第153章 Rose's Adventure (6)

"Never mind," said the professor, cheerfully, "it is to bigotry like this that we shall owe our recovery of Erica.And seriously, what can you think of a religion which can make a man behave like this to one who had never injured him, who, on the contrary, had befriended his child?""It is not Christ's religion which teaches him to do it," said Erica, "it is the perversion of that religion.""Then in all conscience the perversion is vastly more powerful and extended than what you deem the reality.""Unfortunately yes," said Erica, sighing."At present it is.""At present!" retorted the professor; "why, you have had more than eighteen hundred years to improve it.""You yourself taught me to have patience with the slow processes of nature," said Erica, smiling a little."If you allow unthinkable ages for the perfecting of a layer of rocks, do you wonder that in a few hundred years a church is still far from perfect?""I expect perfection in no human being," said the professor, taking up a Bible from the table and turning over the pages with the air of a man who knew its contents well; "when I see Christians in some sort obeying this, I will believe that their system is the true system; but not before." He guided his finger slowly beneath the following lines: 'Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamor, and evil-speaking be put away from you, with all malice.'

There is the precept, you see, and a very good precept, to be found in the secularist creed as well; but now let us look at the practice.See how we secularists are treated! Why, we live as it were in a foreign land, compelled to keep the law yet denied the protection of the law! 'Outlaws of the constitution, outlaws of the human race," as Burke was kind enough to call us.No! When Isee Christians no longer slandering our leaders, no longer coining hateful lies about us out of their own evil imaginations, when Isee equal justice shown to all men of whatever creed, then, the all-conquering love.Christianity has yet to prove itself the religion of love; at present it is the religion of exclusion."Mrs.MacNaughton, who was exceedingly fond of Erica, looked sorry for her.

"You see, Erica," she said, "the professor judges by averages.No one would deny that some of the greatest men in the world have been, and are even in the present day, Christians; they have been brought up in it, and can't free themselves from its trammels.You have a few people like the Osmonds, a few really liberal men; but you have only to see how they are treated by their confreres to realize the illiberality of the religion as a whole.""I think with you," said Erica, "that if the revelation of God's love, and His purpose for all, be only to be learned from the lives of Christians, it is a bad lookout for us.But God HAS given us one perfect revelation of Himself, and the Perfect Son can make us see plainly even when the imperfect sons are holding up to us a distorted likeness of the Father."She had spoken quietly, but with the tremulousness of strong feeling, and, moreover, she was so sensitive that the weight of the hostile atmosphere oppressed her, and made speaking a great difficulty.When she had ended, she turned away from the disapproving eyes to the only sympathetic eyes in the room the dog's.They looked up into hers with that wistful endeavor to understand the meaning of something beyond their grasp, which makes the eyes of animals so pathetic.

There was a silence; her use of the adjective "perfect" had been very trying to all her hearers, who strongly disapproved of the whole sentence; but then she was so evidently sincere and so thoroughly lovable that no one liked to give her pain.

Aunt Jean was the only person who thought there was much chance of her ever returning to the ranks of secularism; she was the only one who spoke now.

"Well, well," she said, pityingly, "you are but young; you will think very differently ten years hence."Erica kept back an angry retort with difficulty, and Raeburn, whose keen sense of justice was offended, instantly came forward in her defense, though her words had been like a fresh stab in the old wound.

"That is no argument, Jean," he said quickly."It is the very unjust extinguisher which the elders use for the suppression of individuality in the young."As he spoke, he readjusted a slide in his microscope, making it plain to all that he intended the subject to be dropped.He had a wonderful way of impressing his individuality on others, and the household settled down once more into the Sabbatical calm which had been broken by a bigoted Sabbatarian.

Nothing more was heard of Rose, nor did Erica have an opportunity of talking over the events of that Sunday with her father for some days for he was exceedingly busy; the long weeks wasted during the summer in the wearisome libel case having left upon his hands vast arrears of provincial work.In some of the large iron foundries you may see hundreds of different machines all kept in action by a forty horse-power engine; and Raeburn was the great motive-power which gave life to all the branches of Raeburnites which now stretched throughout the length and breadth of the land.Without him they would have relapsed, very probably, into that fearfully widespread mass of indifference which is not touched by any form of Christianity or religious revival, but which had responded to the practical, secular teaching of the singularly powerful secularist leader.He had a wonderful gift of stirring up the heretofore indifferent, and making them take a really deep interest in national questions.This was by far the happiest part of his life because it was the healthy part of it.The sameness of his anti-theological work, and the barrenness of mere down-pulling, were distasteful enough to him; he was often heartily sick of it all, and had he not thought it a positive duty to attack what he deemed a very mischievous delusion, he would gladly have handed over this part of his work to some one else, and devoted himself entirely to national work.