CHAPTER XXI. BOLTON AND ST. JOHN

St. John was seated in his study, with a book of meditations before him on which he was endeavoring to fix his mind. In the hot, dusty, vulgar atmosphere of modern life, it was his daily effort to bring around himself the shady coolness, the calm conventual stillness, that breathes through such writers as St. Francis de Sales and Thomas à Kempis, men with a genius for devotion, who have left to mankind records of the mile-stones and road-marks by which they traveled towards the highest things. Nor should the most stringent Protestant fail to honor that rich and grand treasury of the experience of devout spirits of which the Romish Church has been the custodian. The hymns and prayers and pious meditations which come to us through this channel are particularly worthy of a cherishing remembrance in this dusty, materialistic age. To St. John they had a double charm, by reason of their contrast with the sterility of the religious forms of his early life. While enough of the Puritan and Protestant remained in him to prevent his falling at once into the full embrace of Romanism, he still regarded the old fabric with a softened, poetic tenderness; he "took pleasure in her stones and favored the dust thereof."

Nor is it to be denied that in the history of the Romish Church are records of heroism and self-devotion which might justly inspire with ardor the son of a line of Puritans. Who can go beyond St. Francis Xavier in the signs of an apostle? Who labored with more utter self-surrender than Father Claver for the poor negro slaves of South America? And how magnificent are those standing Orders of Charity, composed of men and women of that communion, that have formed from age to age a life-guard of humanity, devoted to healing the sick, sheltering and educating the orphans, comforting the dying!

A course of eager reading in this direction might make it quite credible even that a Puritan on the rebound should wish to come as near such a church as is possible without sacrifice of conscience and reason.

In the modern Anglican wing of the English Church St. John thought he had found the blessed medium. There he believed were the signs of the devotion, the heroism and self-sacrifice of the primitive Catholic Church, without the hindrances and incrustations of superstition. That little record, "Ten Years in St. George's Mission," was to him the seal of their calling. There he read of men of property devoting their entire wealth, their whole time and strength, to the work of regenerating the neglected poor of London. He read of a district that at first could be entered only under the protection of the police, where these moral heroes began their work of love amid the hootings and howlings of the mob and threats of personal violence,—the scoff and scorn of those they came to save; and how by the might of Christian love and patience these savage hearts were subdued, these blasphemies turned to prayers; and how in this dark district arose churches, schools, homes for the destitute, reformatories for the lost. No wonder St. John, reading of such a history, felt, "This is the church for me." Perhaps a wider observation might have shown him that such labors and successes are not peculiar to the ritualist, that to wear the cross outwardly is not essential to bearing the cross inwardly, and that without signs and the symbolism of devout forms, the spirit of love, patience and self-denial can and does accomplish the same results.

St. John had not often met Bolton before that evening at the Henderson's. There, for the first time, he had had a quiet, uninterrupted conversation with him; and, from the first, there had been felt between them that constitutional sympathy that often unites widely varying natures, like the accord of two different strings of an instrument.

Bolton was less of an idealist than St. John, with a wider practical experience and a heavier mental caliber. He was in no danger of sentimentalism, and yet there was about him a deep and powerful undertone of feeling that inclined him in the same direction with Mr. St. John. There are men, and very strong men, whose natures gravitate towards Romanism with a force only partially modified by intellectual convictions: they would be glad to believe it if they could.

Bolton was an instance of a man of high moral and intellectual organization, of sensitive conscience and intense sensibility, who, with the highest ideal of manhood and of the purposes to which life should be devoted, had come to look upon himself as an utter failure. An infirmity of the brain and the flesh had crept upon him in the unguarded period of youth, had struck its poison through his system, and weakened the power of the will, till all the earlier part of his life had been a series of the most mortifying failures. He had fallen from situation after situation, where he had done work for a season: and, each time, the agony of his self-reproach and despair had been doubled by the reproaches and expostulations of many of his own family friends, who poured upon bare nerves the nitric acid of reproach. He had seen the hair of his mother slowly and surely whitening in the sickening anxieties and disappointments which he had brought. Loving her with almost a lover's fondness, desiring above all things to be her staff and stay, he had felt himself to be to her only an anxiety and a disappointment.

When, at last, he had gained a foothold and a place in the press, he was still haunted with the fear of recurring failure. He who has two or three times felt his sanity give way, and himself become incapable of rational control, never thereafter holds himself secure. And so it was with this overpowering impulse to which Bolton had been subjected; he did not know at what time it might sweep over him again.

Of late, his intimacy had been sought by Eva, and he had yielded to the charm of her society. It was impossible for a nature at once so sympathetic and so transparent as hers to mingle intimately with another without learning and betraying much. The woman's tact at once divined that his love for Caroline had only grown with time, and the scarce suppressed eagerness with which he listened to any tidings from her led on from step to step in mutual confidence, till there was nothing more to be told, and Bolton felt that the only woman he had ever loved, loved him in return with a tenacity and intensity which would be controlling forces in her life.

It was with a bitter pleasure nearly akin to pain that this conviction entered his soul. To a delicate moral organization, the increase of responsibility, with distrust of ability to meet it, is a species of torture. He feared himself destined once more to wreck the life and ruin the hopes of one dearer than his own soul, who was devoting herself to him with a woman's uncalculating fidelity.

This agony of self-distrust, this conscious weakness in his most earnest resolutions and most fervent struggles, led Bolton to wish with all his heart that the beautiful illusion of an all-powerful church in which still resided the visible presence of Almighty God might be a reality. His whole soul sometimes cried out for such a visible Helper—for a church with power to bind and loose, with sacraments which should supplement human weakness by supernatural grace, with a priesthood competent to forgive sin and to guide the penitent. It was simply and only because his clear, well-trained intelligence could see no evidence of what he longed to believe, that the absolute faith was wanting.

He was not the only one in this perplexed and hopeless struggle with life and self and the world who has cried out for a visible temple, such as had the ancient Jew; for a visible High-Priest, who should consult the oracle for him and bring him back some sure message from a living God.

When he looked back on the seasons of his failures, he remembered that it was with vows and tears and prayers of agony in his mouth that he had been swept away by the burning temptation; that he had been wrenched, cold and despairing, from the very horns of the altar. Sometimes he looked with envy at those refuges which the Romish Church provides for those who are too weak to fight the battle of life alone, and thought, with a sense of rest and relief, of entering some of those religious retreats where a man surrenders his whole being to the direction of another, and ends the strife by laying down personal free agency at the feet of absolute authority. Nothing but an unconvinced intellect—an inability to believe—stood in the way of this entire self-surrender. This morning, he had sought Mr. St. John's study, to direct his attention to the case of the young woman whom he had rescued from the streets, the night before.

Bolton's own personal experience of human weakness and the tyranny of passion had made him intensely pitiful. He looked on the vicious and the abandoned as a man shipwrecked and swimming for his life looks on the drowning who are floating in the waves around him; and where a hand was wanting, he was prompt to stretch it out.

There was something in that young, haggard face, those sad, appealing eyes, that had interested him more powerfully than usual, and he related the case with much feeling to Mr. St. John, who readily promised to call and ascertain if possible some further particulars about her.

"You did the very best possible thing for her," said he, "when you put her into the care of the Church. The Church alone is competent to deal with such cases."

Bolton ruminated within himself on the wild, diseased impulses, the morbid cravings and disorders, the complete wreck of body and soul that comes of such a life as the woman had led, and then admired the serene repose with which St. John pronounced that indefinite power, the church, as competent to cast out the seven devils of the Magdalen.

"I shall be very glad to hear good news of her," he said; "and if the Church is strong enough to save such as she, I shall be glad to know that too."

"You speak in a skeptical tone," said St. John.

"Pardon me: I know something of the difficulties, physical and moral, which lie in the way," said Bolton.

"To them that believe, nothing shall be impossible," said St. John, his face kindling with ardor.

"And by the Church do you mean all persons who have the spirit of Jesus Christ, or simply that portion of them who worship in the form that you do?"

"Come, now," said St. John, "the very form of your question invites to a long historic argument; and I am sure you did not mean to draw that on your head."

"Some other time, though," said Bolton, "if you will undertake to convince me of the existence in this world of such a power as you believe in, you will find me certainly not unwilling to believe. But, this morning, I have but a brief time to spend. Farewell, for the present."

And with a hearty hand-shake the two parted.