Chapter V

A little after half-past twelve Percy Brandreth Smith pushed his way patiently out through the crowd, detached himself from the stragglers on the pavement, and set out to walk eastwards. He had told them at home, after a very diplomatic mention of the fact that he was going to hear a preacher in the West-end whose name he had forgotten, that he would get something to eat for himself, and wouldn't be back till tea. So he had three or four hours to himself.

His first determination was that he must walk, fast and far. Eating must take care of itself. Perhaps he would have something later on; perhaps not. At any rate he could not face Reggie just now; he had half intended to suggest their lunching together. But that was impossible. He must be alone; he must sort himself out....

For that thing had happened which does occasionally happen at the reading of a book, at the meeting of a new friend or at the hearing of a sermon. That thing had happened to Percy which appears at first to be an entire overturning of the whole scheme of life, to be a revelation of a completely new set of facts whose existence had never been suspected.

First, he had never in all his life heard a sermon which in the smallest degree resembled that to which he had listened just now. Sermons, up to that point in his life — since he had experience only of the most moderate of Anglicanism — had signified the reading of some manuscript

Digitized by Google pages or, at the best, the delivery of a discourse with the help of notes, sometimes tolerable in its interest, sometimes intolerable in its dullness. These sermons had been sometimes the careful exposition of a sentence of Scripture, with a moral exhortation at the end; sometimes they were descriptive and drew pictures of scenes in the Holy Land with a group of unconvincing persons, who tripped over their long robes (if stained-glass windows were trustworthy), in the foreground; sometimes they were argumentative settings forth of doctrines that never erred through the immoderateness of their demands upon the mind, and all ended with a moral exhortation.

This sermon had been entirely different. There was no manuscript; there was no application at the end beginning with some such sentence as: " And now, my dear^brethren, let us see how this all comes home to ourselves here and now." It had been a steady rapid utterance, even conversational at times, dealing with familiar old facts indeed — but dealing with them in a wholly different way; treating them as if they were as much facts as tables and chairs and as real as falling in love; not as if they were a series of propositions, true indeed, but true as the higher branches of mathematics are true or the simpler formula? of chemistry — true apart from what all human beings know as the experiences of their conscious life.

Secondly, these truths appeared to be part of the very fabric of the preacher's own life. The Love of God, on which he had preached — that Love which hitherto Percy, as a good boy, had taken for granted much as he took for granted the distance from the earth to the sun — appeared, instead, to be as much a fact as the sunlight on earth. It was conditioned for us and presented to us, the preacher had remarked, in the life of Jesus Christ; in fact, the text said as much. It is therefore not only by the imita-

Digitized by Google tion of Christ but by actual union with Him that this Love becomes and remains the driving force of the soul. It sounds bald, put like that; yet bald was the very last word that could be applied to the enunciation by Father Hilary, For it appeared to Percy, as he listened, that this extraordinary personality in the pulpit, this tender face, those radiant, serene eyes, and this clear, artless voice — all these things through which that personality had seized upon and affected him from the very moment that the text was finished, were what they were because they lived and moved and drew their being from precisely that which was the subject of the sermon — the " Love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

It was this personality, of course, that had done the work. There was not one single thought in the sermon — except a few at the end — on which Percy could not have passed a theological examination a week ago. These few at the end, however, had interested him intensely: for it appeared from them that there was in the Catholic Religion a system of what were called Sacraments — sacraments that sounded, somehow, quite different from those "two generally necessary to salvation " with which he was acquainted — by which this union with Jesus Christ (which, in its turn, meant a union with the Love of God) could be promoted and consummated. This was what had been said; but it was the personality that had mattered — the personality in which these things seemed embodied, like sunlight in clear water.

Briefly, then, that had been his experience. But it meant enormously more to him, psychologically. That had happened to him which can, as has been said, only be described by saying that it appeared to him as if his whole life had been turned upside-down. All the things that had seemed to him important, appeared now unimportant

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— his office work, his home — little imaginative dramas that he acted to himself. And all the things that had seemed unimportant — religious doctrines, the way he behaved, his attitude towards people, and, above all, towards the Personage whom he called God — these appeared vital, overwhelming and entrancing.

The event that had happened to him is called, sometimes, Conversion....

Half-way up the Long Walk in Kensington Gardens he began to be able to formulate some of those things to himself; and to see how completely values had been changed for him. Up to that point he had been aware of nothing except that something seemed to have emerged from himself whose existence he had not previously even suspected — emerged, as a slender winged creature emerges shivering and iridescent from dark water into warm sunshine. And this creature began to shake out and unfold its wings, and colours to throb and mature in every part of its body.

If he had been questioned closely at this point, he would have said that the Person of Jesus Christ had become real to him, as suddenly as if a picture had come alive. The preacher had told him nothing on the matter which he had not known before; but it appeared to him as if all he had known had been but a mask. Now the mask was dropped. This new Person had qualities he had not previously dreamed of. He was no longer the pained, meek Person he had thought Him.... He was huge and virile and infinitely tender.... He was everything that was worth anything.... He was the Heart of all colour, the Melody of all music, the Perfection of all shape, the Essence of all sweetness... Another name for Him was the Love of God.... The Love of God was not, then, a

Digitized by Google bland, impersonal atmosphere, after all: it was a Person without the limitations of Personality but with all its reality.... And this Person stood now in the midst of a System which previously Percy had called " Romanism."... He thought he began to understand this now. The ceremonies he had seen were still as unintelligible as ever; but their very unintelligibilities had become as significant as court etiquette. They were, taken by themselves, as foolish as the gestures of a signaller with a flag, until it is perceived that they have a purpose; then, even though the purpose is not known, nor the message, they become oddly eloquent and attractive. It all meant something. He saw that now. Whereas the very intelligibility — the intellectuality, so to speak— of his own Anglican worship — the fact that he understood and followed every word of the Book of Common Prayer; the complete reasonableness; the weighed sentences; the careful and expressive intonation of the reader's voice — all the plainness and intelligibility of these things suggested that there was nothing expressed by them that the intellect could hot apprehend, and therefore nothing that could be abjectly worshipped. It was like passing from the study of a Republican President, to the ante-chamber of a crowned and anointed King....

Then Percy began to see that the whole of life was different for ever and ever. He might have to go on doing the same things; he had no alternative programme to suggest; but they could never be the same. He began to perceive, incoherently at first, and more clearly later, that the " things " he did had become, simultaneously, of infinite value and weight and of no importance at all. It did not matter what he did, or what the outer details of his life were, so long as they were permissible by the New Law; it mattered vitally and eternally why and how he did

Digitized by Google them.. •. This is a cold and passionless analysis of what was, as a matter of fact, now making this boy's heart to beat and his nerves to tingle.

As he considered these things, still walking as on springs, he saw people go past him: couples walking together; three children with a nurse; a rider or two far across the meadows; a boy in a frilled collar throwing a stick for a retriever to fetch. He heard the usual sounds: the roll of wheels, voices, the soft wind in the evergreens. He was conscious of the sunlight on his face, of the breeze on his left cheek; he looked down at his own feet moving below his knees. And these things, too, appeared to have become new... •

He thought of the preacher's face sometimes, pallid against the dark pillar, lit by the eyes; of the intonations of his voice. It seemed astonishing to him that the whole world did not know of all these things.

For Percy had no struggle of the intellect at all. The words he had heard and the statements and arguments — (though these had been very few) — found no intellectual obstacles in the boy's mind. He had never even questioned the main dogmas of Christianity: he had accepted them always, since they had been taught to him. So there was no intellectual struggle. It was simply that the great bare structure that he had called Christianity — an affair of poles and ropes and frames, barely disguised with a few sentimental wreaths here and there — had blazed out into fire. There had been no damp doubts to check the conflagration. It had all flared up into glory together, vast and triumphant and dominant.

So his mind went round and round, retreading in its own steps without fatigue. It is as indescribable as fall-

Digitized by Google ing in love. It is more indescribable, since it cannot be reduced to terms of flesh and blood or of a materialistic philosophy. It comes to some, in a measure, under other aspects; it comes in the Quaker meeting-house and at the penitent form of the Salvation Army; but it comes to none with the same vastness of appeal as in Catholicism — to none with the same simultaneous assault along every line of human nature at once — along the intellect, by the way of theology; along the heart by the way of the affections; along the Will in the name of Obedience. He dimly saw this. He understood that there was an enormous Creed which he would have to master — if, indeed, this way was for him; a discipline of the heart and a training of the will. He saw that History played its part, and philosophy, and things to eat and drink, and prayers to say. He saw that there was no part of common life which would not have to be affected.

Then he put all this away. This was not his business. Besides, the thing was too great altogether, and also not great enough. There was only one thing that mattered — more real to him than the sunlight which was its symbol and the breeze that was the illustration of the Way of the Spirit — the Love of God which is in Jesus Christ our Lord.

Ill

He had reduced his raging turmoil of happy bewilderment to some kind of coherence by the time that he got into the slow Sunday train for Hanstead, and he looked upon his fellow-creatures now with a completely unconscious contempt.

These people — this group of loud-voiced young men in black coats with buttonholes; that dismal family party of father and mother and three children — all this strange jetsam that the Sunday tide throws up in the terminal sta-

Digitized by Google tions; the bleak-looking woman selling Lloyd's News behind a counter — these people did not understand at all. He felt like a dragon-fly looking down on grubs that had once been his fellows....

He had arrived at some sort of coherence. First, he must be entirely different at home. Now that the " Love of God which is in Christ Jesus " had displayed itself, he must give up once for all that tiresome, critical, prickly attitude that had grown on him of late. But, of course, he would give it up: it was gone already. It was unthinkable.

Next, he must be exceedingly conscientious about his work... he must not draw pictures on the blotting-paper any more....

Next, a certain entire plane of imagination must cease. It had ceased. It was unthinkable. Fourthly, he must say his prayers always... not less than a quarter of an hour every morning and evening. Fifthly, he must go to Evening Prayer after tea — (that reminded him; he hadn't had any lunch: he had walked all the way to Liverpool Street instead) — and sing in " Gadsby in C."

Sixthly, he must convey to his family — one by one if possible — where he had been and... and what had happened to him.

These things, then, he pondered, looking dreamily out at the stations where the train stopped, sitting all alone in a third-class carriage, with his hands pressed between his knees. He thought once or twice of the girl over whose bag he had tripped last Thursday, though from an infinitely remote distance of emotion; and wondered whether she knew all about those things too.... He supposed not.... He pictured himself telling her.... He wondered whether he could make her understand.... He supposed not.

Anyhow, it did not matter. He understood, at least.

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