By What Authority? by Robert Hugh Benson (large ebook reader txt) 📖

so they sat engrossed until the evening.

Supper was ordered for Mr. Stewart at half-past seven o'clock; and this meal Sir Nicholas had consented should be laid downstairs in his own private room opening out of the hall, and that he and his ladies should sit down to table at the same time. Mr. Stewart went to his room an hour before to dress for riding, and to superintend the packing of his saddle-bags; and at half-past seven he was conducted downstairs by Sir Nicholas who insisted on carrying the saddle-bags with his own hands, and they found the two ladies waiting for them in the panelled study that had one window giving upon the terrace that ran along the south of the house above the garden. When supper had been brought in by Sir Nicholas' own body-servant, Mr. Boyd, they sat down to supper after a grace from Sir Nicholas. The horses were ordered for nine o'clock.


CHAPTER VII


THE DOOR IN THE GARDEN-WALL

On the morning of the day after Mr. Stewart's secret arrival at Maxwell Hall, the Rector was walking up and down the lawn that adjoined the churchyard.

He had never yet wholly recovered from the sneers of Mistress Corbet; the wounds had healed but had not ceased to smart. How blind these Papists were, he thought! how prejudiced for the old trifling details of worship! how ignorant of the vital principles still retained! The old realities of God and the faith and the Church were with them still, in this village, he reminded himself; it was only the incrustations of error that had been removed. Of course the transition was difficult and hearts were sore; but the Eternal God can be patient. But then, if the discontent of the Papists smouldered on one side, the fanatical and irresponsible zeal of the Puritans flared on the other. How difficult, he thought, to steer the safe middle course! How much cool faith and clearsightedness it needed! He reminded himself of Archbishop Parker who now held the rudder, and comforted himself with the thought of his wise moderation in dealing with excesses, his patient pertinacity among the whirling gusts of passion, that enabled him to wait upon events to push his schemes, and his tender knowledge of human nature.

But in spite of these reassuring facts Mr. Dent was anxious. What could even the Archbishop do when his suffragans were such poor creatures; and when Leicester, the strongest man at Court, was a violent Puritan partisan? The Rector would have been content to bear the troubles of his own flock and household if he had been confident of the larger cause; but the vagaries of the Puritans threatened all with ruin. That morning only he had received a long account from a Fellow of his own college of Corpus Christi, Cambridge, and a man of the same views as himself, of the violent controversy raging there at that time.

"The Professor," wrote his friend, referring to Thomas Cartwright, "is plastering us all with his Genevan ways. We are all Papists, it seems! He would have neither bishop nor priest nor archbishop nor dean nor archdeacon, nor dignitaries at all, but just the plain Godly Minister, as he names it. Or if he has the bishop and the deacon they are to be the Episcopos and the Diaconos of the Scripture, and not the Papish counterfeits! Then it seems that the minister is to be made not by God but by man--that the people are to make him, not the bishop (as if the sheep should make the shepherd). Then it appears we are Papists too for kneeling at the Communion; this he names a 'feeble superstition.' Then he would have all men reside in their benefices or vacate them; and all that do not so, it appears, are no better than thieves or robbers.

"And so he rages on, breathing out this smoky stuff, and all the young men do run after him, as if he were the very Pillar of Fire to lead them to Canaan. One day he says there shall be no bishop--and my Lord of Ely rides through Petty Cury with scarce a man found to doff cap and say 'my lord' save foolish 'Papists' like myself! Another day he will have no distinction of apparel; and the young sparks straight dress like ministers, and the ministers like young sparks. On another he likes not Saint Peter his day, and none will go to church. He would have us all to be little Master Calvins, if he could have his way with us. But the Master of Trinity has sent a complaint to the Council with charges against him, and has preached against him too. But no word hath yet come from the Council; and we fear nought will be done; to the sore injury of Christ His holy Church and the Protestant Religion; and the triumphing of their pestilent heresies."

So the caustic divine wrote, and the Rector of Great Keynes was heavy-hearted as he walked up and down and read. Everywhere it was the same story; the extreme precisians openly flouted the religion of the Church of England; submitted to episcopal ordination as a legal necessity and then mocked at it; refused to wear the prescribed dress, and repudiated all other distinctions too in meats and days as Judaic remnants; denounced all forms of worship except those directly sanctioned by Scripture; in short, they remained in the Church of England and drew her pay while they scouted her orders and derided her claims. Further, they cried out as persecuted martyrs whenever it was proposed to insist that they should observe their obligations. But worse than all, for such conscientious clergymen as Mr. Dent, was the fact that bishops preferred such men to livings, and at the same time were energetic against the Papist party. It was not that there was not an abundance of disciplinary machinery ready at the bishop's disposal or that the Queen was opposed to coercion--rather she was always urging them to insist upon conformity; but it seemed rather to such sober men as the Rector that the principle of authority had been lost with the rejection of the Papacy, and that anarchy rather than liberty had prevailed in the National Church. In darker moments it seemed to him and his friends as if any wild fancy was tolerated, so long as it did not approximate too closely to the Old Religion; and they grew sick at heart.

It was all the more difficult for the Rector, as he had so little sympathy in the place; his wife did all she could to destroy friendly relations between the Hall and the Rectory, and openly derided her husband's prelatical leanings; the Maxwells themselves disregarded his priestly claims, and the villagers thought of him as an official paid to promulgate the new State religion. The only house where he found sympathy and help was the Dower House; and as he paced up and down his garden now, his little perplexed determined face grew brighter as he made up his mind to see Mr. Norris again in the afternoon.

During his meditations he heard, and saw indistinctly, through the shrubbery that fenced the lawn from the drive, a mounted man ride up to the Rectory door. He supposed it was some message, and held himself in readiness to be called into the house, but after a minute or two he heard the man ride off again down the drive into the village. At dinner he mentioned it to his wife, who answered rather shortly that it was a message for her; and he let the matter drop for fear of giving offence; he was terrified at the thought of provoking more quarrels than were absolutely necessary.

Soon after dinner he put on his cap and gown, and to his wife's inquiries told her where he was going, and that after he had seen Mr. Norris he would step on down to Comber's, where was a sick body or two, and that she might expect him back not earlier than five o'clock. She nodded without speaking, and he went out. She watched him down the drive from the dining-room window and then went back to her business with an odd expression.

Mr. Norris, whom he found already seated at his books again after dinner, took him out when he had heard his errand, and the two began to walk up and down together on the raised walk that ran along under a line of pines a little way from the house.

The Rector had seldom found his friend more sympathetic and tender; he knew very well that their intellectual and doctrinal standpoints were different, but he had not come for anything less than spiritual help, and that he found. He told him all his heart, and then waited, while the other, with his thin hands clasped behind his back, and his great grey eyes cast up at the heavy pines and the tender sky beyond, began to comfort the minister.

"You are troubled, my friend," he said, "and I do not wonder at it, by the turbulence of these times. On all sides are fightings and fears. Of course I cannot, as you know, regard these matters you have spoken of--episcopacy, ceremonies at the Communion and the like--in the grave light in which you see them; but I take it, if I understand you rightly, that it is the confusion and lack of any authority or respect for antiquity that is troubling you more. You feel yourself in a sad plight between these raging waves; tossed to and fro, battered upon by both sides, forsaken and despised and disregarded. Now, indeed, although I do not stand quite where you do, yet I see how great the stress must be; but, if I may say so to a minister, it is just what you regard as your shame that I regard as your glory. It is the mark of the cross that is on your life. When our Saviour went to his passion, he went in the same plight as that in which you go; both Jew and Gentile were against him on this side and that; his claims were disallowed, his royalty denied; he was despised and rejected of men. He did not go to his passion as to a splendid triumph, bearing his pain like some solemn and mysterious dignity at which the world wondered and was silent; but he went battered and spat upon, with the sweat and the blood and the spittle running down his face, contemned by the contemptible, hated by the hateful, rejected by the outcast, barked upon by the curs; and it was that that made his passion so bitter. To go to death, however painful, with honour and applause, or at least with the silence of respect, were easy; it is not hard to die upon a throne; but to live on a dunghill with Job, that is bitterness. Now again I must protest that I have no right to speak like this to a minister, but since you have come to me I must needs say what I think; and it is this that some wise man once said, 'Fear honour, for shame is not far off. Covet shame, for honour is surely to follow.' If that be true of the philosopher, how much more true is it of the Christian minister whose profession it is to follow the Saviour and to be made like unto him."

He said much more of the same kind; and his soft balmy faith soothed the minister's wounds, and braced his will. The Rector could not help half envying his friend, living, as it seemed, in this still retreat, apart from wrangles and controversy, with the peaceful music and sweet