‘Then you must give your father the same scope. He attributes what we are absolutely certain are bad things to his God--and yet he may believe in a good God, for the good in his idea of God is that alone in virtue of which he is able to believe in him. No mortal can believe in the bad.’
‘He puts the evil foremost in his creed and exhortations.’
‘That may be. Few people know their own deeper minds. The more potent a power in us, I suspect it is the more hidden from our scrutiny.’
‘If there be a God, then, Wilfrid, he is very indifferent to what his creatures think of him.’
‘Perhaps very patient and hopeful, Charley--who knows? Perhaps he will not force himself upon them, but help them to grow into the true knowledge of him. Your father may worship the true God, and yet have only a little of that knowledge.’
A silence followed. At length--‘Thank you for my father,’ said Charley.
‘For not being like my father?--I do,’ he returned.
It was the loveliest evening that brooded round us as we walked. The moon had emerged from a rippled sea of grey cloud, over which she cast her dull opaline halo. Great masses and banks of cloud lay about the rest of the heavens, and, in the dark rifts between, a star or two were visible, gazing from the awful distance.
‘I wish I could let it into me, Wilfrid,’ said Charley, after we had been walking in silence for some time along the grass.
‘I hate being taken in. The more pleasant a self-deception, the less I choose to submit to it.’
‘That is reasonable. But where lies the deception?’
‘I don’t say it’s a deception. I only don’t know that it isn’t.’
‘I mean what you call the beauty of the night.’
‘Surely there can be little question of that?’
‘Ever so little is enough. Suppose I asked you wherein its beauty consisted: would you be satisfied if I said--In the arrangement of the blue and the white, with the sparkles of yellow, and the colours about the scarce visible moon?’
‘Certainly not. I should reply that it lay in the gracious peace of the whole--troubled only with the sense of some lovely secret behind, of which itself was but the half-modelled representation, and therefore the reluctant outcome.’
‘Suppose I rejected the latter half of what you say, admitting the former, but judging it only the fortuitous result of the half-necessary, half-fortuitous concurrences of nature. Suppose I said:--The air which is necessary to our life, happens to be blue; the stars can’t help shining through it and making it look deep; and the clouds are just there because they must be somewhere till they fall again; all which is more agreeable to us than fog because we feel more comfortable in weather of the sort, whence, through complacency and habit, we have got to call it beautiful:--suppose I said this, would you accept it?’