Opinions, like showers, are generated in high places, but they invariably descend into low ones.—Lacon.

It was Elsworth’s third year at the hospital. He had taken several gold medals and scholarships; and so, to outward appearance, had done well. But he was not as he was when he entered. He was sowing what he called his “wild oats,” forgetting the reaping of the crop that one day would have to be considered. He had not abandoned his faith, but it had ceased to influence his life. The thing he came for he had not won. He defended Christianity still when he heard it attacked; but this was because he thought it honourable to take the side of the weakest in every argument, and partly because the set who were so severe upon it were a perky, superficial, insincere lot of folk, that, above all things, wanted taking down. Christianity might be false, he argued, but it could not be such a tissue of absurdities as these people maintained.

One summer’s night, about this time, the society was assembled to hear an address by a well known atheist propagandist, on marriage. Mr. Edgar Adams he was called. He was a singular-looking man; he was tall, lean, and hungry-looking, with long, dank, black hair, and a complexion such as poor people get who work in lead factories, and let it impregnate their systems. His dress was untidy, not to say greasy; his vast display of shirt front looked as if it had done duty in gas-light more than once before. Altogether, he was an unwholesome looking object, and, as a seafaring youth present declared, “it seemed as if a good holystoning down was what he wanted.” It did not surprise you the least when he advocated the destruction of Czars and despots generally, and talked with enthusiasm of the great French Revolution, with his starting eye-balls, and his thin, claw-like hands nervously twitching, expressing his eagerness to assist in the work of another Robespierre. He declared he would “abolish all property, especially that in a wife. The origin of the marriage superstition was pagan and suicidal, for marriage is the suicide of love. When the law no longer supplies husband or wife with a cage, each will take care of holding what has been won. Chastity and modesty are merely conventional ideas, having their origin in utility.” He declared that till Christianity was finally abolished, the real progress of the world could not be continued. “What is called the virtue of humility was never known—not even the word for it—by the Greeks and Romans; that is the great barrier in the path of modern man. Humility was invented by priests to hold man in slavery.” He ended by reciting a poem of Shelley’s denouncing tyrants and despots, and was much applauded.

The rooms of the society are well-filled to-night, and all the chief attractions in force. The people who could lead conversation, and who had strong opinions, and were able to put them cleverly, had assembled. The habituÉs had all some distinguishing trait, some particular socialistic or anti-religious fad; no two exactly agreed on anything, except that it was of the first importance to smash up existing beliefs. Hinduism, Confucianism, Judaism, Buddhism, were all held to be much better than Christianity as systems of religious thought, but that was because they were all impossible for our age; the one thing that was possible, that had established itself by renovating society and redeeming the world, must be crushed and cast out, because it was not the outcome of the age of steam and the electric light. There was scarcely anybody in the room who did not owe his or her character and virtuous environment entirely to a Christian training, which had made them decent members of society, and which they were anxious to requite by proving its incapacity to be any longer a suitable moral system for our age. A curious and a priggish set of imperfectly educated and vain people; mostly young, impracticable, and unversed in the wants and remedies of a work-a-day world. It is worth while to be introduced to these typical folk, who are bent on substituting some of their nostrums to take the place of the old religion when it dies of age.

There was a tall, dark-eyed girl on the lounge in the corner—Miss Mardall. She was a designer of high art tapestry; was lean, sallow, handsome in the Æsthetic sense, not more than twenty-five, and a disciple of Schopenhauer and Hartmann. She grouped her wild flowers to make the most delightfully artistic patterns for her fabrics; but in their forms, their colours, their odours, she recognised nothing but the grossest and most material adaptation to the necessities of their existence and diffusion. Their colours meant nothing but distinguishing characteristics to aid in their fertilisation; their odours served to attract insects to brush so much pollen from their stamens and their pistils; their exquisite forms and intricacies of structure meant so many difficult passages the bees would have to knock against, and so disseminate so much fructifying material. And thus all the floral gems of the fields and woods were, in this nineteenth-century girl’s eyes, so many machines for making so much vegetable material for the furtherance of the animal world; and if they had any of the qualities one chose to term beauty, it was simply the beauty of adaptation of means to end. She was much too clever to be a poet, and was utilitarian and material to the last degree. Adelaide Rowland, her friend, sitting next to her, under the picture of the storming of the Bastille, went even further. Her pessimism was so pronounced that she thought it a mistake to continue to exist. She had no desire that the human or any other race should continue to exist; did not in the least see anything in the world worth working for, except to get food, lodging, and warmth; and declared that at the very first great reverse in her life she would decline to exist any more. As she immediately, however, demanded some tea, and took a wedge of very substantial cake, it was evident the great reverse had not as yet overtaken her. She was but nineteen, and was as proud of her pessimism (in an elegant robe just from Paris) as she recently was of her last new doll, with practicable eyes, and power to say “mamma.” Her talk of “declining to exist” was only alarming to one at the first introduction to her; “when you came to know her well, and love her,” you knew how to discount this sort of talk, and you simply asked her to have a little more cake and another cup of tea. That gentleman on her left in a brown velvet coat, with long hair, is a poet. He admires Nihilism, and thinks all authority wants dynamiting. Sounds dreadful to hear him, but he is really extremely harmless. His father is high in the General Post Office, and this young man is reading for the Bar. He will be all right when he is called; at present he is a supporter of Mr. Parnell. By-and-bye he will come into a row of little weekly properties in the suburb of Stratford-by-Bow, and he will collect the rents and neglect the sanitary arrangements with most landlord-like regularity. His sister is that pretty little fair girl in the corner by the grand piano. She writes stories about despotism and the dawn of freedom’s day. She looks kind, but is a terror to her younger sisters and her sick brother, who often wish that freedom’s day was really just going to begin, and who know a great deal more about the practical working of despotism in an eight-roomed villa than she does, despite the strongly flavoured literature she devours.

That tall, grave, reverend-looking party who has just entered is the socialist leader, James D’Arcy. Humanity in the abstract is all he lives and works for. No concrete embodiment of the mammal, genus Homo, was ever the better in the smallest degree for knowing him, many specimens were very much the worse; but that is neither here nor there. He never wrote “humanity” with a little h, and always spelled “man” with a big M. What more could be expected of him? His was the work of a reformer, a leader of progress; petty details were for petty men. James D’Arcy had to live for the age, and live well too. It was such an unworthy, priest-ridden age withal, and “so dressed up in the tattered shreds of creeds outworn” (as he loved to express it at a Sunday morning Progress Club Lecture to “boot finishers” down Hoxton way), that the age ought to consider itself honoured by giving its best to support him in his journey through it right comfortably, or it would not even be worthy to be spelled by him with a capital A. And, as the age did want to be so distinguished from still more besotted and priest-ridden times, it rose to the occasion, and Mr. D’Arcy lived in clover. He entered the room accompanied by a little, unwholesome, saturnine, beetle-browed friend, Professor Melton. Tho professor looked as if he agreed with Isabella the Catholic, who set a penalty on bathing after the conquest of the Moors in Spain. Mr. Melton was lecturer on physiology at the Institute of Natural Science, and his laboratory was close by. It was seldom he permitted himself much relaxation, but felt it incumbent on him to aid in every scheme for liberating the minds of young people from reverence for the sacredness of days or devotion to religious exercises. So he had consented to promote the interests of this little society by his occasional presence. He was soon the centre of a group of talkers, and his talk was on the extinction of pauperism.

“In a renovated society,” he said, “it will be recognised that there is no greater sin than almsgiving. By relieving distressed persons, by giving bread to the hungry, you defeat Nature, thwart her efforts to limit the too great increase of the race, and allow the recipient to make the fatal error that he can live without work.”

“Would you deny assistance to the aged and the sick?” asked a lady.

“I would abolish the Poor Laws, which establish the right of an asylum to old and infirm people, who actually often live for twenty years in the union at an expense to the country of say £250.”

“Would you refuse to help them altogether?”

“I would. By that means people would be made more provident, and would invest their savings when young to keep them when old.”

“Then you would leave them to starve?”

“Not at all. I would simply stimulate them to work; if they were unfit to work, they must die. I would not prevent anybody giving them food and shelter, though I would teach people that by so doing they were hindering the great law of Nature—the survival of the fittest.”

“What about hospitals for consumptives, asylums for idiots and other shelters for hopeless cases?”

“Oh! while there was a reasonable chance of restoring a consumptive person to health, and enabling him to work, I would do what I could for him. If his case became quite hopeless, I would have him mercifully despatched, that he might not burden the State. As for idiots, the subjects of incurable mental disease, cripples that could do nothing useful, and all other maimed and useless people, I would get rid of them in the same way—of course under the most careful restrictions against abuse.”

“Don’t you think the State should refuse permission to marry to people who cannot produce a certificate of perfect health from a physician employed by the Government, with a view of checking the multiplication of consumptive and ill-developed folk?”

“Certainly; that is in my scheme for an ideal republic.”

“I think I know,” said Elsworth, “many beautiful souls whose work in the world is of the highest value to our day and generation, who would not have been here had any such regulation been in force.”

“That may be,” replied the advanced one; “but there would be no room for their energies in my ideal world. Where all were strong and healthful, all mentally well developed, there would be no weakness, disease, or sorrow to assist.”

“And the highest perfection of man would be extinct in a selfish, unfeeling strength;” said Elsworth, turning to a pretty little girl at a table, who was bending over a dish of wild flowers. “Are you botanising, Miss Gordon?”

“No; I was listening to your conversation, and thinking how unlovely a place all these new ideas will make the world when they come to predominate. Beauty will be eliminated. Don’t you think flowers were meant to delight us as well as the insects?”

“Of course; and I agree with Emerson that ‘flowers are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.’”

“This is such a dreadfully utilitarian age that one has almost to apologise for holding such sentiments,” said she.

“Not at all, if we hold with Ruskin that the most perfectly useful is always the most perfectly beautiful thing—there is direct relation between the two. It is ever these half-statements which are the greatest lies. Truth is full-orbed; it is the broken arcs that are half in shadow.”

He is not very wise who has never erred; and, if the truth must be told, our hero was, to say the least, wasting his time in a society composed of vain and unreal people, who could teach him nothing but that we are “only cunning casts in clay.”

As Arthur Devaux and Elsworth walked home with Linda, they discussed the reasonableness of the old and new beliefs about God. Both the doctor and his clever sister were declared atheists, and, as Bacon says, proved the unsatisfying nature of their negation of God by trying to make converts to their theory. The constant association with these friends, and others of the same opinions, had, little by little, sapped our hero’s faith.

“How do you like the tone of our meetings, Mr. Elsworth?” asked Linda.

“I was thinking,” said he,“how much they resemble the society of which Lady Wortley Montague once spoke, established for taking the word ‘not’ out of the commandments and putting it into the Creed. She rather approved of the idea, as she thought so many people loved to be disobedient, it might bring about a reformation in morals.”

“Oh, but we are not immoral,” said her brother; “it is a higher morality, a higher basis we wish to introduce. We want first to be rid of the idea of God; the mechanic Thor with the hammer and workman’s tools. The design argument is played out, don’t you think?”

“It is hard to have to believe, and still harder to maintain before one’s unlearned friends, that this complicated machinery, so compact, so admirably adapted to its purpose, had no designer,” said Elsworth, with a sigh he could not repress.

“Oh, but it had!” said the young physician. “You must claim all for development that the theist claims for God the mechanic; you must claim that every articulation, every tendon and muscle assumed its form after long ages of necessity for its appearance had gradually evolved it in its present perfection.”

“In a measure I grant this. I know how faculties come to us by reaching after them—know that the craftsman’s deftness is the result of long practice and education of sense and muscle; but I cannot find in the highest craftsman’s hand a single extra nerve or tendon, or a better articulation, than I find in the clumsiest day-labourer’s fist which never knew the use of a more delicate instrument than a spade.”

“Of course not,” said Devaux; “it is not the individual, it is the type which is developed into a higher grade by slow stages, and so gradually that it is usually impossible to mark the precise advent of a distinct advance. Still, as Haeckel points out in the case of the axolotl in the Jardin des Plantes, some few advanced beyond the grade of development hitherto known in them; they lost their gills, changed the shape of their bodies, and, from aquatic animals, became lung-breathers and terrestrial animals. What do you say to that?”

“I would like to know more precise particulars than Haeckel gives of the anatomical characteristics of the axolotl in its natural condition in Mexico; whether it may or may not be the fact that all axolotls, after having propagated themselves in their larval state, undergo the metamorphosis into salamander like animals (Amblystoma).”^[1]

“But surely you cannot be blind to the enormous number of facts adduced by entomologists and botanists to show how the organs of insects and plants have a direct correlation to each other; how each organ and the whole form of the insect is the outcome of its effort to obtain food from particular species of plants, and the form of the plant the outcome of its resistance to giving food supply without payment in the shape of pollen dissemination. The ingenuity of the insect in its endeavour to get nectar easily, is met by the cleverness, so to speak, of the plant in providing the food only in such situations where it cannot be reached without efficient pollen dusting. Where is the room for your heavenly Mechanic here?”

“I fail to see that you in the least disturb my theism. ‘These are only parts of His ways.’ I expect that a Creator of all things would operate by means, by just such natural laws and the power of such environment as you have instanced, to modify and develop organs. All these things serve but to make me admire the power of His inflexible laws, and the infinite wisdom which set them going. I see nothing in these things to make disbelieve in an almighty Creator. The creating influence is only set a little farther back, not excluded. That these wonderful adaptations exist potentially in the original protoplasm of the creature, is to me quite as much a proof of an all-wise Creator as if I believed in a separate interference for the production of each organ, or adaptation as its necessity arose. It is the potentiality in the cell and the atom that transcends all men’s materialist explanations, that is so wonderful to me. This is where you see Force and Nature, and the Christian sees God, as Browning says:—

“Yes,” said Linda, who had not taken part in the argument till now, “you set up your idea of God as a great First Cause to shield yourself from awkward questions and the confession of your ignorance.”

“Questions that you, at least, cannot answer, and ignorance that none of our materialist philosophers can enlighten,” replied Elsworth, with a little warmth.

“Precisely; only we are honest enough to say we don’t know and cannot explain; while you shelter yourself behind a mere idea, which is a barrier to investigation and an obstacle to all freedom of research.”

“I protest. Nothing of the sort. Darwin was a theist; Newton was a theist. Surely neither of these men found their conception of God an obstacle to their freedom of research?”

“I don’t mean that,” rejoined the physician. “What I mean is, that to the great mass of mankind the habit of attributing to a Creator, of whom they know nothing, the formation of things they cannot understand, prevents their desire to enlarge the boundaries of their knowledge. Dog fanciers know perfectly well that the English bull-dog is the creation of the breeders; they understand just how the bull dog has acquired his peculiar characteristics. They attribute animals in general, perhaps, to God; they take the credit of the bull-dog to themselves. The gardener knows just how to develop the particular dahlia he wants; he knows all the tricks and interferences of art required to produce the flower of a certain form and colour. He attributes the creation of plants in general to God; the dahlia you ask for, and which is in his particular line, he places to his own account. As men enlarge the bounds of their knowledge, there will become less and less room for God. I know a man who has a brown mark on his arm, which he calls a mushroom; he is particularly fond of ketchup; he attributes this taste to the fact that he is marked with a mushroom. He declares that during the mushroom season this brown mark (not a bit like a mushroom, by the way) comes to greater perfection; as the season passes it diminishes, till at last there is, he declares, very little to be seen.

“Now, at present, maternal impressions and birth marks are very little understood by scientific men; the whole question is still under investigation. By-and-bye the whole mystery will be solved, and we shall have an answer to the difficulty. Meanwhile the common folk will persist in their fanciful theories, while the more intelligent will suspend their judgment till we can influence it by science. This is my attitude about creation, as you call it. Yours is the attitude of Mrs. Gamp towards the strawberry marks. She persists in explaining, VoilÀ tout!”

“In this instance Mrs. Gamp has a good deal of reason on her side, and it is not unlikely that her explanation may have its foundation in fact. The uneducated mind has often made discoveries by observing and comparing this sort of facts which scientific men have after much scoffing been compelled to admit are correct statements of natural phenomena.

“For instance, in the case of the stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi, all the scientific men for many years put the whole business down to imposture, if they took the trouble to consider it seriously at all. Now they are compelled to recognise that it is a fact that in highly nervous temperaments the concentration of the mind for a length of time on one engrossing idea, such as the wounds of Christ in the hands and feet, will produce just such a condition of the parts in question on the body of the absorbed individual, as is recorded of St. Francis. The influence of the mind upon the body is even yet only very partially understood. Mrs. Gamp, in the case you allude to, has my sympathy. Pray remember that our great Paracelsus, the father of our modern scientific medicine, derived much of his valuable information on treatment from the unlettered peasantry of the countries in which he travelled, and of whom he was not too proud to learn.”

“That is true, and I saw the other day that a layman of Vienna has discovered a method of treatment for the cure of that puzzling and intractable disease, writer’s cramp, which has been recognised by the physicians of Vienna as affording the only really good results they know of. But you are wandering rather wide of our argument. We started from the evidences of design as shown in the human hand, and went on to consider the question of a great First Cause. Paley’s argument from the watch might have been all very well for his time, but is of little force now, because you see where it lands you; it makes your designer—your watchmaker—responsible for all the imperfections as well as the excellencies. I see a watch lying by the road-side, and at once say it must have had a maker. Very well; it is a bad time-keeper—gains one day, loses the next, and is a generally shabby bit of workmanship. So much the worse for the watchmaker. Now, take the human eye. Helmholtz said, as an optical instrument it was so defective, that had such a piece of workmanship been sent to him by any optician, he should have forthwith forfeited his custom. If you persist in using the design argument after Paley, you make your Omnipotent Designer responsible for all the evil, the disease, the misery that is in the world. Here is the hand with all its wonders. ‘Behold the all-wise, all-powerful Creator,’ say you. Good. But there are scarlet fever, lunacy, cancer. How about your all-wise, all-powerful Creator now?

“Oh, if you would but read your Browning! Hear what he says:—

“I am surprised you think the existence of evil militates against the existence of a perfect Creator. A ribald controversialist was once asked how he would have improved the world had he had the making of it. He replied; ‘For one thing I would have made health catching instead of disease. Yours is a similar ad captandum style of argument. You must know as well as I do that our fevers are the result of dirt and neglect of the most elementary sanitary precautions; it is not nature that afflicts us so much as our artificial living and our vicious habits. As for lunacy, it is largely the product of vice, drink, and the race for wealth. With regard to pain, it is frequently conservative. As Theodore Parker points out, if we could put our fingers into the fire without pain, they would soon be destroyed; if dust did not make our eyes smart, their utility would soon be destroyed by rough usage; if we could eat improper food without unpleasant consequences, our digestive functions would soon be unfit for their work, and so forth.”

Linda laughed at the idea of health being catching, and thought the advocate of design was cornered.

“For my part,” said Elsworth, “I think the man was a great fool. Love is catching, as Coventry Patmore says, ‘love that grows from one to all, and love is better than health, isn’t it?’”

“I don’t see,” said the doctor, “that you have in the least affected my argument that evil could never have been permitted by an all-wise, omnipotent, and good Creator. Its existence proves the Creator not to have been all these, at any rate.”

“A great deal of man’s ill may be removed,” said Elsworth; “indeed, amelioration is the dominant note of nature. If you will forgive me quoting my favourite poet Browning again—

you will see what I mean. There is a general onward movement; the prospect brightens for mankind. But there will always be evil, because without it there can be no good. Where would be patience without trials; where sympathy and charity without suffering? Do you think the virtues and nobility of Gordon, of Sakya Muni, of St. Francis, would have been evolved had there been no evil and suffering in the world?”

“In a perfect world there would have been no occasion for them,” said Linda.

“I cannot conceive,” Elsworth replied,“ of a perfect world without love for one’s neighbour, sacrifice of self, devotion to high and noble efforts for the good of others. Fancy the hideous selfishness of a world of wealthy, luxurious aristocrats, such as helped to precipitate the French Revolution; the gratification of their own pleasures and passions the sole object of their existence! Contrast this state of things in your ideal perfect world—where every one would have all he wanted, and would have no occasion to think of others,—no opportunity to exercise charity, pity, long-suffering, or altruism in any form—with the burning love of a St. Paul, who was willing himself to be accursed if he could thereby save others; with Christian heroes who have sold themselves into slavery; have entered lazar-houses from which they could never return; have cheerfully embraced martyrdom, and undertaken every form of danger and suffering, to help their brother men. Or to come to every-day affairs, contrast the selfishness of the rich, and those who are elevated above the grosser cares and difficulties of life, with the charity and devotedness practised by the poor of our great cities towards each other; and say if the existence of pain, sorrow, and suffering is not actually necessary for the evolution of the highest man? And so ‘upon men’s own account must evil stay.’”

“But here we are at your diggings, Elsworth. You will get rid of these cobwebs of the brain before you have done with St. Bernard’s,” laughed Devaux.

And so the friends went home to bed, to dream of a regenerated world, fit for an age of steam, telephones, and physiological research not contemplated by the Apostles, and therefore requiring a new religion of its own.