The Altar Fire - Arthur Christopher Benson (the chimp paradox txt) 📗

the completeness of the heavenly house of which they are the furniture. Fanciful, of course; but I am inclined to think not wholly fanciful.


May 10, 1891.


The question is this: Is there a kind of peace, of tranquillity, attainable in this world, which is proof against all calamities, sufferings, sorrows, losses, doubts? Is it attainable for one like myself, who is sensitive, apprehensive, highly strung, at once confident and timid, alive to impressions, liable to swift changes of mood? Or is it a mere matter of mental, moral, and physical health, depending on some balance of qualities, which may or may not belong to a man, a balance which hundreds cannot attain to?

By this peace, I do not mean a chilly indifference, or a stoical fortitude. I do not mean the religious peace, such as I see in some people, which consists in holding as a certainty a scheme of things which I believe to be either untrue or uncertain--and about which, at all events, no certainty is logically and rationally possible.

The peace I mean is a frame of mind which a man would have, who loved passionately, who suffered acutely, who desired intensely, who feared greatly; and yet for whom, behind love and pain, desire and fear, there existed a sort of inner citadel, in which his soul was entrenched and impregnable.

Such a security could not be a wholly rational thing, because reason cannot solve the enigmas with which we are confronted; but it must not be an irrational intuition either, because then it would be unattainable by a man of high intellectual gifts; and the peace that I speak of ought to be consistent with any and every constitution--physical, moral, mental. It must be consistent with physical weakness, with liability to strong temptations, with an incisive and penetrating intellectual quality; its essence would be a sort of vital faith, a unity of the individual heart with the heart of the world. It would rise like a rock above the sea, like a lighthouse, where a guarded flame would burn high and steady, however loudly the surges thundered below upon the reefs, however fiercely the spray was dashed against the glasses of the casements.

If it is attainable, then it is worth while to do and to suffer anything to attain it; if it is not attainable, then the best thing is simply to be as insensible as possible, not to love, not to admire, not to desire; for all these emotions are channels along which the bitter streams of suffering can flow.

Prudence bids one close these channels; meanwhile a fainter and remoter voice, with sweet and thrilling accents, seems to cry to one not to be afraid, urges one to fling open every avenue by which impassioned experiences, uplifting thoughts, noble hopes, unselfish desires, may flow into the soul.

This peace I have seen, or dream that I have seen, in the faces and voices of certain gracious spirits whom I have known. It seemed to consist in an unbounded natural gratitude, a sweet simplicity, a childlike affectionateness, that recognised in suffering the joy of which it was the shadow, and in desperate catastrophes the hope that lay behind them.

Such a peace must not be a surrender of anything, a feeble acquiescence; it must be a strong and eager energy, a thirst for experience, a large tolerance, a desire to be convinced, a resolute patience.

It is this and no less that I ask of God.


June 6, 1891.


I had a beautiful walk to-day. I went a short way by train, and descending at a wayside station, found a little field-path, that led me past an old, high-gabled, mullioned farmhouse, with all the pleasant litter of country life about it. Then I passed along some low-lying meadows, deep in grass, where the birds sang sweetly, muffled in leaves. The fields there were all full of orchids, purple as wine, and the gold of buttercups floated on the top of the rich meadow-grass. Then I passed into a wood, and for a long time I walked in the green glooms of copses, in a forest stillness, only the tall trees rustling softly overhead, with doves cooing deep in the wood. Only once I passed a house, a little cottage of grey stone, in a clearing, with an air of settled peace about it, that reminded me of an old sweet book that I used to read as a child, Phantastes, full of the mysterious romance of deep forests and haunted glades. I was overshadowed that afternoon with a sense of the ineffectiveness, the loneliness of my life, walking in a vain shadow; but it melted out of my mind in the delicate beauty of the woodland, with its wild fragrances and cool airs, as when one chafes one's frozen hands before a leaping flame. They told me, those whispering groves, of the patient and tender love of the Father, and I drew very near His inmost heart in that gentle hour. The secret was to bear, to endure, not stoically nor stolidly, but with a quiet inclination of the will to sorrow and pain, that were not so bitter after all, when one abode faithfully in them. I became aware, as I walked, that my heart was with the future after all. The beautiful dead past, I could be grateful for it, and not desire that it were mine again. I felt as a man might feel who is making his way across a wide moor. "Surely," he says to himself, "the way lies here; this ridge, that dingle mark the track; it lies there by the rushy pool, and shows greener among the heather." So he says, persuading himself in vain that he has found the way; but at last the track, plain and unmistakable, lies before him, and he loses no more time in imaginings, but goes straight forward. It was my sorrow, after all, that had shown me that I was in the true path. I had tried, in the old days, to fancy that I was homeward bound; sometimes it was in the love of my dear ones, sometimes in the joy of art, sometimes in my chosen work; and yet I knew in my heart all the time that I was but a leisurely wanderer; but now at last the destined road was clear; I was no longer astray; I was no longer inventing duties and acts for myself, but I had in very truth a note of the way. It was not the path I should have chosen in my blindness and easiness. But there could no longer be any doubt about it. How the false ambitions, the comfortable schemes, the trivial hopes melted away for me in that serene certainty! What I had pursued before was the phantom of delight; and though I still desired delight, with all the passion of my poor frail nature, yet I saw that not thus could the real joy of God be won. It was no longer a question of hope and disappointment, of sin and punishment. It was something truer and stronger than that. The sin and the suffering alike had been the Will of God for me. I had never desired evil, though I had often fallen into it; but there was never a moment when, if I could, I would not have been pure and unselfish and strong. That was a blessed hour for me, when, in place of the old luxurious delight, there came, flooding my heart, an intense and passionate desire that I might accept with a loving confidence whatever God might send; my wearied body, my tired, anxious mind, were but a slender veil, rent and ruinous, that hung between God and my soul, through which I could discern the glory of His love.


June 20, 1891.


It was on a warm, bright summer afternoon that I woke to the sense both of what I had lost and what I had gained. I had wandered out into the country, for in those days I had a great desire to be alone. I stood long beside a stile in the pastures, a little village below me, and the gables and chimneys of an old farmhouse stood up over wide fields of young waving wheat. A cuckoo fluted in an elm close by, and at the sound there darted into my mind the memory, seen in an airy perspective, of innumerable happy and careless days, spent in years long past, with eager and light-hearted companions, in whose smiling eyes and caressing motions was reflected one's own secret happiness. How full the world seemed of sweet surprises then! To sit in an evening hour in some quiet, scented garden in the gathering dusk, with the sense of a delicious mystery flashing from the light movements, the pensive eyes, the curve of arm or cheek of one's companion, how beautiful that was! And yet how simple and natural it seemed. That was all over and gone, and a gulf seemed fixed between those days and these. And then there came first that sad and sweet regret, "the passion of the past," as Tennyson called it, that suddenly brimmed the eyes at the thought of the vanished days; and there followed an intense desire to live in it once again, to have made more of it, a rebellious longing to abandon oneself with a careless disregard to the old rapture.

Then on that mood, rising like a star into the blue spaces of the evening, came the thought that the old days were not dead after all. That they were assuredly there, just as the future was there, a true part of oneself, ineffaceable, eternal. And hard on the heels of that came another and a deeper intuition still, that not in such delights did the secret really rest; what then was the secret? It was surely this: that one must advance, led onward like a tottering child by the strong arm of God. That the new knowledge of suffering and sorrow was as beautiful as the old, and more so, and that instead of repining over the vanished joys, one might continue to rejoice in them and even rejoice in having lost them, for I seemed to perceive that one's aim was not, after all, to be lively, and joyful, and strong, but to be wiser, and larger-minded, and more hopeful, even at the expense of delight. And then I saw that I would not really for any price part with the sad wisdom that I had reluctantly learnt, but that though the burden galled my shoulder, it held within it precious things which I could not throw away. And I had, too, the glad sense that even if in a childish petulance I would have laid my burden down and run off among the flowers, God was stronger than I, and would not suffer me to lose what I had gained. I might, I assuredly should, wish to be more free, more light of heart. But I seemed to myself like a woman that had borne a child in suffering, and that no matter how restless and vexatious a care that child might prove to be, under no conceivable circumstances could she wish that she were barren and without the experience of love. I felt indeed that I had fulfilled a part of my destiny, and that I might be glad that the suffering was behind me, even though it separated me from the careless days.

I hope that in after days I may sometimes make a pilgrimage to the place where that wonderful truth thus dawned upon me. I have made a tabernacle there in my spirit, like the saints who saw the Lord transfigured before their eyes; and to me it had