Then for a long time we are like men who follow down
the cleft of a mountain and the peaks are hidden from us and
forgotten. It takes years to reach the dry plain, and then we look
back and see our home.
What is it, do you think, that causes the return? I think it is the
problem of living; for every day, every experience of evil, demands a
solution. That solution is provided by the memory of the great scheme
which at last we remember. Our childhood pierces through again ... But
I will not attempt to explain it, for I have not the power; only I
know that we who return suffer hard things; for there grows a gulf
between us and many companions. We are perpetually thrust into
minorities, and the world almost begins to talk a strange language; we
are troubled by the human machinery of a perfect and superhuman
revelation; we are over-anxious for its safety, alarmed, and in danger
of violent decisions.
And this is hard: that the Faith begins to make one abandon the old
way of judging. Averages and movements and the rest grow uncertain. We
see things from within and consider one mind or a little group as a
salt or leaven. The very nature of social force seems changed to us.
And this is hard when a man has loved common views and is happy only
with his fellows.
And this again is very hard, that we must once more take up that awful
struggle to reconcile two truths and to keep civic freedom sacred in
spite of the organization of religion, and not to deny what is
certainly true. It is hard to accept mysteries, and to be humble. We
are tost as the great schoolmen were tost, and we dare not neglect the
duty of that wrestling.
But the hardest thing of all is that it leads us away, as by a
command, from all that banquet of the intellect than which there is no
keener joy known to man.
I went slowly up the village place in the dusk, thinking of this
deplorable weakness in men that the Faith is too great for them, and
accepting it as an inevitable burden. I continued to muse with my eyes
upon the ground ...
There was to be no more of that studious content, that security in
historic analysis, and that constant satisfaction of an appetite which
never cloyed. A wisdom more imperative and more profound was to put a
term to the comfortable wisdom of learning. All the balance of
judgement, the easy, slow convictions, the broad grasp of things, the
vision of their complexity, the pleasure in their innumerable
life - all that had to be given up. Fanaticisms were no longer entirely
to be despised, just appreciations and a strong grasp of reality no
longer entirely to be admired.
