Wilfrid Cumbermede by George MacDonald (desktop ebook reader txt) 📕

to the other enormities of his unbelief was to be added the justification of suicide. His habit of arguing was doubtless well enough known to her to leave room for the mitigating possibility that he might be arguing only for argument's sake, but what he said could not but be shocking to her upon any supposition.

I was not ready with an answer. Clara was the first to speak.

'It's a cowardly thing, anyhow,' she said.

'How do you make that out, Miss Clara?' asked Charley. 'I'm aware it's the general opinion, but I don't see it myself.'

'It's surely cowardly to run away in that fashion.'

'For my part,' returned Charley, 'I feel that it requires more courage than I 've got, and hence it comes, I suppose, that I admire any one who has the pluck.'

'What vulgar words you use, Mr Charles!' said Clara.

'Besides,' he went on, heedless of her remark, 'a man may want to escape-not from his duties-he mayn't know what they are-but from his own weakness and shame.'

'But, Charley dear,' said Mary, with a great light in her eyes, and the rest of her face as still as a sunless pond, 'you don't think of the sin of it. I know you are only talking, but some things oughtn't to be talked of lightly.'

'What makes it a sin? It's not mentioned in the ten commandments,' said Charley.

'Surely it's against the will of God, Charley dear.'

'He hasn't said anything about it, anyhow. And why should I have a thing forced upon me whether I will or not, and then be pulled up for throwing it away when I found it troublesome?'

'Surely I don't quite understand you, Charley.'

'Well, if I must be more explicit-I was never asked whether I chose to be made or not. I never had the conditions laid before me. Here I am, and I can't help myself-so far, I mean, as that here I am.'

'But life is a good thing,' said Mary, evidently struggling with an almost overpowering horror.

'I don't know that. My impression is that if I had been asked-'

'But that couldn't be, you know.'

'Then it wasn't fair. Bat why couldn't I be made for a moment or two, long enough to have the thing laid before me, and be asked whether I would accept it or not? My impression is that I would have said-No, thank you; that is, if it was fairly put.'

I hastened to offer a remark, in the hope of softening the pain such flippancy must cause her.

'And my impression is, Charley,' I said, 'that if such had been possible-'

'Of course,' he interrupted, 'the God you believe in could have made me for a minute or two. He can, I suppose, unmake me now when he likes.'

'Yes; but could he have made you all at once capable of understanding his plans, and your own future? Perhaps that is what he is doing now-making you, by all you are going through, capable of understanding them. Certainly the question could not have been put to you before you were able to comprehend it, and this may be the only way to make you able. Surely a being who could make you had a right to risk the chance, if I may be allowed such an expression, of your being satisfied in the end with what he saw to be good-so good indeed that, if we accept the New Testament story, he would have been willing to go through the same troubles himself for the same end.'

'No, no; not the same troubles,' he objected. 'According to the story to which you refer, Jesus Christ was free from all that alone makes life unendurable-the bad inside you, that will come outside whether you will or not.'

'I admit your objection. As to the evil coming out, I suspect it is better it should come out, so long as it is there. But the end is not yet; and still I insist the probability is that, if you could know it all now, you would say with submission, if not with hearty concurrence-"Thy will be done."'

'I have known people who could say that without knowing it all now, Mr Cumbermede,' said Mary.

I had often called her by her Christian name, but she had never accepted the familiarity.

'No doubt,' said Charley, 'but I 'm not one of those.'

'If you would but give in,' said his sister, 'you would-in the end, I mean-say, "It is well." I am sure of that.'

'Yes-perhaps I might-after all the suffering had been forced upon me, and was over at last-when I had been thoroughly exhausted and cowed, that is.'

'Which wouldn't satisfy any thinking soul, Charley-much less God,' I said. 'But if there be a God at all-'

Mary gave a slight inarticulate cry.

'Dear Miss Osborne,' I said, 'I beg you will not misunderstand me. I cannot be sure about it, as you are-I wish I could-but I am not disputing it in the least; I am only trying to make my argument as strong as I can.-I was going to say to Charley-not to you-that, if there be a God, he would not have compelled us to be, except with the absolute fore-knowledge that, when we knew all about it, we would certainly declare ourselves ready to go through it all again if need should be, in order to attain the known end of his high calling.'

'But isn't it very presumptuous to assert anything about God which he has not revealed in his Word?' said Mary, in a gentle, subdued voice, and looking at me with a sweet doubtfulness in her eyes.

'I am only insisting on the perfection of God-as far as I can understand perfection,' I answered.

'But may not the perfection of God be something very different from anything we can understand?'

'I will go further,' I returned. 'It must be something that we cannot understand-but different from what we can understand by being greater, not by being less.'

'Mayn't it be such that we can't understand it at all?' she insisted.

'Then how should we ever worship him? How should we ever rejoice in him? Surely it is because you see God to be good-'

'Or fancy you do,' interposed Charley.

'Or fancy you do,' I assented, 'that you love him-not merely because you are told he is good. The Fejee islander might assert his God to be good, but would that make you love him? If you heard that a great power, away somewhere, who had nothing to do with you at all, was very good, would that make you able to love him?'

'Yes, it would,' said Mary, decidedly. 'It is only a good man who would see that God was good.'

'There you argue entirely on my side. It must be because you supposed his goodness what you call goodness-not something else-that you could love him on testimony. But even then your love could not be of that mighty absorbing kind which alone you would think fit between you and your God. It would not be loving him with all your heart and soul and strength and mind-would it? It would be loving him second-hand-not because of himself, seen and known by yourself.'

'But Charley does not even love God second-hand,' she said, with a despairing mournfulness.

'Perhaps because he is very anxious to love him first-hand, and what you tell him about God does not seem to him to be good. Surely neither man nor woman can love because of what seems not good! I confess one may love in spite of what is bad, but it must be because of other things that are good.'

She was silent.

'However goodness may change its forms,' I went on, 'it must still be goodness; only if we are to adore it, we must see something of what it is-of itself. And the goodness we cannot see, the eternal goodness, high above us as the heavens are above the earth, must still be a goodness that includes, absorbs, elevates, purifies all our goodness, not tramples upon it and calls it wickedness. For if not such, then we have nothing in common with God, and what we call goodness is not of God. He has not even ordered it; or, if he has, he has ordered it only to order the contrary afterwards; and there is, in reality, no real goodness-at least in him; and, if not in him, of whom we spring-where then?-and what becomes of ours, poor as it is?'

My reader will see that I had already thought much about these things; although, I suspect, I have now not only expressed them far better than I could have expressed them in conversation, but with a degree of clearness which must be owing to the further continuance of the habit of reflecting on these and cognate subjects. Deep in my mind, however, something like this lay; and in some manner like this I tried to express it.

Finding that she continued silent, and that Charley did not appear inclined to renew the contest, anxious also to leave no embarrassing silence to choke the channel now open between us-I mean Mary and myself-I returned to the original question.

'It seems to me, Charley-and it follows from all we have been saying-that the sin of suicide lies just in this, that it is an utter want of faith in God. I confess I do not see any Other ground on which to condemn it-provided, always, that the man has no other dependent upon him, none for whom he ought to live and work.'

'But does a man owe nothing to himself?' said Clara.

'Nothing that I know of,' I replied. 'I am under no obligation to myself. How can I divide myself, and say that the one-half of me is indebted to the other? To my mind, it is a mere fiction of speech.'

'But whence, then, should such a fiction arise?' objected Charley, willing, perhaps, to defend Clara.

'From the dim sense of a real obligation, I suspect-the object of which is mistaken. I suspect it really springs from our relation to the unknown God, so vaguely felt that a false form is readily accepted for its embodiment by a being who, in ignorance of its nature, is yet aware of its presence. I mean that what seems an obligation to self is in reality a dimly apprehended duty-an obligation to the unknown God, and not to self, in which lies no causing, therefore no obligating power.'

'But why say the unknown God , Mr Cumbermede?' asked Mary.

'Because I do not believe that any one who knew him could possibly attribute to himself what belonged to Him-could, I mean, talk of an obligation to himself, when that obligation was to God.'

How far Mary Osborne followed the argument or agreed with it I cannot tell, but she gave me a look of something like gratitude, and my heart felt too big for its closed chamber.

At this moment the housemaid who had, along with the carpenter, assisted me in the library, entered the room. She was rather a forward girl, and I suppose presumed on our acquaintance to communicate directly with myself instead of going to the housekeeper. Seeing her approach as if she wanted to speak to me, I went to meet her. She handed me a small ring, saying, in a low voice,

'I found this in your room,