Part 6
He heard her out, did not attempt to controvert her arguments, and went away to live the life that seemed good in his own eyes.
She saw him several times, heard of him again and again, and never desisted from appealing to his better nature. But gradually he slipped out of religion, gradually he became less respectable, and at last he definitely so it seemed abandoned all struggle to be his highest.
The adjutant went to him in his home. The woman was not there. It was now the moment for her great appeal. With all the tenderness of her gentle character she made the man feel the difference in his present state and that of only a few months ago, when he was living in purity and serving God by trying to make other people better. He was softened, and in his relenting mood she pressed home to his heart the condition of the woman's soul with whom he was living in sin. Was she really good? Was she pure? Was she willing to live as God wanted all pure women to live in service for others? Could he say solemnly before God that he was not preventing her by this life of sin from uniting her will with the will of God from being her best possible?
He listened, wretched and unhappy, to her searching words. He knew their truth. Gradually this girl who had come to him like a spaniel, and who had seemed so sweet, affectionate, and pliant, had drifted into bad habits, had associated with women living a life like her own, was
now hardening and growing dark of soul. The life was not a good one. But he was fond of her still. For him, there was no other woman in the world. What was he to do?
The Salvationist asked him to give her up, spoke about placing her in the Army's home for such women, made him hold the hope that one day this poor sinner might be herself rescuing the fallen and unfortunate.
He lifted his head at that. 'I won't hinder you,' he said. 'I tell you what. I won't turn her out of doors, but if she goes, I won't go after her.'
That was the extent of his sacrifice.
If it was not the utterance of one's idea of a converted soul, at least it was not very unlike some of St. Augustine's earlier prayers. How different, at any rate, from the thing he would have said before conversion.
An appeal to the woman succeeded, after much persuasion, in moving her heart towards renunciation. She agreed to leave the man, and said she would go into the rescue home.
That very night the adjutant took her to London, carried her to the home, and remained with her till the next day. But morning brought disillusion to the girl's mind. She had not suffered remorse, she was not spiritual, for a cleansed mind and a pure soul she had no longing or desire. For the rest, the home did not appeal to her sympathies. She had no broken and contrite spirit, such as that of the women in the place, most of them gladly content to work out their repentance in humility and silence and shadow. The girl was not conscious of sin. She would not stay.
So the adjutant was obliged to bring her back, and the girl returned to the man.
He was now lost to the Army. He was, in technical phrase, a backslider. The world might have pointed to him with amusement as an example of these emotional conversions. Even the adjutant herself thought of him as a lost sheep.
No news of him came to the Salvation Army, he dropped out of that busy ministering life, he sank in the depths of the poor quarters, where religion apparently has no power.
And yet, hear the sequel.
The union was not happy. Man and woman, sinking together, with no sacred affection to make them even kindly and forbearing to each other, quarrelled and came to blows. They parted; the woman to form another evil alliance, the man to take back his wife.
Long after this, the adjutant received her marching orders. A special service was organized for the night of her departure, a service of farewell to the best friend of the poor and the outcast who had ever worked in that town.
To her surprise the man attended this meeting, and at its conclusion he came to the penitent form.
Now there was no occasion for him to make this appearance, he derived no advantage by kneeling with the penitent, his attendance was his own will, his penitence requiring no little courage was entirely his own thought. One thinks that perhaps his failure to live the highest life was only a failure in relativity, that the adjutant's failure with her convert was apparent rather than real. For from this man she presently received a manly letter of good-bye, a letter which confessed his weakness, implored her forgiveness, and expressed his gratitude for her kindness the letter of a backslider, but one whose sliding had not carried him right back. Is this not a case where one may attach a new meaning to a hackneyed phrase, and verily say,' 'Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all'?
The failures of the Salvation Army! What a book might be written of these people! However far they fall one cannot think that they ever forget the hour of their penitence, the moment of their vision, and the desire of their hearts for cleanness and mercy. In the larger self, that vast field of unexplored consciousness, the memory of these things works toward some end in their destiny, wholly good and wholly pure. A profound thought, deeply planted, can never be rooted from the mind, and a soul that has once looked and recognized and desired the highest can never for the rest of existence be perfectly satisfied with the lowest. One thinks that the failures pray in secret, some of them, and that nearly all of them this I feel is really true and important to remember never become so bad as they might have been.
It's wiser being good than bad; It's safer being meek than fierce: It's fitter being sane than mad. My own hope is, a sun will pierce The thickest cloud earth ever stretched; That, after Last, returns the First, Though a wide compass round be fetched; That what began best, can't end worst, Nor what God blessed once, prove accursed!
POSTSCRIPT
I THINK that every reader who brings an unprejudiced mind to the study of these narratives will feel and confess the wonder and the power of religion. But scepticism will raise two objections. We shall be told, first, that it is doubtful whether these conversions last; and, second, that the word religion is merely an unscientific term for mental excitement. The value of the conversions will be depreciated by the first criticism; their testimony to the truth of religion assailed by the second. I am anxious to meet these two objections which are so general in modern society, modern society with its mouth full of negations and its soul empty of affirmations, and to show their shallowness. Most of the men whose stories are narrated in these pages have carried their regeneration over several years; not one of them has been recently converted. Such tremendous change lasting over a week, over a month, would be wonderful and worth while; what does scepticism say when all of these conversions are declared to be a matter of years? And here is a brief story of a man converted by the Salvation Army long before it had assumed its present form and title, while it was still known among the polite as the Christian Mission, and among the common people as the Top-Hat Brigade, the story of a man who has continued in his conversion, through difficulty and obstruction, all those long years down to the present day.
John Garry ran away from home at the age of fourteen, and attached himself to a travelling circus. He is described as a 'smart and wicked brat, as good a boy at the game as you could meet.' The immorality of this troupe did not shock him in the least. He proved himself is cunning and impudent a rogue as ever lived a vagabond life. Illtreated, badly fed, and overworked by his masters, he yet kept his audacity and cheekiness, and saw that he got as much pleasure as possible out of the general wickedness of the company. When he reached manhood he was a dipsomaniac. Turned away from circus after circus, he took at last to a cadger's life, and became what is called an 'unemployable.' He got drinks by performing tricks in public-
houses, such, for instance, as eating a cat. For what is called 'a navvy's price,' in other words, 'a bob and a pot,' he undertook to eat any dead cat that was brought to him in that bar, and the winning of this wager established for him the name of 'The Cat Eater.' He lived also largely by crime, and was always in hiding from the police. Once, when he was sleeping in some bushes on a London common, he woke up to find a band of people gathered together beside a tent quite close to him. The men were in black coats and tall hats. The Cat Eater instantly imagined that they were detectives. When they saw him, spoke to him, and said that they were going to hold a religious service, inviting him to join them, he replied that if it were a job to nab him, he would surely murder some of them. Still unconvinced by their assurances, he suffered himself to enter the tent, and there he was converted. He felt a desire for betterment. He prayed for mercy. He told the missionaries the story of his life, and said that he would begin again from that moment. They were kind to him, helped him to make a fresh start, and watched over his new birth. He married one of the women who had seen him in his rags and wretchedness kneeling as a penitent at that first meeting. And now, in his old age, he and his wife are prosperous and happy people, carrying on a good business in London, and following their religion with devotion. Never once through all these long years of incessant labour has the exdipsomaniac, the ex-cadger, the ex-unemployable, the ex-cat eater, looked back to his evil life. Older, then, than the Salvation Army itself is this conversion, and I could fill pages with similar stories. I ask the reader, who has not studied the question for himself, to believe my assurance that the records of conversion testify in an overwhelming percentage to lifelong victories. There is no question of that. And after all, as one endeavoured to point out in ' Apparent Failure,' the relapses among converted people only witness to the tremendous conflict in every man's soul between good and evil, only serve to make more vital an apprehension of this eternal duality in nature, only bring home to us the significance of this struggle, and the tremendous need for religion as a force in the conflict. Why the struggle to be good? Can materialism explain that? Why does religion convert at all? Can scepticism declare it?
But is it 'religion'? Here we reach the second objection of sceptical people.
I want to point this out and to make it real, that however science may explain the psychological side of conversion, however convincingly it may show us that religion is a clumsy term for describing emotional excitement, science itself cannot and does not save the lost and rescue the abandoned. Science cannot do this; it knows how it is done, and yet cannot itself do the thing which it assures us is not a miracle; and science does not do it, does not desire to do it, for the very reason that it lacks the religious impulse which alone can accomplish the miracle, the miracle not only of converting people, but of making conversion of the evil and the bad a passion of the life of the good and the virtuous. It is really not so wonderful that religion should transform character and give new birth to personality as that it should inspire pure and holy people with a love for the degraded, the base, and the lost. That is, it seems to me, the great testimony of conversion, the love and the faith of those good and gentle souls who give their lives in rescuing the outcasts of society. Religion alone can create this sublime impulse.
A poor creature of my acquaintance, intellectually crippled and paralysed by success in the schools, endeavours to persuade me that there is no merit in this devotion and sacrifice of good people, because they like to do it, because they love doing it. And I in vain endeavour to make him perceive that unless they loved this work and were happy in it, there would be neither miracle nor merit. For is it not the most profound of Christ's revelations that all sacrifice of self and all labour for righteousness, without love, are of no avail? It is their love of saving souls which most testifies to the truth of religion. My poor critic, who never yet raised his finger to help a fallen creature, can charge good people with loving unselfish labour, but cannot explain how it is they come to love it. That is religion. To the unprejudiced reader I offer this book, with the request that he will contemplate the narratives with honesty and common sense, considering within himself these simple reflections:
Men, radically bad, radically evil a burden to the State, a scandal to
civilization, and a disgrace to humanity become, under the influence of religion, good, honest, industrious, and kind.
Homes where children suffer frightfully, where privation and tyranny obscure all the beauty and all the blessing of existence; homes so base, vile, and cruel that they cannot be described, become, under the influence of religion, happy, virtuous, and glad.
Vices which degrade men lower than the brutes, which make them loathsome in the sight of respectable people, and fill our prisons and workhouses with an immense burden on the community, under the influence of religion lose every fibre of their power, and drop away from the strangled souls of their victims like dead ivy, like an outworn garment.
Sins and crimes which retard the progress of the race, which breed corruption, degeneration, and prosperous misery, under the influence of religion cease to have power over the minds of men, and in the instant of conversion appear horrible and inimical. Let the reader bear these things in mind, and ask himself what would become of humanity if materialism triumphed over religion, and life were revealed to the masses of the human race only as a struggle for existence. Could the law, could eugenics, assure us of evolution? Socrates confessed that it was through a hard struggle that he attained virtue. An ultra-evolutionist would have eliminated him in his first stage. Nero, on the other hand, set out well.' Professor Goldwin Smith, who makes this telling remark, might have cited with Socrates the great Augustine, St. Francis, David, and many another whose struggle towards righteousness has sustained and assisted generation after generation of men struggling to attain their highest. Hear him on the necessity, even from a material point of view, for religion in its sanction of the conscience: 'But if this life ends all, I do not see how conscience can retain its authority. The authority of conscience, it seems to me, is religious. In the absence of such a sanction what can there be to prevent a man from following his own inclinations, good or bad, beneficent or murderous, so long as he keeps within the pale of the law, or manages
to escape the police? One man is a lamb by nature, another is a tiger. Why is not the tiger, as well as the lamb to follow his nature, so far as the law will let him or as he has power? Eccelino, for instance, was by nature a devil incarnate, a sort of Satanic enthusiast of evil. What had merely utilitarian morality to say against his gratification of his propensities as long as he had power on his side?'
The common sense of this subject is that life without conscience becomes a destroying animalism, and that conscience without religion has neither force nor justification for its restraints.
Those who know life deeply and intimately, who are profoundly acquainted with all the suffering, sorrow, misery, and sin of cities and villages, those whose studies are not limited to books read in a library, or to discussions accidentally started in a drawing-room, know as the first axiom of their knowledge that religion alone among all the forces at work for the improvement of humanity has power to alter the character and regenerate the soul of evil people. Legislation may better house the poor, may educate their children, limit the opportunities for drink and crime, and punish evildoers with a saner and more determined effort at their moral reformation, but without religion they will never give spiritual joy and rejoicing strength to the posterity on which evolution depends.
'No heart is pure that is not passionate; no virtue is safe that is not enthusiastic.'
When I visit the happy homes and experience the gentleness, kindness, and refinement of such people as those whose life-stories appear in this book, and compare them with the squalor and misery of the great majority of homes surrounding them, I am astonished that the world should be so incredulous about religion, and that legislation should be so foolish as to attempt to do laboriously by enactments, clumsy and slow, what might be done instantly and easily by religion, if it had the full force of the community at its back. Greater faith is necessary to the salvation of this country. Without God, vain is the work of the builders.