In the Days of the Comet

“I must be going,” I said, with a curiously reinforced desire to get away out of that room.

“My dear chap!” he insisted, “I can’t think of it.  Surely—­there’s nothing to call you away.”  Then with an evident desire to shift the venue of our talk, he asked, “You never told me what you thought of Burble’s little book.”

I was now, beneath my dull display of submission, furiously angry with him.  It occurred to me to ask myself why I should defer and qualify my opinions to him.  Why should I pretend a feeling of intellectual and social inferiority toward him.  He asked what I thought of Burble.  I resolved to tell him—­if necessary with arrogance.  Then perhaps he would release me.  I did not sit down again, but stood by the corner of the fireplace.

“That was the little book you lent me last summer?” I said.

“He reasons closely, eh?” he said, and indicated the armchair with a flat hand, and beamed persuasively.

I remained standing.  “I didn’t think much of his reasoning powers,” I said.

“He was one of the cleverest bishops London ever had.”

“That may be.  But he was dodging about in a jolly feeble case,” said I.

“You mean?”

“That he’s wrong.  I don’t think he proves his case.  I don’t think Christianity is true.  He knows himself for the pretender he is.  His reasoning’s—­Rot.”

Mr. Gabbitas went, I think, a shade paler than his wont, and propitiation vanished from his manner.  His eyes and mouth were round, his face seemed to get round, his eyebrows curved at my remarks.

“I’m sorry you think that,” he said at last, with a catch in his breath.

He did not repeat his suggestion that I should sit.  He made a step or two toward the window and turned.  “I suppose you will admit—­” he began, with a faintly irritating note of intellectual condescension. . . . .

I will not tell you of his arguments or mine.  You will find if you care to look for them, in out-of-the-way corners of our book museums, the shriveled cheap publications—­the publications of the Rationalist Press Association, for example—­on which my arguments were based.  Lying in that curious limbo with them, mixed up with them and indistinguishable, are the endless “Replies” of orthodoxy, like the mixed dead in some hard-fought trench.  All those disputes of our fathers, and they were sometimes furious disputes, have gone now beyond the range of comprehension.  You younger people, I know, read them with impatient perplexity.  You cannot understand how sane creatures could imagine they had joined issue at all in most of these controversies.  All the old methods of systematic thinking, the queer absurdities of the Aristotelian logic, have followed magic numbers and mystical numbers, and the Rumpelstiltskin magic of names now into the blackness of the unthinkable.  You can no more understand our theological passions than you can understand the fancies that made all ancient peoples speak of their gods only by circumlocutions, that made savages pine away and die because they had been photographed, or an Elizabethan farmer turn back from a day’s expedition because he had met three crows.  Even I, who have been through it all, recall our controversies now with something near incredulity.

Faith we can understand to-day, all men live by faith, but in the old time every one confused quite hopelessly Faith and a forced, incredible Belief in certain pseudo-concrete statements.  I am inclined to say that neither believers nor unbelievers had faith as we understand it—­they had insufficient intellectual power.  They could not trust unless they had something to see and touch and say, like their barbarous ancestors who could not make a bargain without exchange of tokens.  If they no longer worshipped stocks and stones, or eked out their needs with pilgrimages and images, they still held fiercely to audible images, to printed words and formulae.

But why revive the echoes of the ancient logomachies?

Suffice it that we lost our tempers very readily in pursuit of God and Truth, and said exquisitely foolish things on either side.  And on the whole—­from the impartial perspective of my three and seventy years—­I adjudicate that if my dialectic was bad, that of the Rev. Gabbitas was altogether worse.

Little pink spots came into his cheeks, a squealing note into his voice.  We interrupted each other more and more rudely.  We invented facts and appealed to authorities whose names I mispronounced; and, finding Gabbitas shy of the higher criticism and the Germans, I used the names of Karl Marx and Engels as Bible exegetes with no little effect.  A silly wrangle! a preposterous wrangle!—­you must imagine our talk becoming louder, with a developing quarrelsome note—­my mother no doubt hovering on the staircase and listening in alarm as who should say, “My dear, don’t offend it!  Oh, don’t offend it!  Mr. Gabbitas enjoys its friendship.  Try to think whatever Mr. Gabbitas says”—­though we still kept in touch with a pretence of mutual deference.  The ethical superiority of Christianity to all other religions came to the fore—­I know not how.  We dealt with the matter in bold, imaginative generalizations, because of the insufficiency of our historical knowledge.  I was moved to denounce Christianity as the ethic of slaves, and declare myself a disciple of a German writer of no little vogue in those days, named Nietzsche.

For a disciple I must confess I was particularly ill acquainted with the works of the master.  Indeed, all I knew of him had come to me through a two-column article in The Clarion for the previous week. . . .  But the Rev. Gabbitas did not read The Clarion.

I am, I know, putting a strain upon your credulity when I tell you that I now have little doubt that the Rev. Gabbitas was absolutely ignorant even of the name of Nietzsche, although that writer presented a separate and distinct attitude of attack upon the faith that was in the reverend gentleman’s keeping.

“I’m a disciple of Nietzsche,” said I, with an air of extensive explanation.

He shied away so awkwardly at the name that I repeated it at once.

“But do you know what Nietzsche says?” I pressed him viciously.

“He has certainly been adequately answered,” said he, still trying to carry it off.

“Who by?” I rapped out hotly.  “Tell me that!” and became mercilessly expectant.