While in their exaltation of
the "sub-conscious self"--namely, of those blind movements of instinct
and foreboding common to the lower animals and to savage or degenerate
man alike--as against the intellect and the reasoned action of the
will, he saw a menace to human attainment, to civilisation--in the best
meaning of that word--to right reason and noble living, which it would
be difficult to overestimate. These good people, while pouring contempt
on the body, and even denying its existence, in point of fact thought
and talked about little else. All of which struck him as not only very
tiresome and very silly, but very dangerous. Modern Protestantism might
eventuate in Rationalism, in a limiting of human endeavour exclusively
to the end of material well-being. But this worship of the
pseudo-sciences, this tinkering at the accepted foundations and
accepted decencies of the social order, this cultivation of
intellectual and moral chaos, could, for the vast majority of its
professors at all events, eventuate only in the mad-house. And to the
mad-house, whether by twentieth-century esoteric airship or occult
subway, Dominic Iglesias had not the very smallest desire to go.
For he had no ambition to be "on time" and up-to-date, to electrify
either himself or his contemporaries by an exhibition of mental
smartness. He merely desired, earnestly yet humbly, to be given grace
to find the road--however archaic in the eyes of the modern world that
road might be--which leads to the light on the far horizon and beyond
to the presence of God. The more he meditated on these things the more
inconceivable it became to him but that this road veritably existed;
and that, not by labour of man, but by everlasting ordinance of God. It
was absurd, in face of a state of being so complex, so highly
organised, so universally subjected to law, as the one in which he
found himself, that a matter of such supreme importance as the channel
of intercourse between the soul and its Maker should have been left to
haphazard accident or blundering of lucky chance. And so, having
supplemented his researches in print, by listening to the discourses of
many teachers, from one end of London to the other in lecture-hall,
chapel, and church, having even stood among the crowds which gather
around itinerant preachers in the Park, Dominic found his thought
fixing itself with deepening assurance upon the communion in which he
had been born and baptised, which his father, in the interests of the
revolutionary propaganda, had so bitterly repudiated, and from which
his mother, broken by the tyranny of circumstance and bodily weakness,
had lapsed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account