Читать книгу The Kernel and the Husk: Letters on Spiritual Christianity онлайн

68 страница из 81

Do not however, suppose that I call upon you, because hope is the basis of Christian belief, on that account to hope against the truth and to believe against reason. I bid you believe in the Fatherhood of God, first because your conscience tells you that this is the best and noblest belief, but secondly also because this belief—although it may be against the superficial evidence of the phenomena of the Universe—is in accordance with these phenomena when you regard them more deeply and when you include in your scope the history of Christianity.

I admit that we have to fight against temptations in order to retain this belief; and sometimes I ask myself, “If I and my children had been slaves in one of the Southern States of America; or if I and my family had suffered such indelible outrages as were recently inflicted by the Turks upon the Bulgarians; or if I were at this moment a matchbox-seller or a father of ten children (girls as well as boys) in the East of London—should I find it so easy to believe that God is our Father in heaven?” And I am obliged to reply, “No, I should not find it easy;” I fear that I might be tempted to say, as a workman did not long ago to a lecturer on co-operation who mentioned the name of God: “Oh, no; no God for us; the workman’s God deserted him long ago.” And perhaps you yourself may remember the answer of one of those wretched Bulgarians to some newspaper correspondent who endeavoured to console him in his anguish by the reflection that “After all there is a God that governs the world:” “I believe you,” was the reply; “there is indeed a God; and he governs the world indeed; and he is the Devil.” Or take a spectacle of the Middle Ages as a problem. In the lists are two armed knights; on the one side a man of might and muscle, exulting in conflict; on the other, a slight, weak creature, who never fights save on compulsion, and is to fight now on sternest compulsion, being accused (though innocent) of some gross crime by yonder man of flesh, who combines scoundrel, liar, traitor, oppressor, thief, and adulterer, all in one; and the fight is to begin under the sanction of the Church of Christ. As the trumpets sound, while the heralds are still calling on God to “shew the right,” the two men meet, and “the right” is cast to the ground, trampled on by his enemy, and dragged from the lists to the neighbouring gallows, while the muscular scoundrel wipes his forehead and receives congratulations. Do you suppose that the innocent man’s wife, if she were looking on, would be able easily to say at that moment, “Verily there is a God that judgeth the earth”?