The first day of Michaelmas term is, to an undergraduate's
furniture, the brightest day of the year. Much as Charles regretted
home, he rejoiced to see old Oxford again. The porter had acknowledged
him at the gate, and the scout had smiled and bowed, as he ran up the
worn staircase and found a blazing fire to welcome him. The coals
crackled and split, and threw up a white flame in strong contrast with
the newly-blackened bars and hobs of the grate. A shining copper kettle
hissed and groaned under the internal torment of water at boiling
point. The chimney-glass had been cleaned, the carpet beaten, the
curtains fresh glazed. A tea-tray and tea commons were placed on the
table; besides a battel paper, two or three cards from tradesmen who
desired his patronage, and a note from a friend whose term had already
commenced. The porter came in with his luggage, and had just received
his too ample remuneration, when, through the closing door, in rushed
Sheffield in his travelling dress.
“Well, old fellow, how are you?” he said, shaking both of Charles's
hands, or rather arms, with all his might; “here we are all again; I am
just come like you. Where have you been all this time? Come, tell us
all about yourself. Give me some tea, and let's have a good jolly
chat.” Charles liked Sheffield, he liked Oxford, he was pleased to get
back; yet he had some remains of home-sickness on him, and was not
quite in cue for Sheffield's good-natured boisterousness. Willis's
matter, too, was still on his mind. “Have you heard the news?” said
Sheffield; “I have been long enough in college to pick it up. The
kitchen-man was full of it as I passed along. Jack's a particular
friend of mine, a good honest fellow, and has all the gossip of the
place. I don't know what it means, but Oxford has just now a very bad
inside. The report is, that some of the men have turned Romans; and
they say that there are strangers going about Oxford whom no one knows
anything of. Jack, who is a bit of a divine himself, says he heard the
Principal say that, for certain, there were Jesuits at the bottom of
it; and I don't know what he means, but he declares he saw with his own
eyes the Pope walking down High Street with the priest. I asked him how
he knew it; he said he knew the Pope by his slouching hat and his long
beard; and the porter told him it was the Pope. The Dons have met
several times; and several tutors are to be discommoned, and their
names stuck up against the buttery-door. Meanwhile the Marshal, with
two bulldogs, is keeping guard before the Catholic chapel; and, to
complete it, that old drunken fellow Topham is reported, out of malice,
when called in to cut the Warden of St. Mary's hair, to have made a
clean white tonsure atop of him.”
“My dear Sheffield, how you run on!” said Reding. “Well, do you
know, I can tell you a piece of real news bearing on these reports, and
not of the pleasantest. Did you know Willis of St. George's?”
“I think I once saw him at wine in your rooms; a modest,
nice-looking fellow, who never spoke a word.”
“Ah, I assure you, he has a tongue in his head when it suits him,”
answered Charles: “yet I do think,” he added, musingly, “he's very much
changed, and not for the better.”
“Well, what's the upshot?” asked Sheffield.
“He has turned Catholic,” said Charles.
“What a fool!” cried Sheffield.
There was a pause. Charles felt awkward: then he said, “I can't say
I was surprised; yet I should have been less surprised at White.”
“Oh, White won't turn Catholic,” said Sheffield; “he hasn't it in
him. He's a coward.”
“Fools and cowards!” answered Charles: “thus you divide the world,
Sheffield? Poor Willis!” he added; “one must respect a man who acts
according to his conscience.”
“What can he know of conscience?” said Sheffield; “the idea of his
swallowing, of his own free-will, the heap of rubbish which every
Catholic has to believe! in cold blood tying a collar round his neck,
and politely putting the chain into the hands of a priest!... And then
the Confessional! 'Tis marvellous!” and he began to break the coals
with the poker. “It's very well,” he continued, “if a man is born a
Catholic; I don't suppose they really believe what they are obliged to
profess; but how an Englishman, a gentleman, a man here at Oxford, with
all his advantages, can so eat dirt, scraping and picking up all the
dead lies of the dark ages—it's a miracle!”
“Well, if there is anything that recommends Romanism to me,” said
Charles, “it is what you so much dislike: I'd give twopence, if some
one, whom I could trust, would say to me, 'This is true; this is not
true.' We should be saved this eternal wrangling. Wouldn't you be glad
if St. Paul could come to life? I've often said to myself, 'Oh, that I
could ask St. Paul this or that!'”
“But the Catholic Church isn't St. Paul quite, I guess,” said
Sheffield.
“Certainly not; but supposing you did think it had the
inspiration of an Apostle, as the Roman Catholics do, what a comfort it
would be to know, beyond all doubt, what to believe about God, and how
to worship and please Him! I mean, you said, 'I can't believe
this or that;' now you ought to have said, 'I can't believe the Pope
has power to decide this or that.' If he had, you ought
to believe it, whatever it is, and not to say, 'I can't believe.'”
Sheffield looked hard at him: “We shall have you a papist some of
these fine days,” said he.
“Nonsense,” answered Charles; “you shouldn't say such things, even
in jest.”
“I don't jest; I am in earnest: you are plainly on the road.”
“Well, if I am, you have put me on it,” said Reding, wishing to get
away from the subject as quick as he could; “for you are ever talking
against shams, and laughing at King Charles and Laud, Bateman, White,
rood-lofts, and piscinas.”
“Now you are a Puseyite,” said Sheffield in surprise.
“You give me the name of a very good man, whom I hardly know by
sight,” said Reding; “but I mean, that nobody knows what to believe, no
one has a definite faith, but the Catholics and the Puseyites; no one
says, 'This is true, that is false; this comes from the Apostles, that
does not.'”
“Then would you believe a Turk,” asked Sheffield, “who came to you
with his 'One Allah, and Mahomet his Prophet'?”
“I did not say a creed was everything,” answered Reding, “or that a
religion could not be false which had a creed; but a religion can't be
true which has none.”
“Well, somehow that doesn't strike me,” said Sheffield.
“Now there was Vincent at the end of term, after you had gone down,”
continued Charles; “you know I stayed up for Littlego; and he was very
civil, very civil indeed. I had a talk with him about Oxford parties,
and he pleased me very much at the time; but afterwards, the more I
thought of what he said, the less was I satisfied; that is, I had got
nothing definite from him. He did not say, 'This is true, that is
false;' but 'Be true, be true, be good, be good, don't go too far, keep
in the mean, have your eyes about you, eschew parties, follow our
divines, all of them;'—all which was but putting salt on the bird's
tail. I want some practical direction, not abstract truths.”
“Vincent is a humbug,” said Sheffield.
“Dr. Pusey, on the other hand,” continued Charles, “is said always
to be decisive. He says, 'This is Apostolic, that's in the Fathers; St.
Cyprian says this, St. Augustine denies that; this is safe, that's
wrong; I bid you, I forbid you.' I understand all this; but I don't
understand having duties put on me which are too much for me. I don't
understand, I dislike, having a will of my own, when I have not the
means to use it justly. In such a case, to tell me to act of myself, is
like Pharaoh setting the Israelites to make bricks without straw.
Setting me to inquire, to judge, to decide, forsooth! it's absurd; who
has taught me?”
“But the Puseyites are not always so distinct,” said Sheffield;
“there's Smith, he never speaks decidedly in difficult questions. I
know a man who was going to remain in Italy for some years, at a
distance from any English chapel,—he could not help it,—and who came
to ask him if he might communicate in the Catholic churches; he could
not get an answer from him; he would not say yes or no.”
“Then he won't have many followers, that's all,” said Charles.
“But he has more than Dr. Pusey,” answered Sheffield.
“Well, I can't understand it,” said Charles; “he ought not; perhaps
they won't stay.”
“The truth is,” said Sheffield, “I suspect he is more of a sceptic
at bottom.”
“Well, I honour the man who builds up,” said Reding, “and I despise
the man who breaks down.”
“I am inclined to think you have a wrong notion of building up and
pulling down,” answered Sheffield; “Coventry, in his 'Dissertations,'
makes it quite clear that Christianity is not a religion of doctrines.”
“Who is Coventry?”
“Not know Coventry? he is one of the most original writers of the
day; he's an American, and, I believe, a congregationalist. Oh, I
assure you, you should read Coventry, although he is wrong on the
question of Church-government: you are not well au courant with
the literature of the day unless you do. He is no party man; he is a
correspondent of the first men of the day; he stopped with the Dean of
Oxford when he was in England, who has published an English edition of
his 'Dissertations,' with a Preface; and he and Lord Newlights were
said to be the two most witty men at the meeting of the British
Association, two years ago.”
“I don't like Lord Newlights,” said Charles, “he seems to me to have
no principle; that is, no fixed, definite religious principle. You
don't know where to find him. This is what my father thinks; I have
often heard him speak of him.”
“It's curious you should use the word principle,” said
Sheffield; “for it is that which Coventry lays such stress on. He says
that Christianity has no creed; that this is the very point in which it
is distinguished from other religions; that you will search the New
Testament in vain for a creed; but that Scripture is full of
principles. The view is very ingenious, and seemed to me true, when
I read the book. According to him, then, Christianity is not a religion
of doctrines or mysteries; and if you are looking for dogmatism in
Scripture, it's a mistake.”
Charles was puzzled. “Certainly,” he said, “at first sight there
is no creed in Scripture.—No creed in Scripture,” he said slowly,
as if thinking aloud; “no creed in Scripture, therefore there is
no creed. But the Athanasian Creed,” he added quickly, “is that
in Scripture? It either is in Scripture, or it is not.
Let me see, it either is there, or it is not.... What was it that
Freeborn said last term?... Tell me, Sheffield, would the Dean of
Oxford say that the Creed was in Scripture or not? perhaps you do not
fairly explain Coventry's view; what is your impression?”
“Why, I will tell you frankly, my impression is, judging from his
Preface, that he would not scruple to say that it is not in Scripture,
but a scholastic addition.”
“My dear fellow,” said Charles, “do you mean that he, a dignitary of
the Church, would say that the Athanasian Creed was a mistake, because
it represented Christianity as a revelation of doctrines or mysteries
to be received on faith?”
“Well, I may be wrong,” said Sheffield, “but so I understood him.”
“After all,” said Charles sadly, “it's not so much more than that
other Dean, I forget his name, said at St. Mary's before the Vacation;
it's part of the same system. Oh, it was after you went down, or just
at the end of term: you don't go to sermons; I'm inclined not to go
either. I can't enter upon the Dean's argument; it's not worth while.
Well,” he added, standing up and stretching himself, “I am tired with
the day, yet it has not been a fatiguing one either; but London is so
bustling a place.”
“You wish me to say good-night,” said Sheffield. Charles did not
deny the charge; and the friends parted.