There & Back by George MacDonald (acx book reading .txt) 📕

friend!"

"I am well aware of that! Everything worth knowing in the parish, and a good deal that is not, comes to my ears."

"May I hope you count Miss Brown's affairs worth hearing about, then?"

"Of course I do! Does not a lady call her friend, whose acquaintance I have long wished to make! and do I not know that Miss Brown loves her in return! I cannot help sometimes regretting for a moment that four-footed friends in general are so short-lived."

"Why only for a moment?" said Barbara.

"Because I remind myself that it must be best for them and us-best for the friendship between us, best for us every way. But indeed I have more to be thankful for in the relation than most people of my acquaintance, for I sometimes drive a pony yet that is over forty!"

"Forty years of age!"

"Yes."

"I should like to see that pony!"

"You shall see her, any day you will come to the parsonage. I will gladly introduce her to you, but it is getting rather late to desire her acquaintance: she does not see very well, and is not so good-tempered as she once was. But she will soon be better."

"How do you mean?"

"She has a process to go through out of which she will come ever so much the better."

"Good gracious! you're not going to have an operation performed on her-at her age?"

"She is going to have her body stript off her!"

"Good gracious!" cried Barbara again, but with yet greater energy-then seeing what he meant, laughed at her mistake.

"But then," she said, with eager resumption, "you must believe there is something to strip her body off? I do! I have always thought so!"

"So have I, and so I do indeed!" answered Wingfold. "I can't prove it. I can't prove anything-to my own satisfaction, that is, though I dare say I might to the satisfaction of one who did not love the creatures enough to be anxious about them. I don't think you can prove anything that is worth being anxious about."

"Then why do you believe it?" asked Barbara, influenced by the talk of the century.

"Because I can ," answered Wingfold. "To believe and to be able to prove, have little or nothing to do with each other. To believe and to convince have much to do with each other."

"But," persisted Barbara, with Richard in her mind, "how are you to be sure of a thing you can't prove?"

"That's a good question, and this is my answer," said Wingfold:-"What you love, you already believe enough to put it to the proof of trial. My life is such a proving; and the proof is so promising that it fills me with the happiest hope. To prove with your brains the thing you love, would be to deck the garments of salvation with a useless fringe. Shall I search heaven and earth for proof that my wife is a good and lovely woman? The signs of it are everywhere; the proofs of it nowhere."

They walked along for a while, side by side, in silence. Which had turned and gone with the other neither knew. Barbara was beginning already to feel that safety which almost everybody sooner or later came to feel in Wingfold's company-a safety born of the sense that, in the closest talk, he never lay in wait for a victory, but took his companion, as one of his own people, into the end after which he was striving.

"Then," said Barbara at length, still thinking of Richard, "if you believe that even the beasts are saved, you must think it very bad of a man not to believe in a God!"

"I should think anyhow that he didn't care much about the beasts-that he hadn't a heart big enough to take the beasts in!"

"But he couldn't, you know, if he didn't believe in God!"

"I understand; only, if he loved the poor beasts very much, and thought what a bad time they have of it in the world, I don't know how he could help hoping at least, that there was a God somewhere who would somehow make up to them for it all! For my own part I don't know how to be content except the beasts themselves, when it is all over and the good time come, are able to say, 'After all, it is well worth it, bad as it was!'"

"But what if it was just that suffering that made the man think there could not be a God, or he would put a stop to it?"

"That looks to me very close to believing in God."

"How do you make that out?"

"If a man believed in a God that did not heed the suffering of the creation, one who made men and women and beasts knowing that they must suffer, and suffer only-and went on believing so however you set him thinking about it, I should say to him, 'You believe in a devil, and so are in the way to become a devil yourself.' A thousand times rather would I believe that there was no God, and that the misery came by chance from which there was no escape. What I do believe is, that there is a God who is even now doing his best to take all men and all beasts out of the misery in which they find themselves."

"But why did he let them come into it?"

"That the God will tell them, to their satisfaction, so soon as ever they shall have become capable of understanding it. There must be things so entirely beyond our capacity, that we cannot now see enough of them to be able even to say that they are incomprehensible. There must be millions of truths that have not yet risen above the horizon of what we call the finite."

"Then you would not think a person so very, very wicked, for not believing in a God?"

"That depends on the sort of God he fancied himself asked to believe in. Would you call a Greek philosopher wicked for not believing in Mercury or Venus? If a man had the same notion of God that I have, or anything like it, and did not at least desire that there might be such a God, then I confess I should have difficulty in understanding how he could be good. But the God offered him might not be worth believing in, might even be such that it was a virtuous act to refuse to believe in him."

"One thing more, Mr. Wingfold-and you must not think I am arguing against you or against God, for if I thought there was no God, I should just take poison:-tell me, mightn't a man think the idea of such a God as you believe in, too good to be true?"

"I should need to know something of his history, rightly to understand that. Why should he be able to think anything too good to be true? Why should a thing not be true because it was good? It seems to me, if a thing be bad, it cannot possibly be true. If you say the thing is, I answer it exists because of something under the badness. Badness by itself can have no life in it. But if the man really thought as you suggest, I would say to him, 'You cannot know such a being does not exist: is it possible you should be content that such a being should not exist? If such a being did exist, would you be content never to find him, but to go on for ever and ever saying, He can't be! He can't be! He's so good he can't be! Supposing you find one day that there he is, will your defence before him be satisfactory to yourself: "There he is after all, but he was too good to believe in, therefore I did not try to find him"? Will you say to him-" If you had not been so good, if you had been a little less good, a little worse, just a trifle bad, I could and would have believed in you?" '"

"But if the man could not believe there was any such being, how could he have heart to look for him?"

"If he believed the idea of him so good, yet did not desire such a being enough to wish that he might be, enough to feel it worth his while to cry out, in some fashion or other, after him, then I could not help suspecting something wrong in his will, or his moral nature somewhere; or, perhaps, that the words he spoke were but words, and that he did not really and truly feel that the idea of such a God was too good to be true. In any such case his maker would not have cause to be satisfied with him. And if his maker was not satisfied with what he had made, do you think the man made would have cause to be satisfied with himself?"

"But if he was made so?"

"Then no good being, not to say a faithful creator, would blame him for what he could not help. If the God had made his creature incapable of knowing him, then of course the creature would not feel that he needed to know him. He would be where we generally imagine the lower animals-unable, therefore not caring to know who made him."

"But is not that just the point? A man may say truly, 'I don't feel I want to know anything about God; I do not believe I am made to understand him; I take no interest in the thought of a God'!"

"Before I could answer you concerning such a man, I should want to know whether he had not been doing as he knew he ought not to do, living as he knew he ought not to live, and spoiling himself, so spoiling the thing that God had made that, although naturally he would like to know about God, yet now, through having by wrong-doing injured his deepest faculty of understanding, he did not care to know anything concerning him."

"What could be done for such a man?"

"God knows-God does know. I think he will make his very life a terrible burden, so that for pure misery he will cry to him."

"But suppose he was a man who tried to do right, who tried to help his neighbour, who was at least so far a good man as to deny the God that most people seem to believe in-what would you say then?"

"I would say, 'Have patience.' If there be a good God, he cannot be altogether dissatisfied with such a man. Of course it is something wanting that makes him like that, and it may be he is to blame, or it may be he can't help it: I do not know when any man has arrived at the point of development at which he is capable of believing in God: the child of a savage may be capable, and a gray-haired man of science incapable. If such a man says, 'The question of a God is not interesting to me,' I believe him; but, if he be such a man as you have last described, I believe also that, as God is taking care of him who is the God of patience, the time must come when something will make him want to know whether there be a