第76章 What it Involved (2)

Am I to wait till, between our injustice to secularists and their injustice to Christians, she is half badgered out of life? If she could but love me, if she would marry me now, I could save her from what must be a life of misery.""If I could but get you to see it from what I am convinced is Erica's point of view!" exclaimed Charles Osmond."Forget for a minute that you are her knight and champion, and try to see things as she sees them.Let us try to reverse things.Just imagine for a minute that you are the child of some leading man, the head and chief of a party or association we'll say that you are the child of an Archbishop of Canterbury.You are carefully educated, you become a zealous worker, you enter into all your father's interests, you are able to help him in a thousand ways.But, by slow degrees, we will say that you perceive a want in the system in which you have been educated, and, after many years of careful study and thought, you are obliged to reject your former beliefs and to accept that other system which shall most recommend itself to you.We will suppose for the sake of analogy that you become a secularist.Knowing that your change of views will be a terrible grief to your father the archbishop, it takes your whole strength to make your confession, and you not only feel your father's personal pain, but you feel that his pain will be increased by his public position.To make it worse, too, we must suppose that a number of people calling themselves atheists, and in the name of atheism, have at intervals for the last thirty years been annoying and insulting your father, that in withstanding their attacks he has often received bodily injury, and that the atheists have so often driven him into the law courts that he has been pretty nearly beggared.All his privations you have shared for instance, you went with him and lived for years in a poky little lodging, and denied yourself every single luxury.But now you have, in spite of all these persecutions carried on in the name of secularism, learned to see that the highest form of secularism is true.The archbishop feels this terribly.However, being a very loving father, he wisely refuses to indulge in perpetual controversy with his child.You agree still to live together, and each try with all your might to find all the possible points of union still left you.

Probably, if you are such a child as I imagine, you love your father ten times more than you did before.Then just as you have made up your mind to try to be more to him, when all you care about in life is to comfort and help him, and when your heart is much occupied with your new opinions, a friend of yours a secularist comes to you, and says: 'A miserable life lies before you.The atheists will never thoroughly take up with you while you live with your father the archbishop, and of course it is wretched for you to be surrounded by those of another creed.Come with me.I love you I will make you happy, and save you from persecution."In spite of himself Brian had smiled many times at this putting of an Archbishop of Canterbury into the position of Luke Raeburn.But the conclusion arrived at seemed to him to admit of only one answer, and left him very grave.

"You may be right," he said, very sadly."But to stand still and watch her suffer--"He broke off, unable to finish his sentence.

Charles Osmond took it up.

"To stand still and watch her suffer will be the terribly hard work of a brave man who takes a true, deep view.To rush in with offers of help would be the work of an impetuous man who took a very superficial view.If Erica were selfish, I would say go and appeal to her selfishness, and marry her at once; for selfishness will never do any good in Guilford Terrace.But she is one of the most devoted women I know.Your appeal would be rejected.I believe she will feel herself in the right place there, and, as long as that is the case, nothing will move her.""Father," said Brian, rather desperately, "I would take your opinion before any other opinion in the world.You know her well far better than I do.Tell me honestly do you think she could ever love me?""You have given me a hard task," said Charles Osmond."But you have asked for my honest opinion, and you must have it.As long as her father lives I don't believe Erica will ever love a man well enough to marry him.I remember, in my young days, a beautiful girl in our neighborhood, the belle of the whole county; and years went by, and she had countless offers, but she rejected them all.

People used to remonstrate with her, and ask her how it was.'Oh,'

she used to reply, 'that is very easily explained..I never see a man I think equal to my own brothers!' Now, whatever faults Raeburn has, we may be sure Erica sees far less plainly than we see, and nobody can deny that he is a grand fellow.When one bears in mind all that he has had against him, his nobility of character seems to me marvelous.He puts us to shame.And that is why he seems to me the wholesome though powerful medicine for this nineteenth century of ours, with its great professions and its un-Christlike lives.""What is the use of patience what is the use of love," exclaimed Brian, "if I am never to serve her?""Never! Who said so?" said his father smiling."Why, you have been serving her every blessed day since you first loved her.Is unspoken love worth nothing? Are prayers useless? Is it of no service to let your light shine? But I see how it is.As a doctor, you look upon pain as the one great enemy to be fought with, to be bound down, to be conquered.You want to shield Erica from pain, which she can't be shielded from, if she is to go on growing.

"'Knowledge by suffering entereth!'

No one would so willingly indorse the truth of that as she herself.