitent. It was
simply and only because his clear, well-trained intelligence
could see no evidence of what he longed to believe,
that the absolute faith was wanting.
He was not the only one in this perplexed and hopeless
struggle with life and self and the world who has
cried out for a visible temple, such as had the ancient
Jew; for a visible High-Priest, who should consult the
oracle for him and bring him back some sure message
from a living God.
When he looked back on the seasons of his failures,
he remembered that it was with vows and tears and
prayers of agony in his mouth that he had been swept
away by the burning temptation; that he had been
wrenched, cold and despairing, from the very horns of
the altar. Sometimes he looked with envy at those
refuges which the Romish Church provides for those
who are too weak to fight the battle of life alone, and
thought, with a sense of rest and relief, of entering some
of those religious retreats where a man surrenders his
whole being to the direction of another, and ends the
strife by laying down personal free agency at the feet
of absolute authority. Nothing but an unconvinced intellect—an
inability to believe—stood in the way of this
entire self-surrender. This morning, he had sought Mr.
St. John's study, to direct his attention to the case of the
young woman whom he had rescued from the streets, the
night before.
Bolton's own personal experience of human weakness
and the tyranny of passion had made him intensely pitiful.
He looked on the vicious and the abandoned as a
man shipwrecked and swimming for his life looks on the
drowning who are floating in the waves around him;
and where a hand was wanting, he was prompt to stretch
it out.
There was something in that young, haggard face,
those sad, appealing eyes, that had interested him more
powerfully than usual, and he related the case with much
feeling to Mr. St. John, who readily promised to call and
ascertain if possible some further particulars about her.
“You did the very best possible thing for her,” said
he, “when you put her into the care of the Church. The
Church alone is competent to deal with such cases.”
Bolton ruminated within himself on the wild, diseased
impulses, the morbid cravings and disorders, the
complete wreck of body and soul that comes of such a
life as the woman had led, and then admired the serene
repose with which St. John pronounced that indefinite
power, the CHURCH, as competent to cast out the seven
devils of the Magdalen.
“I shall be very glad to hear good news of her,” he
said; “and if the Church is strong enough to save such
as she, I shall be glad to know that too.”
“You speak in a skeptical tone,” said St. John.
“Pardon me: I know something of the difficulties,
physical and moral, which lie in the way,” said Bolton.
“To them that believe, nothing shall be impossible,”
said St. John, his face kindling with ardor.
“And by the Church do you mean all persons who
have the spirit of Jesus Christ, or simply that portion of
them who worship in the form that you do?”
“Come, now,” said St. John, “the very form of your
question invites to a long historic argument; and I am
sure you did not mean to draw that on your head.”
“Some other time, though,” said Bolton, “if you will
undertake to convince me of the existence in this world
of such a power as you believe in, you will find me certainly
not unwilling to believe. But, this morning, I have
but a brief time to spend. Farewell, for the present.”
And with a hearty hand-shake the two parted.
