Surgeon Paul Faber by George MacDonald (e book free reading txt) 📕

to assist posterity is to be true to your contemporaries, so there I need say no more-except that the hopeless man can do the least for his fellows, being unable to give them any thing that should render them other than hopeless themselves; and if, for the grandeur of it, a man were to cast away his purse in order to have the praise of parting with the two mites left in his pocket, you would simply say the man was a fool. This much seems to me clear, that, if there be no God, it may be nobler to be able to live without one; but, if there be a God, it must be nobler not to be able to live without Him. The moment, however, that nobility becomes the object in any action, that moment the nobleness of the action vanishes. The man who serves his fellow that he may himself be noble, misses the mark. He alone who follows the truth, not he who follows nobility, shall attain the noble. A man's nobility will, in the end, prove just commensurate with his humanity-with the love he bears his neighbor-not the amount of work he may have done for him. A man might throw a lordly gift to his fellow, like a bone to a dog, and damn himself in the deed. You may insult a dog by the way you give him his bone."

"I dispute nothing of all that," said Faber-while good Mr. Bevis sat listening hard, not quite able to follow the discussion; "but I know you will admit that to do right from respect to any reward whatever, hardly amounts to doing right at all."

"I doubt if any man ever did or could do a thing worthy of passing as in itself good, for the sake of a reward," rejoined Wingfold. "Certainly, to do good for something else than good, is not good at all. But perhaps a reward may so influence a low nature as to bring it a little into contact with what is good, whence the better part of it may make some acquaintance with good. Also, the desire of the approbation of the Perfect, might nobly help a man who was finding his duty hard, for it would humble as well as strengthen him, and is but another form of the love of the good. The praise of God will always humble a man, I think."

"There you are out of my depth," said Faber. "I know nothing about that."

"I go on then to say," continued the curate, "that a man may well be strengthened and encouraged by the hope of being made a better and truer man, and capable of greater self-forgetfulness and devotion. There is nothing low in having respect to such a reward as that, is there?"

"It seems to me better," persisted the doctor, "to do right for the sake of duty, than for the sake of any goodness even that will come thereby to yourself."

"Assuredly, if self in the goodness, and not the goodness itself be the object," assented Wingfold. "When a duty lies before one, self ought to have no part in the gaze we fix upon it; but when thought reverts upon himself, who would avoid the wish to be a better man? The man who will not do a thing for duty, will never get so far as to derive any help from the hope of goodness. But duty itself is only a stage toward something better. It is but the impulse, God-given I believe, toward a far more vital contact with the truth. We shall one day forget all about duty, and do every thing from the love of the loveliness of it, the satisfaction of the rightness of it. What would you say to a man who ministered to the wants of his wife and family only from duty? Of course you wish heartily that the man who neglects them would do it from any cause, even were it fear of the whip; but the strongest and most operative sense of duty would not satisfy you in such a relation. There are depths within depths of righteousness. Duty is the only path to freedom, but that freedom is the love that is beyond and prevents duty."

"But," said Faber, "I have heard you say that to take from you your belief in a God would be to render you incapable of action. Now, the man-I don't mean myself, but the sort of a man for whom I stand up-does act, does his duty, without the strength of that belief: is he not then the stronger?-Let us drop the word noble ."

"In the case supposed, he would be the stronger-for a time at least," replied the curate. "But you must remember that to take from me the joy and glory of my life, namely the belief that I am the child of God, an heir of the Infinite, with the hope of being made perfectly righteous, loving like God Himself, would be something more than merely reducing me to the level of a man who had never loved God, or seen in the possibility of Him any thing to draw him. I should have lost the mighty dream of the universe; he would be what and where he chose to be, and might well be the more capable. Were I to be convinced there is no God, and to recover by the mere force of animal life from the prostration into which the conviction cast me, I should, I hope, try to do what duty was left me, for I too should be filled, for a time at least, with an endless pity for my fellows; but all would be so dreary, that I should be almost paralyzed for serving them, and should long for death to do them and myself the only good service. The thought of the generations doomed to be born into a sunless present, would almost make me join any conspiracy to put a stop to the race. I should agree with Hamlet that the whole thing had better come to an end. Would it necessarily indicate a lower nature, or condition, or habit of thought, that, having cherished such hopes, I should, when I lost them, be more troubled than one who never had had them?"

"Still," said Faber, "I ask you to allow that a nature which can do without help is greater than a nature which can not."

"If the thing done were the same, I should allow it," answered the curate; "but the things done will prove altogether different. And another thing to be noted is, that, while the need of help might indicate a lower nature, the capacity for receiving it must indicate a higher. The mere fact of being able to live and act in more meager spiritual circumstances, in itself proves nothing: it is not the highest nature that has the fewest needs. The highest nature is the one that has the most necessities, but the fewest of its own making. He is not the greatest man who is the most independent, but he who thirsts most after a conscious harmony with every element and portion of the mighty whole; demands from every region thereof its influences to perfect his individuality; regards that individuality as his kingdom, his treasure, not to hold but to give; sees in his Self the one thing he can devote, the one precious means of freedom by its sacrifice, and that in no contempt or scorn, but in love to God and his children, the multitudes of his kind. By dying ever thus, ever thus losing his soul, he lives like God, and God knows him, and he knows God. This is too good to be grasped, but not too good to be true. The highest is that which needs the highest, the largest that which needs the most; the finest and strongest that which to live must breath essential life, self-willed life, God Himself. It follows that it is not the largest or the strongest nature that will feel a loss the least. An ant will not gather a grain of corn the less that his mother is dead, while a boy will turn from his books and his play and his dinner because his bird is dead: is the ant, therefore, the stronger nature?"

"Is it not weak to be miserable?" said the doctor.

"Yes-without good cause," answered the curate. "But you do not know what it would be to me to lose my faith in my God. My misery would be a misery to which no assurance of immortality or of happiness could bring any thing but tenfold misery-the conviction that I should never be good myself, never have any thing to love absolutely, never be able to make amends for the wrongs I had done. Call such a feeling selfish if you will: I can not help it. I can not count one fit for existence to whom such things would be no grief. The worthy existence must hunger after good. The largest nature must have the mightiest hunger. Who calls a man selfish because he is hungry? He is selfish if he broods on the pleasures of eating, and would not go without his dinner for the sake of another; but if he had no hunger, where would be the room for his self-denial? Besides, in spiritual things, the only way to give them to your neighbors is to hunger after them yourself. There each man is a mouth to the body of the whole creation. It can not be selfishness to hunger and thirst after righteousness, which righteousness is just your duty to your God and your neighbor. If there be any selfishness in it, the very answer to your prayer will destroy it."

"There you are again out of my region," said Faber. "But answer me one thing: is it not weak to desire happiness?"

"Yes; if the happiness is poor and low," rejoined Wingfold. "But the man who would choose even the grandeur of duty before the bliss of the truth, must be a lover of himself. Such a man must be traveling the road to death. If there be a God, truth must be joy. If there be not, truth may be misery.-But, honestly, I know not one advanced Christian who tries to obey for the hope of Heaven or the fear of hell. Such ideas have long vanished from such a man. He loves God; he loves truth; he loves his fellow, and knows he must love him more. You judge of Christianity either by those who are not true representatives of it, and are indeed, less of Christians than yourself; or by others who, being intellectually inferior, perhaps even stupid, belie Christ with their dull theories concerning Him. Yet the latter may have in them a noble seed, urging them up heights to you at present unconceived and inconceivable; while, in the meantime, some of them serve their generation well, and do as much for those that are to come after as you do yourself."

"There is always weight as well as force in what you urge, Wingfold," returned Faber. "Still it looks to me just a cunningly devised fable-I will not say of the priests, but of the human mind deceiving itself with its own hopes and desires."

"It may well look such to those who are outside of it, and it must at length appear such to all who, feeling in it any claim upon them, yet do not put it to the test of their obedience."

"Well, you have had your turn, and now we are having ours-you of the legends, we of the facts."

"No," said Wingfold, "we have not had our turn, and you have been