PILGRIM PAPER 
 
 THE WHITINGS OF 
 
 THOMAS Wf IH!D, 
 
 ROBERT 
 
PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 A CITY OF THE DAWN 
 THE DRIFT OF PINIONS 
 STANDING BY 
 
 E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY 
 NEW YORK 
 
PILGRIM LPAPERS 
 
 FROM THE WRITINGS OF FRANCIS 
 THOMAS WILFRID, PRIEST 
 
 BY 
 ROBERT KEABLE 
 
 NEW YORK 
 E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 
 
 681 FIFTH AVENUE 
 
. , v Copyright, 1921 
 By fc; F. DUTTON & COMPANY 
 
 , ; .' V ' } Ail Rights Reserved 
 
 Printed in the Vnlted States of America 
 
I 
 
 <r~ 
 
 TO 
 
 SYBIL, 
 A RESOLUTE PILGRIM 
 
 GS6299 
 
f Friend, of my infinite dreams 
 
 Little enough endures ; 
 Little however it seems 
 
 It is yours, all yours. 
 
 1 Fame hath a fleeting breath : 
 
 Hopes may be frail or fond ; 
 But Love shall be Love till death, 
 And perhaps beyond." 
 
 ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAQB 
 
 FOREWORD . ix 
 
 1. OF TRAVELLERS AND TRAVELLING 1 
 
 2. OF THE BEASTS AT EPHESUS 10 
 
 3. OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 17 
 
 4. OF GOD OR ALLAH 28 
 
 5. OF WANTING GOD 34 
 
 6. OF A SUNDAY IN THE MISSION 44 
 
 7. OF MISUNDERSTANDINGS 56 
 
 8. OF THE MISSION PACK-SADDLE 66 
 
 9. OF THE BEST IN LIFE 74 
 
 10. OF AARON AND GAMALIEL 86 
 
 11. OF A VILLAGE UNDER THE MOON 100 
 
 12. OF THE LOVE OF GOD 108 
 
 13. OF THE TOUCHING OF THE WORLD IN- 
 
 TANGIBLE 115 
 
 14. OF THE TRUE RICHES 124 
 
 15. OF THE SHOUTING OF THE SONS OF GOD . . 132 
 
 16. OF THE BITTER CROSS 140 
 
 17. OF TERESA 148 
 
 18. OF WILFRID 156 
 
 19. OF SOME SICK VISITS 167 
 
 20. OF THE BISHOPS' PRAYERS 175 
 
 21. OF A DISPUTED QUESTION 185 
 
 22. OF THE COST OF MISSIONS 195 
 
 23. OF A MOUNT OF TEMPTATION 203 
 
 24. OF RELICS AND FRIENDS 212 
 
 25. OF CONCLUSIONS 221 
 
 26. OF THE RAINBOW'S END 230 
 
 vii 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 THEEE were few, it is certainly fair to say, 
 who knew Francis Thomas Wilfrid, of the 
 Mission, as I knew him, and that very 
 knowledge embarrasses me not a little in writ- 
 ing any sort of foreword to these Papers. He 
 confided them to me just before the end; and 
 now that his day is done, and he will never 
 speak or minister upon the Berg again, I feel 
 that the time has come to make them public. 
 These that he called therein "letters" were 
 written chiefly on the last of his journeyings, 
 as I know to my sorrow, for some, indeed, pen- 
 cilled on scraps of paper in hut or camp, have 
 been none too easy to decipher. To whom they 
 were written was his secret, and is now mine. 
 They are presented here substantially as he 
 wrote them, and if I have deleted a sentence in 
 one or two, he would not, I am sure, feel that 
 I had done wrong. Such sentences seem to me, 
 as I read them now, of too intimate a character 
 for the general public; but I have not removed 
 every personal touch. 
 
 For it is by something of which that personal 
 touch is a symbol that I think he would wish to 
 be known or remembered. Wilfrid had many 
 
 ix 
 
x FOREWORD 
 
 faults in his ministry, faults which, indeed, he 
 often deplored most deeply when he and I were 
 alone, and of which I knew him to be very 
 conscious when he knelt in the presence of 
 Almighty God. He was erratic, hasty, too easily 
 moved, and hardly ever steadily persistent 
 enough in routine work to make a successful 
 priest. But he was at least intensely sincere, 
 and the natives, to whom he was called more 
 especially to minister by the nature of the dis- 
 trict, had a real place in his affection. He ever 
 went to the altar bearing them in his heart as 
 the high-priest of the old Law carried the names 
 of the children of Israel on the golden and 
 jewelled breastplate. And as for the Euro- 
 peans, to whom he was mostly an eccentric 
 enigma, it may certainly be said that he never 
 regarded them as they too often thought he did. 
 He despised no man's faith, if it were genuine; 
 he resented no criticism, if it were just; but he 
 found ignorant and bigoted hostility very hard 
 to bear. Towards that he exhibited, more un- 
 consciously than consciously it is true, a certain 
 only half -veiled contempt, for which he himself 
 was sincerely sorry again and again. He would 
 say often in self -rebuke that under no circum- 
 stances should a Christian ever be contemptuous 
 of any one, that of all things contempt was most 
 foreign to the mind of God. 
 
 Thus, then, he was eager for friendship, in- 
 tensely eager, and he rarely found it. If sym- 
 
FOREWORD xi 
 
 pathetic understanding were offered to him in 
 any measure he responded, if anything, too 
 readily, and in consequence laid himself open 
 to more than one rebuff. But his longing to 
 receive and to share human intimacy was the 
 best thing in him, and it finds illustration in 
 the occasional heart to heart language that I 
 have spared in these letters. " Tread softly," 
 he would doubtless have me quote, "for you 
 tread on my dreams." 
 
 This correspondence (if it should be so called) 
 is, indeed, largely of the stuff of which dreams 
 are made; but I trust no reader will lightly 
 dismiss the substance of many of these Papers 
 on that account. Thinking them singularly 
 appropriate for more reasons than one, I have 
 ventured to preface two lovely little verses by 
 Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson, now Master of 
 Magdalene College in the University of Cam- 
 bridge. For there may be reality in dreams, 
 and there are dreams of reality. In Wilfrid's 
 letters I detect a good deal of both. At any rate, 
 he sacrificed his life to his dreams, and a man 
 can hardly set higher attestation than that to 
 his faith that they are true. If too little endures 
 of them, does he not herein offer all that there 
 is to his friend? 
 
 But, even considered as letters, it is plain to 
 me that these are largely dream-letters, for they 
 were not despatched through the post as they 
 now stand and as Wilfrid committed them to 
 
xii FOREWORD 
 
 my care. "Here," he said as he gave them to 
 me, "read these, will you? and edit them one 
 day if you like. Say that they have indeed 
 been written on the face of the Berg, the old 
 Berg that has claimed the best part of my life; 
 that they are true enough pictures of work y and 
 journeying there; and that I publish them be- 
 cause I want to make an apologia and have 
 no wit or learning to do it as some of my masters 
 have done. They show what I thought and tried 
 to do, and maybe, if you can arrange to print 
 them, they will at last reach their destination. 
 For, since they deal with heartfelt things, why 
 should not heart cry to heart across a world?" 
 I think it better not to write down all that I 
 suppose him to have meant by that rather 
 strange conclusion; besides, quite possibly that, 
 too, was part of a dream. 
 
 His words, however, when it is noticed how 
 often they are repeated by him, suggest a title 
 that I rather fancy he may have designed for 
 this book. It is pre-eminently a book of "The 
 Face of the Berg. ' 9 But it is still more the book 
 of a man, a personality, and I have preferred 
 to indicate that that man was on a pilgrimage 
 in more senses than one. How far he travelled 
 as some may think God wished him to travel 
 I shall not venture an opinion here, but I feel 
 his descriptions of that journey are better called 
 "Pilgrim Papers." 
 
 Still it is, I think, open to me to say this: 
 
FOREWORD xiii 
 
 that I can quite understand how he came to 
 dream such letters on the face of that mighty 
 Berg, whose world-message has not been at- 
 tempted, so far as I know, before. Nothing 
 more suggestive of reality as commonly under- 
 stood can well be imagined than those wind- 
 swept, sun-kissed, often snow-washed krantzes 
 that tower up 10,000 feet and more towards 
 God. It is no easy thing to travel on them. The 
 stones of their poor and winding paths; their 
 hardy, bleak clusters of reeds, thistles, moun- 
 tain-grass, and scrubby bush; their fierce sun, 
 blistering wind, and bitter cold in quick succes- 
 sion; the rough living and primitive passions 
 of the folk who shelter on them all these are 
 realities of earth, beyond doubt. Wilfrid was 
 conscious enough of them, as his letters show, 
 and yet it was there that he felt so keenly the 
 mantle of the world intangible. And no wonder, 
 for the very openness of the smile of some sunlit 
 valley, or the stillness of some mist-wrapped 
 peak, or the expectation that seems written on 
 the great grass plains, reaching up in every 
 flower and blade to Him Who bade them be, 
 had but one meaning to the man who spent 
 so much time there. "We are," he said to me 
 once, "waiting in an antechamber, and there 
 is silence among those that know, for they sus- 
 pect that the curtain is about to be pulled aside, 
 and that the Presence will step out among 
 them." 
 
xiv FOREWORD 
 
 Wilfrid longed, I know, for the drawing of 
 that curtain while he was on the Berg, and more 
 than expected that he would resolve the mys- 
 teries of the Presence Chamber at the very least. 
 An early letter expresses, with pathetic con- 
 fidence, that hope. And he learned much, it is 
 true, enough, indeed, to conceive himself justi- 
 fied in taking a step indicated here. But at 
 the end he expressed to me his conclusions char- 
 acteristically, and in a moment of farewell that 
 I am not likely ever to forget. I had gone out 
 alone from the homestead in East Griqualand 
 to meet him, and we were standing in the dying 
 day on the edge of a little green acacia spinney 
 where a path ends at a gate so set that a watcher 
 may see afar off the sunset lights on the great 
 Basuto peaks. Wilfrid stood long gazing at 
 them, and then turned to me with rather a wist- 
 ful smile. ' ' The grand old Berg, ' ' he said, * ' has 
 chiefly taught me, after all, how to wait." 
 
 He was right. At the very best we see through 
 a glass darkly, till the day break and the 
 shadows flee away. 
 
 E. K. 
 
 SOUTH AFRICA, 
 1920. 
 
 P. S. I have to thank Mr. John Lane, who holds the 
 copyright, for permission to print Mr. Arthur C. Benson's 
 poem. 
 
PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 1. OF TRAVELLERS AND TRAVELLING 
 
 SOME people like journeys on the edge of 
 things and into the unkown, and some 
 people do not. I am one of those who do, 
 and I find also a dreadful amusement in travel- 
 ling with those who do not. So I could hardly 
 fail to enjoy, my dear, this first stage towards 
 the Berg. 
 
 We left the city fairly early at half-past 
 seven in a little composite train of coal trucks 
 and live-stock waggons and passenger coaches, 
 in which the greater number of us were natives. 
 It was a perfect day, with the sun golden on the 
 new- washed trees and fields, and we meandered 
 slowly across the heart of Natal. At first Indian 
 houses seemed to be everywhere, and Indian 
 women, in their highly coloured wraps, were 
 gay on the tiny stations and in the little settle- 
 ments set among market gardens and wattle 
 plantations. But as the proportion of veld to 
 cultivated lands grew, and as we climbed over 
 kopje after kopje, each a little higher than be- 
 fore, the native huts increased. Towards mid- 
 
2 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 day w',3 were ainong tlie mountains, stretch on 
 stretch and fold on, fold, great grassy slopes and 
 stone-strewn summits, with the white clouds 
 chasing each other across them. Then not only 
 were there natives, but natives to whom dress 
 regulations became increasingly unimportant. 
 
 Alas that they do not become entirely so ! A 
 Zulu girl, her little fringe of beadwork about 
 her waist, but otherwise naked and unashamed, 
 who stands and looks at you straight as a lance 
 and fearlessly, is a beautiful creature, but a girl 
 in a ragged, dirty skirt that ends half-way to the 
 knee, with a piece of old sacking pulled up to 
 her throat and tied behind her neck like the top 
 half of an apron, is neither decent in the conven- 
 tional sense nor beautiful. Really the whole 
 thing is an amazing comment on our civilisa- 
 tion. They accuse missionaries in the books of 
 dressing up the savage, and we have been, I 
 suppose, dreadfully to blame, but, after all, mis- 
 sionaries do dress their people more or less 
 decently, and if the garments lack artistic merit, 
 that is merely due to the fact that so few really 
 pious missionaries have any sense of the beauti- 
 ful. Their minds are astonishingly little. But 
 it is the civilisation of the average farmer and 
 trader and the petty Government regulation that 
 has dressed these people so, and the mind behind 
 that is not merely little : it is non-existent, or if 
 existent, warped and futile beyond words. 
 
 But this is a lamentable digression. I was 
 
OF TRAVELLERS AND TRAVELLING 3 
 
 going to say that we came out into mountainous 
 country that could easily be seen to be a rib 
 of the world and might possibly have been mis- 
 taken for the backbone. We wound tortuously 
 up one side of a valley and as tortuously down 
 the other. In one place we passed the back door 
 of a cottage, and twenty minutes later came 
 back and passed within a hundred yards of the 
 front door. Wonderful vistas opened up at 
 every turn, and sometimes one could glimpse 
 the road to the heart of all but untamed hills. 
 I was entranced; most of my companions slept. 
 Before me a stout person lolled with his head 
 on one side and his mouth so widely open that 
 one could see the stopping in his back teeth. 
 Such is the lord of the world in his off moments. 
 
 Finally, after one o'clock we pulled in to the 
 junction and centre of life in these parts. There 
 must have been quite half a dozen houses, ahH 
 there was a dining-room on the station. After 
 a while my first train went on; a little later a 
 second departed in another direction; and, 
 finally, the one passenger coach of the train 
 destined for me appeared. And thus, then, the 
 thinning of my companions left me with the 
 gentleman who does not like travelling on the 
 edge of things. 
 
 He was stoutish, and he opened fire by pulling 
 his ticket from his pocket some time after the 
 train had started and asking me pathetically if 
 that was "all right" for the terminus. I can- 
 
4 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 not think it was a reasoned action, only just 
 the groping of a bewildered soul after any in- 
 formation. I scrutinised it, and told him that 
 I could see no reason why he should not arrive 
 without further expense if he sat still, but as 
 our train takes four and a half hours (with 
 luck) to traverse forty-nine miles, I told him 
 he must sit very still. On that he launched out. 
 He had come from what the inhabitants of Lon- 
 don would call the wilds (and in them he had 
 lived most of his life), and he was actually 
 going to he lone store in the heart of the 
 Drakensberg to which I am also wending. But, 
 in his judgment, he had come from civilisation, 
 and was going, he was fast discovering, beyond 
 the limit. It was really hard on the store, where 
 we are all so intensely proper and law-abiding, 
 natives and white men too, but I had to agree 
 with him. He had no idea how to proceed when 
 we reached rail-head, so I explained that some- 
 how we must get on another stage to the little 
 township and yet another on the morrow to the 
 farm, and that then we must mount horses and 
 climb to the 10,000-foot level and travel two 
 days and sleep out at night under the stars. 
 And he was not at all joyful at the prospect, 
 as I was, but rather he all but wept. Still he 
 was stoutish perhaps I should say a shade more 
 than stoutish he was dressed in a city suit; 
 and his luggage was contained in a trunk which, 
 if not big, was at least impossible on horseback. 
 
OF TRAVELLERS AND TRAVELLING ^3 
 
 He collected himself at last. How were we 
 to get over the miles from the station to the 
 township, and where should we eat and sleep? 
 I had not an idea, but I did know that the 
 further you go, the more easy all these things 
 become. It is a dreadful business going to 
 Johannesburg: you must book a place in a train 
 days beforehand, and you must secure accom- 
 modation at an hotel in advance (and very 
 likely these days you will not be able to do so), 
 and you must pay; there is no doubt that you 
 must pay. But at the ends of the earth any one 
 will take you in, and every one is glad to see 
 you, and no one is anxious to speed your de- 
 parture. When I last arrived in London, I could 
 not get a taxi or a cab for love or money, and 
 when I had obtained one by sheer force of arms, 
 I spent a small fortune trying to find a bed- 
 room; but I was pretty sure a post-cart or a 
 car would be waiting at the lonely little station 
 under the Berg. They would not be waiting for 
 us, true, but they would certainly be there for 
 the mail. And if they were not, we could wait; 
 they would come some time. 
 
 Well, of course it all turned out as I had 
 thought. We found a car waiting for the mail, 
 and we were run out the dreaded miles in no 
 more than an hour or so. The little town, 
 marked by a few hundred trees on the veld, took 
 us in and was glad, for we were ahead of last 
 week's papers. Incidentally we now caught up 
 
6 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 the telegram my friend had sent to the distant 
 store eight days before, but that was a small 
 matter. A boy came in from the farm for the 
 mail, and he took out a note, so that in the morn- 
 ing a buggy was waiting. And at the farm 
 was Cyril with my horses, who had come down 
 the day before from the towering peaks that 
 lifted themselves so serenely into the burning 
 blue. 
 
 This sort of travelling, then, I love. One 
 never quite gets over the surprise of it, even 
 although it is always the same. In the city 
 you name some place on the edge of the world 
 and say you want to get there, and they shake 
 their heads and pretend it cannot be done. You 
 search for a map, and as like as not you cannot 
 find your place. Finally you discover the 
 farthest point known to civilisation on the road, 
 and you go to it. And there you find a friend, 
 and a roof, and a meal, and a welcome, and no 
 surprise at all that you are there. I remember 
 setting off to climb Kilimanjaro, or as much of 
 it as I could. I could find no one who had done 
 so, no one who knew what lay beyond rail-head 
 even if one got there, no one who did not think 
 the getting beyond and up all but impossible. 
 And yet when I arrived I found a homestead 
 nearly three-quarters of the way to the summit, 
 with a charming, cultured, comfortable old Hun 
 in a smoking cap and a velvet jacket, who had 
 been there all the time. Possibly there are 
 
OF TRAVELLERS AND TRAVELLING 7 
 
 places in which it would be otherwise, but I 
 do not believe it. I have no sort of donbt that 
 it would be perfectly easy to get to Papua, or 
 Fiji, or Samarkand, or Timbuctoo, if one tried, 
 and that at the far end there would wait a 
 pleasant person, very glad to see you, with a 
 cup of tea and a cigarette. 
 
 It is possible that you will feel that this sort 
 of thing spoils the romance of travel, but that is 
 quite a mistake. It adds to the romance; it 
 makes it into a fairy story, in short, for in every 
 fairy story there l% s always an old woman by the 
 side of the road or a beautiful prince in a palace 
 to tell one what to do next. No amount of 
 experience makes the discovery less of a sur- 
 prise, however; it only gives a pleasurable hope 
 to life. And it is so wonderful to find kindly 
 and friendly humanity beyond the end of all 
 the long roads. 
 
 The most wonderful person I have ever met 
 was a traveller who knew the secret of all this. 
 This traveller had just completed an entirely 
 solitary journey (with no more than a dozen 
 "boys," who were constantly changing along 
 the road) up the Niger, through Hausaland, 
 behind Lake Tchad, across unknown Central 
 Africa, down by the great lakes, through Ger- 
 man East Africa, to Zanzibar. The journey 
 had taken some sixteen months, and cost less 
 than 150 from Charing Cross to the Indian 
 Ocean. No newspaper had written it up, and 
 
8 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 no scientific, religions, or commercial ambition 
 had inspired it. Nor has any account of it ever 
 since, so far as I know, been given to the world. 
 And I met the traveller the day after she arrived 
 prettily dressed and taking afternoon tea! 
 
 Possibly this will be a little more than you 
 can believe, but it is simply and strictly true. 
 If the lady is alive, I hope she will pardon the 
 liberty I take in writing of her, for I must tell 
 you that she was an ordinary person, with quite 
 a small income, who was suddenly released from 
 home ties, and who there and then determined 
 that, as there was no reason why she should 
 sit at home, she would instead go afield in God's 
 wonderful world. She did not call on Thomas 
 Cook and Sons, Ltd., and arrange her journey; 
 she did not pack all the things she would need; 
 and she did not write to the papers. She simply 
 took a map and decided to walk across Africa, 
 and she took the things she could not get on 
 without: salt, I think, and tea, and some needles, 
 and a sketching block, and a change of clothes 
 oh, and matches. At Lagos they told her 
 she was a fool; at Sokoto they wanted to arrest 
 her for a lunatic. But after that it was easy, 
 and cannibal chief passed her on to naked 
 savage with the inborn politeness (and super- 
 stition) of the raw native. She did not even 
 take a revolver, but, I think, some aspirin and 
 quinine, for if you shoot brotherman anywhere 
 in this wide world, it creates an unpleasantness, 
 
OF TRAVELLERS AND TRAVELLING 9 
 
 and you cannot get far, whereas if yon heal 
 him, you can go anywhere. Still even quinine 
 is not really necessary; you can heal most of 
 his troubles with a smile. 
 
 I think you hardly believe this as you read it, 
 but I assure you it is true. My experience has 
 been singularly limited, but it is just the same 
 so far as it goes. One of these days, perhaps, 
 I shall be able to prove to you that I am right 
 by setting off myself with a pipe, and a stick, 
 and a haversack for Kordofan, or Bokhara, or 
 Honolulu, and by writing you a little book of 
 the ease and pleasantness of it. And do you 
 know what it teaches me? I feel so sure that 
 at the end, unencumbered by any of the super- 
 fluities that people take en voyage, and un- 
 hurried and serene, you and I will set off on the 
 final journey over the edge of the known and 
 find waiting for us a friendly smile and a place 
 prepared. 
 
2. OF THE BEASTS AT EPHESUS 
 
 AT long last I am back, my dear, where 
 for these many days I have longed to be 
 longed to be, sometimes even when with 
 you. We left the little farm of which I have 
 written in the early dawn with the sun still cool, 
 and we rode at first through the lands with the 
 great chain ahead of us, a sheer rampart against 
 the sky. The lands were green with the new 
 mealies, and there was song in the air and al- 
 most song in my heart. Then we struck the 
 river, and we crossed and recrossed it, always 
 up and up, through the aloe and the cactus and 
 the sugar-bush of semi-tropical Natal, till the 
 sun beat on us and we grew tired. There was a 
 snake asleep in the path in one place, and only 
 the river made music untiringly. And then the 
 gorge narrowed until the great dark krantzes 
 seemed as if they would fall on us, and at last 
 we were climbing up on foot in and out of the 
 tangled mountain bushes, with the tiny stream 
 plashing and falling beneath them, and far 
 above the infinite blue sky, so seeming pitiless. 
 The last few yards always seem impossible, but 
 we climbed over the lip of the pass and fell on 
 
 10 
 
OF THE BEASTS AT EPHESUS 11 
 
 the grass beyond at last. I scarcely looked back. 
 I felt I knew what lay behind; the secret of the 
 tangle is hid somewhere here ahead. 
 
 Then, after a little, we mounted our horses. 
 It is always wonderful, the first hour on the top 
 of the Berg. The peaks ahead crowd each other 
 in massed armies to the far horizon, and their 
 valleys lie fold on fold. Grass, and grey stone, 
 and blue sky, and a whispering wind that is 
 all. And so we rode till we came to this place, 
 and Cyril knew that the tiny stony track ran 
 down now 1,000 feet to the river, and that we 
 had best sleep here. 
 
 The packs and packhorses are to meet us on 
 ahead, so our preparations to-night were simple. 
 We off-saddled and turned the ponies loose to 
 feed. We collected dried dung, native fashion, 
 and made a fire for the cheer of it only, as we 
 had nothing to cook or in which to boil water. 
 Cold meat and bread, and a cup of water, and a 
 pipe after all, on a warm, fine evening up here 
 what does one want more? I smoked while the 
 stars came out. Still far ahead was the purple 
 haze into which from below it appears that one 
 could almost climb; but the stars seemed nearer. 
 We sat under big boulders just off the path, 
 and the wide valley sloped from our feet until 
 it was lost in the press of lower hills beyond 
 which the mountains rose again. There was no 
 wind now, nor any sound at all, only the dying 
 light, and the great far-stretching slopes, and 
 
12 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 the brooding silence. In that silence it is as if 
 one only just fails to hear the stars. 
 
 Oh, but I am glad to be here once more! It 
 is so good to feel infinitely little and to lie on 
 the broad face of the wheeling earth powerless 
 and still. Down below people, and sounds, and 
 things jostle, and one has to be something to 
 them all. One is always on guard. Even in the 
 streets of the town the passers-by scan one's 
 face as if to read it, and one has to pose. The 
 brain is never still. It hears and questions each 
 sound, and by its servants the senses looks, 
 smells, selects, rejects, accepts, continually. I 
 marvel that any one can think detachedly at all 
 down there. But up here I am nothing a little 
 stone on an untrodden beach that is just lapped, 
 and no more, by the tide of life. Man in all the 
 centuries has done nothing to change the face 
 of things up here, and it is possible to set in 
 truer proportion his tiny works below. For all 
 our knowledge, for all our binding and harness- 
 ing of Nature, not otherwise does the world 
 roll through space beneath these stars itself 
 smaller to the universe than even I to this Berg 
 than it rolled when the first savage looked out 
 on the night. 
 
 It is almost strange, after these weeks, to feel 
 once more at peace. I have felt myself for so 
 long the plaything of giants far stronger and 
 more subtle than St. Paul's beasts at Ephesus, 
 and the horror is that one has to wrestle with 
 
OF THE BEASTS AT EPHESUS 13 
 
 them even when tired heart and weary brain 
 crave for peace at any price. Love and religions 
 controversy they are giants, are they not? 
 Well, here they meet their match. On the face 
 of the Berg they appear as those tiny fignres in 
 the lands who dwindled and sank out of sight 
 as we climbed and climbed and climbed. 
 
 It is cnrious that they shonld so shrink away, 
 and I wonder why. After all, I still love, and 
 I still believe, and Love and Faith are still the 
 two great facts of life. Bnt I suppose it is the 
 isolation which robs them of their power to 
 torment. We are sc bound up down below in 
 others and in affairs that we cannot love 
 straightforwardly or believe straightfor- 
 wardly. We have to consider what our 
 loving and believing will mean to other 
 people or have meant to them; we have to set 
 ourselves either mentally or in fact against other 
 people; we have to choose and reject among 
 them. We cannot move in any direction with- 
 out treading on some one's toes. But up here 
 Love and Eeligion cannot fight in me except 
 with God, and one does not ultimately, you 
 know, fight with God. Sometimes, in pitiful 
 fury, one strikes a blow at Him, just as I have 
 lost my temper before now with the Berg and 
 kicked out at the turf! But one does not dash 
 oneself to pieces against it. After all, even that 
 would not be a fight, for I suppose it takes two 
 to fight. 
 
14 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 I expect that death will be rather like this: 
 in life the clash of struggle, the false propor- 
 tions, the distracted thinking; all through life 
 the ever more weary and painful climbing, and 
 all through life the growing sense of the slip- 
 ping away of the importance of the world; and 
 then at last, with the last breaths and the sense 
 that we can no more, the throwing of oneself 
 down upon the stretch of eternity, and the con- 
 sciousness that after all nothing matters except 
 the settling of these issues with God and that 
 He is really far too big for the word "settle" 
 to be used at all. And then probably it will 
 grow very dark for a while, only the more dark 
 it grows, the more clear will shine the stars, 
 until they dim before the dawn. And in the 
 dawn we shall arise refreshed and look out on a 
 new world. 
 
 Ah well, it may be so, but the climb still lies 
 ahead; this is only the picture of it. It is only 
 that on the face of the Berg one may have some 
 quieting vision of the end. And the vision that 
 I would pass to you is that you must not allow 
 yourself to be deafened or blinded by the noise 
 and the glare down below. Have you ever tried 
 to break through the surf to the broad sea? 
 If you have, you know that one has to keep 
 a steady head, and not suffer the turmoil to 
 daunt one. Breathe warily; close eyes as the 
 wave breaks, and open them afterwards; put 
 power into the stroke at the right moment, and 
 
OF THE BEASTS AT EPHESUS 13 
 
 never lose resolve; and yon are through. So 
 it is with life, and with these only two big things 
 that life holds. Why, I have thought in despair 
 that we were doomed to die beneath them, and 
 that the only concern that mattered was to see 
 that one died fighting, face forward; but I know 
 differently now. A man may win through. He 
 may come undaunted unto God. 
 
 Yet of course you must not think that I feel 
 as I lie in my blanket on this turf that I have 
 done with Love or Eeligion; on the contrary, I 
 have come here to settle these affairs if one 
 can ever settle them. The curious thing is, 
 however, that now I can, as it were, hold them 
 at arm's length and look at them almost dispas- 
 sionately. I feel that here I may learn some- 
 thing of the secret of both, and perhaps arrive 
 at some definite philosophy which shall help me 
 to be master of them. I want to see if I can 
 get to any apprehension of what Love really is; 
 of how it stands in relation to physical passion; 
 of what one is to do in the dreadful muddle that 
 the entry of Love seems nine times out of ten to 
 make of life, for it will come imperiously in and 
 command (or at least allure) to revolutionary 
 things. Love is such a two-edged thing. It 
 seems to me that more often than not the love 
 of any two persons means bliss to them, but 
 agony to others. If it is so, then this Love is 
 a strange, ravening thing, and maybe our fore- 
 fathers did wisely to seek to tie it down by 
 
16 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 conventions and proprieties and shibboleths. 
 But what in the world did they do with their 
 hearts, do you suppose? I think those Victorian 
 folk must have cramped their children's hearts 
 from the start, like the Chinese women their 
 babies' feet, that they should have succeeded in 
 arriving at such apparent placidity. However, 
 enough of that. 
 
 And then there is Eeligion. I have to come 
 to a conclusion in these months, as you know, 
 and it is on the face of the Berg that I shall 
 come to it. I write " have to come," for it is 
 just that. There comes a time in life when one 
 must act on the trend of the years or never act 
 at all. At any rate, it cannot be right to drift 
 into a form of faith, and ultimately stereotype 
 in it from sheer inertia. Better, I think, to act 
 on one's honest judgment and have to retrace 
 one's steps later on than not act at all. 
 
 My candle-end is burning out, and I want to 
 make haste and extinguish it. Then the dark- 
 ness will take me on its breast, and not wall me 
 in as it does with this flicker by my side, and 
 it will seem to me that I am part of the velvet 
 dusk and silence and can swim out on it, even 
 to you. 
 
3. OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 
 
 THE day before yesterday I was ten and 
 a half lonely hours in the saddle on trek, 
 and yesterday I did what you would least 
 expect in the mountains I spent a whole day 
 browsing among novels. And so to-day I have 
 got to write it all for you. 
 
 Ten and a half hours in the saddle, without 
 even Cyril to talk to, gives one time for reflec- 
 tion, and yet it is extraordinarily little reflec- 
 tion that I find I can do in the saddle. I must 
 say that I do not think much of that noble beast, 
 the horse, when it comes to journeying. There 
 is nothing more delightful than a couple of 
 hours on a fresh horse for the sake of the exer- 
 cise, but that is one thing; it is altogether an- 
 other to have to get somewhere a good way off 
 in the mountains and to have to do it on horse- 
 back. My horses are nearly always tired, too, 
 poor beasts. One jogs slowly along, for the 
 ground makes even a canter impossible for 
 hours at a time, and the best pace is one peculiar 
 to our country, a kind of half -trot, half -walk, 
 beloved of the native, which certainly gets one 
 over the miles, but at some expense to mind and 
 body unless one is used to it. Personally, I 
 
 17 
 
18 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 always discover in the mountains that I am a 
 dreadfully civilised person. Pace haunts me. I 
 spend the hours unrestfully in a futile effort not 
 to miss the advantage of a dozen yards of flat, 
 and dreaming of motor cars. 
 
 But the curious thing is that the day after 
 such a ride I invariably find how much it has 
 done to sort one's ideas, so to speak. On this 
 trek, for example, I rode first across the high 
 plateau, with mile on mile of sparse grass and 
 small rocks on either hand and the great blue 
 bowl over all. Possibly I met three natives in 
 six hours, and I think I saw a dozen horses and 
 a couple of dozen sheep oh, and a hawk or two. 
 On both sides and far ahead stretched the 
 rounded shoulders of more and more moun- 
 tains, with great shadows that hinted of the 
 deep valleys between. And then at last I 
 reached the one I was to follow, and descended 
 the tiny stony trail, all but lost here and there, 
 to the minute stream that grew with every mile, 
 and finally flowed into the Orange within a few 
 miles of the store. Hour after hour I followed 
 it, in and out of its stony bed, among the flowers 
 and long grass to which its water gives life, 
 often with the high cliffs through which it has 
 cut its way towering up to left and right, and 
 towards evening blocking out the sun. 
 
 There is music in such a valley, the music of 
 the singing, crystal-clear river, and the noise of 
 little birds among the rocks. Once a wild duck 
 
OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 19 
 
 got up from the reeds a few yards away, and 
 now and again the mountain sheep came down 
 to drink. In the solitude one's thoughts wan- 
 der, and one notices little things and questions 
 them half irritatingly. It is only if I have not 
 to think of the way lest I miss it, as one so 
 easily can, and have not to remember to "push" 
 lest the dark overtake me far from a meal, that 
 I can think consecutively. 
 
 Yet, as I have said, one finds in the end that 
 one's thoughts are clearer. I suppose the 
 monotony of it rests the brain. And I think, 
 still more, that to be alone for hours on the 
 breast of Nature, especially in these wild and, 
 on the whole, barren solitudes, is to tell how 
 trivial the petty things are that make up life 
 down below, and to allow them to sink out of 
 sight. 
 
 So, then, at sunset, I reached the store. No 
 visitor had been tkere since I said good-bye five 
 months before, and although there was no doubt 
 as to the sincerity and kindliness of the wel- 
 come, still it amused me again, as always, to see 
 how nonchalantly they took my coming. Men 
 who live much alone in these mountains do not 
 run to the windows to see who in the world is at 
 the door, as dwellers in Suburbia do with a 
 dozen callers a day. Mallont was tinkering at 
 something over by the stable, and I rode up and 
 got off and called a boy, and partly off-saddled, 
 before he came up slowly to give me a real grip 
 
20 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 of a hand-shake and his slow smile. Day after 
 day the immemorial mountains and the brood- 
 ing silences when the packs have left that ride 
 the wool and grain, and the station is deserted 
 save for the dogs and horses and a few boys, 
 have steadied that man's mind. A man that can 
 stick ten years up here without making a brute 
 of himself with liquor or women is a man. He 
 is rarely a Eadical and never a Socialist, and 
 yet it is impossible to think of caste in connec- 
 tion with him. He fights a lone hand. He is 
 master, on the face of the Berg that has sub- 
 dued the lords of creation these untold cen- 
 turies. Where the native builds his frail hut 
 and but scrapes the soil and leaves no memory, 
 he takes his stand and wrests his own from the 
 grip of Nature. A curse on your cities in the 
 plain that drag him back in the end nine times 
 out of ten to batten on his blood ! 
 
 The day after, I rested my pony, and sat in a 
 deck chair within reach of his book-shelves. 
 There are up here, of course, men who read 
 nothing at least, not exactly up here, because 
 there is nobody else up here at all but in similar 
 circumstances. But Mallont is not like that. 
 True, there are vastly more novels on his 
 shelves than anything else, but far be it from 
 me to decry the novel. At any rate, I can always 
 depend on finding the latest on his shelves, and 
 nearly always a book or two as well that I have 
 been waiting these many months to read. So 
 
OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 21 
 
 yesterday I lit my pipe and put the tobacco 
 handy, and gave myself up to a long day's 
 browse. 
 
 I wonder if you know what it is to "browse." 
 Curiously enough, one rarely does down below. 
 The day is always overloaded with things to be 
 done, and if one reads, one picks up the last 
 novel from the library and reads it steadily for 
 an hour or so. Yesterday, now, I had positively 
 nothing else to do. My body was comfortably 
 tired with the trek of the day before, and my 
 mind had been swept by tlie wind and the sun. 
 A hundred volumes stood within reach, and I 
 had mood and opportunity to judge and reject. 
 
 Among a random hundred modern novels, 
 then, up here, one does indeed reject. It struck 
 me, as I sat there lazily, that a trek in these 
 mountains would be a good test for the authors 
 of them. I imagine most of them would be 
 unutterably bored and excessively helpless, and 
 would be returned, as from a nightmare, as 
 quickly as possible to write more novels. 
 There are exceptions among the novels, of 
 course, the exceptions being those which you 
 feel have been written by authors who have 
 seen at first hand some phase of life, and have 
 learnt its grim lesson, and have had to write of 
 it. It is the way in which such a lesson is writ- 
 ten up in a novel in these days that is new more 
 than the lesson itself. If I were to criticise, I 
 should say that the weakness of such a method 
 
22 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 of dealing with life lies in the character-draw- 
 ing. It is so often wholly impressionist. The 
 circumstances of life are often drawn in boldly 
 and truly, but the men and women who move 
 among them strike one as distorted more fre- 
 quently. One side of them is put under the 
 magnifying glass, and the rest diminished out 
 of sight. But there, possibly it has to be so. 
 
 The great mass, however, are varyingly told 
 tales that one knows to be but tales. Of such 
 I like best, I must say, the novels that are quite 
 obviously tales, and not the novels that read 
 as if the author were trying to work out the 
 plot in terms of real life. A tale is a tale, and 
 to be told it need not fight shy of coincidences 
 and impossibilities. It sets out to amuse for 
 an hour or two, and that is all one asks of it. 
 
 I read somewhere the other day that this was 
 the true novel, and I think it was the West- 
 minster Gazette that described the other as the 
 deadliest form of tract. So the serious novel 
 may be ; but it is also the modern sermon and 
 philosophical or religious essay. Nor can I see 
 why it should not be so; indeed, I wish those 
 others would call themselves tales and not 
 novels. A man may well write tales to earn 
 his bread-and-butter and to amuse, he being 
 your modern troubadour; and it is a good 
 calling. But I would have that if a man write 
 a novel he writes because the Spirit has fallen 
 upon him, and he must needs prophesy in the 
 
OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 23 
 
 true sense of that word. After all, it is we 
 professional prophets who have invented that 
 deadliest and driest of prophetical mediums, 
 the modern sermon. Those old firebrands of 
 religious history, from the Hebrew prophet to 
 the mediaeval friar, did not disdain parable and 
 story, the circumstances of the hour, the tongue, 
 wit, sarcasm, and invective of the people. But 
 the modern preacher continues to base his 
 moralities on the Old Testament stories and the 
 Mosaic Code, while the modern novelist bases 
 his on the reason and judgment of men to-day, 
 whose eyes look out on the new world that 
 Science has opened up, and on the Divorce 
 Court. 
 
 That is the real problem before us all. Is 
 Moses a back number, or is he not? Is Leviticus 
 Divine revelation, or is it primitive folk-lore? 
 It is customary with many of us parsons to 
 pretend that it is both, but I am wondering if 
 we can do so truly. It might be, of course. 
 Almighty God speaks in divers tongues and 
 manners, and He might have spoken through 
 selected folk-lore. But even if He did, we 
 moderns require a modern medium if we are to 
 hear and understand. 
 
 The major part of these novels, for example, 
 are of Love and Passion, and they well may be. 
 Passion, at any rate, is a fundamental and 
 universal law I mean of course sexual passion, 
 the desire to mate. It is a hard law, I think, 
 
24 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 
 
 a monstrous, ravening, horribly subtle thing. 
 Nature would seem to fling decencies to the 
 winds to accomplish that supreme purpose of 
 hers. She will use any artifice, any enticement, 
 to bring it about ; she will murder, lie, and cheat 
 to breed. Bead Henri Fabre, and see her at it 
 in the insect world ; read any true modern novel, 
 and see her at it among men. You know 
 "Passion and Pot-Pourri," don't you? You 
 remember the tale of the millionairess on "One 
 Libertine Afternoon"? "I am twenty-nine, 
 you know ... we realise that not only shall we 
 love again . . . but . . . again and again . . . 
 Love passes away so soon ..." she said. 
 
 Three-quarters of the novels are based on 
 that, and one dreads lest it be hideously true. 
 The man and the woman are kept blind by our 
 slave-mistress until she has achieved her object. 
 They are attracted, dazzled, carried away. 
 They even drag their souls in, and whisper of 
 God and eternity in the half-lights. A far-off 
 gramophone sings to them . . . "God gave you 
 me . . ."as they sit out together in the moon- 
 light under the trees, and its voice is clearer 
 than that of God on Sinai. And they mate, and 
 later wonder why. Of course the amazing thing 
 is that no man in love will believe what I have 
 just written, no matter how many times he has 
 been disillusioned; and if he believes it now 
 because he is not in love, he will not believe it 
 as soon as he is. To tell you the truth, my dear, 
 
OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 23 
 
 I do not believe it myself. Or do I! I hardly 
 know. Up here, out here, I see the iron law 
 as clear as the daylight, but if I believed that 
 there was no more in love than this, I would 
 wish myself dead ; indeed, I think I would curse 
 God and die. Amazing, isn't it? And quite 
 possibly that is all another trick! 
 
 But let us suppose, now, that both things are 
 true, that we are animal enough to be in the 
 grip of this ravenous beast called Nature to our 
 own deception and undoing, but spiritual 
 enough to have it in us to love in its deep sense 
 as well as lust. Love ^s then the supreme 
 achievement of life. Let us not fear that, for 
 Love is of God. We may see and serve God in 
 Love. What then? Well, Love will be infinitely 
 bigger than the begetting of children, though it 
 may involve that. It appears to me that Love 
 might quite truly not wish that, although it is so 
 horribly hard to disentangle the two, as a con- 
 sequence, if not as an aim. But is it, then, to be 
 the supreme dictator when it truly comes, burst- 
 ing through the Ten Commandments of social 
 protection with a snap of the fingers? 
 
 I could feel so. Take the seventh. Here are 
 a man and a woman trapped by Nature into a 
 marriage by the false lights of what was pas- 
 sion, but which they once thought was love. And 
 then love and a third enter in. If love is, indeed, 
 the supreme achievement, life for the two is a 
 barren, wasted thing, and for the third it will 
 
26 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 never be achieved, if they keep all the Com- 
 mandments. 
 
 There seems to me to be only one possible line 
 of thought if one would escape from the di- 
 lemma, the quagmire, the very social instabili- 
 ties, into which the abandonment of the Com- 
 mandments would lead. It lies in the frank 
 recognition that love won or thwarted, happi- 
 ness or pain, success or failure, the populating 
 of the globe or the cessation of human life upon 
 it, are but secondary affairs after all. They are 
 so many obstacles in the race, so many tem- 
 porary furnishings to be assessed at that value. 
 The only object of man's existence will be God. 
 If he put Nature wholly on one side, like the 
 monk, he must do it for God; if he submit to 
 Nature, he must do it for God. If he hope to 
 walk hand in hand with another towards that 
 Goal, good : let him try so to walk ; but he must 
 remember that to reach the Goal is his object, 
 and not the walking hand in hand, and that, if 
 the latter prove a delusion, he must go on, alas ! 
 not alone, but in uncongenial company. 
 
 This seems a hard solution, does it not? 
 There are moods in which I can feel that it is 
 not as hard as it seems, moods in which I can 
 believe that God alone is love. Even then I 
 am not a believer that all else is evil, for it may 
 be that we find other things in God, provided 
 we seek Him first, and understand that, if we 
 seem to lose the riches of life for His sake, they 
 
OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 27 
 
 are not really lost at all. But, whatever my 
 mood, I am certain of this and this is where 
 I feel with your modern novelists and the pup- 
 pets whose strings they pull such a solution 
 must have more authority behind it than the un- 
 supported law of Deuteronomy. If I should see 
 God and hear His Voice in my own tongue and 
 age, then would I sacrifice (if He asked it) even 
 you to Him ; but if not, then would I take you 
 in my arms though the laws of Israel and of 
 social England stood twenty times as strongly 
 in the way, though I dreaded lest jade Nature 
 mocked at me 
 
4. OF GOD OR ALLAH 
 
 I MUST say I love a few days here at the 
 store. Mallont is such a good feltew. In 
 a way he reminds me of many of the boys in 
 the War, he is so good-natured, unselfish, gen- 
 erous, and straight. We are good friends, and 
 yesterday, when the store closed, we took rods 
 and walked out of the front door to the river, 
 scarce a hundred yards away, to fish. There 
 is a wide, deep pool just behind the house, with 
 high rocks on one side, and I sat perched up 
 there and watched the sunset glow higher up 
 the valley, and the deepening colours, till, as 
 the first stars came out, we walked back. Sup- 
 per was ready in the lighted room, but we stood 
 for a few minutes on the stoep in the deep 
 silence. There is little water in the river, and 
 it simply murmured through the night as it ran 
 under the high kraatzes in the horse-shoe bend 
 in which the store stands. On the unenclosed 
 side the mountain slopes up to the sky-line, and 
 there a high wind was blowing little clouds 
 across the face of the moon. 
 
 After supper we sat and talked, and talked 
 on the big things, too. It's a strange world! 
 Here is Mallont, right out of civilisation, and 
 
 28 
 
OF GOD OR ALLAH 29 
 
 out of it now for many years, an independent, 
 strong man, not given, one would think, to 
 making concessions to propriety. Yet he is 
 ten times more conventional than I. He accepts 
 the social and moral order, and quite admittedly 
 without what I should call a principle behind it. 
 I tried to work off on him what I wrote to you 
 the other day, and it interested him. But he 
 was quite firm. Leviticus, he was sure, had 
 made a mistake over the Deceased Wife's 
 Sister, and if the Church condemned Divorce in 
 toto, at whosoever 's direction, there was a blun- 
 der somewhere ; but until divorce had been ob- 
 tained (and it was much better not sought) a 
 woman was apparently the private property of 
 her husband, and mistakes should be endured 
 without rhyme or reason, even to the blighting 
 of two lives. 
 
 My protest led, of course, easily to religion, 
 and we discussed all kinds of things, from Con- 
 fession to the Pope. He is very downright. 
 "If I took religion," he said, "I'd go the whole 
 way. I wouldn't take the Sacrament on Sunday 
 and do a nigger down for a tikJci on Monday. 
 But I don't think I shall. There is no life in the 
 Church, and it doesn't seem to me that religion 
 makes a man any better. My creed is, 'Do to 
 every man as you would be done by, and leave 
 the rest to God.'" 
 
 I was silent for a while. What was one to 
 say? It sounds so easy in the theological study, 
 
30 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 and I suppose the saintly evangelical fathers 
 would have an answer ready. It was the 
 thought of them that made me put a question. 
 "What about sin?" I said. "If you feel it is 
 too great a thing to meet a forgiving God in 
 Communion, what about the meeting that's 
 bound to come at the end? If He sent His Son 
 and made a plan for salvation, how will you 
 answer Him when He wants to know why you 
 neglected it?" 
 
 He flicked the ash off his cigarette and 
 smiled. "I reckon I shall say that / never 
 asked to be put into this world. I was shoved 
 in unconsciously, and I found it too big a mud- 
 dle for me. I did my best ; I couldn't do more. " 
 
 Now, you know, there is a challenge in that. 
 "I never asked to be put into this world." I 
 wonder what you think of that. Again, it's an 
 easy question or an easier than the last in 
 the study, but when a man puts it to you 
 straight and wants a practical, and not a theo- 
 logical, answer, what then? It seemed to me 
 that the great, silent, enduring, age-long moun- 
 tains all about waited for the answer. You 
 cannot talk clap-trap with those listeners. 
 After all, has God the right to make a man 
 against or without his will? A man a thing of 
 brain and nerve and passion, the heir of cen- 
 turies of hereditary impulse, the sport of 
 Nature, the slave of environment, and yet the 
 restless, brooding, masterful being that is half 
 
OF GOD OR ALLAH 31 
 
 a God himself has God a right to make him 
 without his wish, and will He have the right to 
 damn him because he has blundered and found 
 things too hard? 
 
 "But you enjoy life," I said. "Even the 
 fellow most to be pitied rarely wants to throw 
 away the gift. And if he does, owing to the 
 misery of his present circumstances, he would 
 admit to days and hours of too high value for 
 estimation. And if you had a child, a mere 
 baby, and I offered to x>lace ten thousand 
 pounds for it in the Bank, to accumulate until 
 it was twenty-one, would you refuse on the 
 ground that the child was unconscious of so 
 great a gift, which at twenty-one might possibly 
 bring about his ruin?" 
 
 "I should not," he said. "But if the boy 
 inherited a weakness for alcohol, and your for- 
 tune worked his ruin, whose fault would it be ? " 
 
 I fear I nearly gave it up, but then I had an 
 idea. "It's no answer," I said, "but it seems 
 to me that what is really wrong with your 
 question is something much more fundamental 
 than all this. You have a wrong idea of God, 
 and you will think in terms of Law and Com- 
 mandment and Punishment. Almighty God 
 is to you the unattractive Euler of the Universe. 
 He is all but Allah. But that is not God at all. 
 God is all Goodness, Love, Beauty, Manliness, 
 Striving, Joy, Satisfaction, Honour, Attain- 
 ment, Eeward. If you could see Him, you 
 
32 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 would desire Him passionately. It will be 
 heaven to serve Him in the fulness of our man- 
 hood. If you refuse Him, He will not damn 
 you; you will merely deprive yourself of all 
 that is fine and good. In refusing God you are 
 refusing all that you like in any man you hon- 
 our, all that you desire in any woman you truly 
 love. He has made no rigid commandments; 
 He has set you no hard task ; He has but given 
 you life that you may run to Him, and He has 
 but set up warning sign-posts lest you go 
 astray." 
 
 Mallont nodded silently. "That's fine," he 
 said, "but what would the Church say to all 
 that?" 
 
 "The Catholic Church," said I, "is the 
 revelation of God. So was Jesus Christ, and 
 the two are one. In her you can see Him." 
 
 "Can you?" he queried sarcastically, under- 
 standing only my second sentence, I think. 
 "All that I can say is that the world doesn't 
 see that, and I have never heard the Church 
 speak as you spoke just now." 
 
 And I too was silent then as the minutes 
 passed. Then, with a flicker of passion, 
 "Padre, if I could see God's Face like that, He 
 should have all my strength ! " he said. 
 
 I looked at him. He has been a brick to me, 
 tender as a woman once, when I was badly 
 smashed up and in agony, a good friend always. 
 He and I know little of each other's past, for 
 
OF GOD OR ALLAH 33 
 
 men do not often confide that, and possibly we 
 each wonder of the other what eddy washed us 
 into this backwater of the stream of life. So 
 I know very little, and yet I think I judged 
 aright "Mallont," I said, "you will surely 
 see Him one day. And then remember me." 
 
 Across the table he held out his hand. 
 
 * # * * # 
 
 But, my dear, am I right, or am I wrong, and 
 last, but not least for it involves honour am 
 I orthodox? And ought I to sit here in this 
 uniform? Oh, that you could give me an an- 
 swer ! There are times when I hat e these silent 
 mountains. 
 
5. OF WANTING GOD 
 
 I WISH you could see me now. I am spread 
 out on the floor of a mud hut, writing by 
 candle-light, and I am going to describe the 
 hut minutely, for I have just been wandering 
 around taking measurements. It's a big hut, 
 round, and five paces in diameter. The door 
 is nearly six feet high, and the top of the roof 
 perhaps nine. The walls are of stone outside 
 and mud within, the floor stamped mud, the 
 roof smoke-blackened thatch and poles. There 
 is no window, no chimney, no fireplace, no fix- 
 tures, except a hole in the mud reaching to the 
 stone, about two feet long and six inches wide, 
 that does duty as a small shelf. 
 
 Half the circle of the wall is taken up with 
 grain bags; next to them, on sacks, is a dead 
 sheep, spread out and skinned; next to it my- 
 self, also spread out, but on my blankets and 
 valise, and writing to you; next to me are my 
 saddles my own, Cyril's, and the pack; and 
 next to them is the door, with the grain starting 
 again beyond it. You can reach the top of the 
 wall, where the thatch starts, with your hand, 
 and this makes another shelf, while the roof 
 poles are convenient pegs. Hanging up, then, 
 
 34 
 
OF WANTING GOD 33 
 
 or stuck into the thatch, or resting on the shelf, 
 are various objects: skeins of grass rope; a 
 broken knife; a spoon; a Tower musket, very 
 rusty; a collection of my hostess's skirts; an 
 old military coat; two spears; a goat-skin, not 
 very completely cured; a few books, very 
 ragged; empty tins; empty bottles; a few of 
 the same with unknown and unrecognisable con- 
 tents; a pair of boots; the skin of a dead calf, 
 tied up at the legs to make a sack; a woven 
 grass bag of native tobacco; a gnarled stick; 
 an ancient umbrella; and a decayed toothbrush. 
 And then there is the furniture : a kitchen chair, 
 with the back gone and one leg mended with 
 wire, and a crucifix. This, my dear, is a true, 
 literal, and veracious description of my present 
 lodgings. 
 
 In the train coming up I met a man who was 
 deploring the high cost of living. I told him 
 that I expected to live on about 5 a month 
 for the next six months. He hardly believed 
 it, but it is true. And, after all, I wonder some- 
 times why one does not remain for ever as I 
 am to-night. It is quite as comfortable in this 
 valise on the floor as in a bed; what is the use 
 of a dining-room suite? and I am as contented 
 physically, having dined off mealiemeal por- 
 ridge, native bread, a couple of chops that Cyril 
 hacked from the sheep an hour ago, and tea, 
 as if I had dined in the Eoyal Hotel, Durban. 
 Moreover, this hut is quite clean, and so am 
 
36 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 I, really. True, I could do with a wash, but 
 the dirt is merely clean earth dirt, and I'm 
 shaved. I am, really. I always do. And if my 
 clothes are a bit old, after all, they answer all 
 practical purposes. 
 
 Yet I am anything but content in my soul. 
 I have been out, wandering up and down under 
 the stars, thinking, thinking, always thinking, 
 as if thinking did any good. My mind is full 
 of the sort of criticism that men pour out on 
 missions and on religion generally, and I cannot 
 get away from it. I met the other day a man 
 back from the War, and from adventures up and 
 down India, Egypt, Palestine, and Mesopotamia. 
 I cannot explain exactly why, but his talk hurts. 
 He had seen what was said to be the most 
 debased Christianity in the world; he reckoned 
 the most religious people were undoubtedly 
 Mohammedan: what Christians get up regularly 
 at 5 a.m. to say their prayers? He burst or 
 tried to burst a good many bubbles, such as 
 Armenian atrocities, by telling story after story 
 of the thievish, murderous, immoral character 
 of the Armenians he had met; and, without 
 saying so, he gently hinted that all religions or 
 no religion were much of a muchness provided 
 a man played the game. 
 
 Then the talk veered on Spiritualism and the 
 after-life, which is debated as if Christ had 
 never risen from the dead, with the conclusion 
 that after all it does not matter, for if we rise 
 
OF WANTING GOD 37 
 
 from the 'dead, we rise, and if we do not, we 
 do not, and it will not matter much provided 
 a man has and all the rest. 
 
 I wonder if you can guess the effect all this 
 has on my mind. I hardly know how to express 
 it, but I think I might put it in this way. The 
 great religious problem of the world is that 
 modern men believe that they have proved that 
 they can get on quite as well without orthodox 
 religion as with it. A man says his prayers; 
 he gives up saying them; and there is no differ- 
 ence. He lives his life; he has his pleasures, 
 his worries, his anxieties, his successes; and 
 Christ has no place in them. Your modern man 
 does not want Christ. He gets on perfectly well 
 without Him. 
 
 The realisation of this tears me to pieces, so 
 to speak. I ask myself, Who is to blame the 
 Church, the man, or Christ? Is it to be expected, 
 and if so, why? And up against it is the fact 
 that the native finds a use for religion, and 
 as for me, well, I am a man too, and I cannot 
 get away from it. 
 
 The native wants religion. Some say it does 
 not improve him; some say he wants it merely 
 to get on; some say he pretends to want it to 
 cheat us; but all that is rubbish. The last two 
 sentences may be true of some; the first may 
 be true of more, and even of many in the sense 
 in which it is used, for it comes to mean that 
 religion tends to spoil a native from the white 
 
38 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 man's point of view: it makes him less subser- 
 vient, less slavish in his estimation of himself, 
 less satisfied with having small prospects and no 
 racial future. And all power to his elbow there ! 
 I say frankly. 
 
 But the native wants religion. A man will 
 not pay, suffer, labour, for a thing he does not 
 want. Not all, of course, do these things for 
 religion, but many do, and more would if we 
 missionaries did not tend to spoon-feed them. 
 And for myself, I honestly believe it is just due 
 to this : the soul of the native is being awakened, 
 and a soul awakened turns naturally to God. 
 
 The trouble with your white man is twofold. 
 In the first place, he does few things naturally, 
 and least of all his thinking. He no longer 
 grows like a flower and opens up to the sun. He 
 starts so as a child, but then conventions, and 
 civilisations, and other people's ideas, and the 
 realisation of his mastery of so much, come in, 
 and he ceases to be natural. If the stars and 
 the mountains and the spring cry to him of God, 
 he says to himself: " Don't be a fool remember 
 Evolution, Science, Darwin"; and he pours him- 
 self out a whisky and soda instead of falling on 
 his knees. If he falls in love, he keeps a tight 
 hand on himself unless the prospects are good, 
 and he gratifies his passion in the meantime 
 with precaution. He is born a child still, but 
 he is made a cynic. 
 
 But the one thing that might save him is not 
 
OF WANTING GOD 39 
 
 there. Oh, my dear, why is it that the living 
 Christ, the power of the Spirit, the passion of 
 God for souls, never seize on him and rock his 
 soul to its foundation till he cries out: "Depart 
 from me!" or else "Inflame me!" one or the 
 other, but either in an agony? Why is it that 
 he does not feel the hand of this terrible God 
 of ours in all its relentless power? Why is it 
 that he does not either surrender entirely or 
 sin daringly? Why is it that he is such a 
 craven for it comes to that such a slave both 
 in his petty sins and in his arm-chair disbeliefs ? 
 Well, I will tell you: it is because of me, and 
 of such as me, and because we have allowed the 
 supernatural in religion to drop out of count. 
 We have set ourselves a low standard, for we 
 are content to be saved. To put it theologically, 
 as long as we feel we are in a position to be 
 "justified" at the last day, sanctification does 
 not matter much. We live moderately within 
 the law, and go to Church, and take the Sacra- 
 ments, but we do not fling our whole souls, like 
 reckless gamblers, into the attainment of God. 
 We do not want to lose our lives that we may 
 find them. My friend is perfectly right in a 
 way even over his Mohammedans. There are, 
 of course I know it plenty of Christians who 
 get up at 5 a.m. to say their prayers; but the 
 majority do not. We are content if we say them 
 at all. We have whittled everything down to 
 the finest edge of distinction between our miser- 
 
40 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 able Christianity and paganism, and it is only 
 we who can see the line of demarcation at all. 
 The world at large never dreams, from observa- 
 tion of us, that the Beatitudes are the ideals 
 of the religion of Christian men any longer. 
 
 We Catholics are worse than the Protestants. 
 After all, Catholicism is far more an obviously 
 supernatural religion than Protestantism, and 
 it is far more other-worldly. It is only a 
 "rational" faith at all provided you accept first 
 an hypothesis of faith. The Catholic Sacra- 
 ments are daring and daily claims to be 
 miracles, the practice of the ordinary Catholic 
 faith a commonplace assertion of the reality of 
 the other world. Protestantism might be made 
 other-worldly; it was by the Quakers and the 
 Puritans (although their presentation of things 
 was not a good advertisement of that other 
 world) ; but modern Protestantism at any rate, 
 with its educational basis of an intelligent read- 
 ing of difficult MSS. and its Jewish synagogue 
 worship, wears no such dress. I never, there- 
 fore, blame the average Englishman for his 
 materialistic outlook, any more than one can 
 blame a modern society child for not believing 
 in fairies and Father Christmas. The English- 
 man honestly thinks that the belief in survival 
 either rests on a dubious and ancient account 
 of Our Lord's Resurrection, or on Spiritualism, 
 instead of which it rests for the Catholic on the 
 knowledge that the risen Jesus is to hand in 
 
OF WANTING GOD 41 
 
 the Tabernacle on the altar of every church and 
 has been actually seen in every age, down to 
 last year, by His disciples. 
 
 But to come back to my point: I am so dread- 
 fully conscious that I do not live as if I believed 
 this, and that I do not spend my days in a real 
 attempt to see God for myself. All that aban- 
 don, passion, madness, heroism, of the Saints, 
 belongs solely to the Saints. But I ought to 
 show it. Why, then, do I no c? 
 
 Ah, the sorrowful answer! " Suffer me first 
 to go and bury my father!" "He went away 
 grieved because he had great possessions!" 
 Thank God, my dear, that it was not you who 
 had a hand in writing such sentences of doom 
 across my life! But it is that, is it not? and 
 with most of us. Do you know, I am so con- 
 scious of it up here on the Berg. I trek up 
 and go to the Store. I am full of zeal when 
 I arrive. At the Store I do not deny Christ, 
 of course, but I, too, whittle things down to the 
 fine edge. No one would call the Store luxury, 
 but it is by contrast to this hut and my life 
 in this hut. There I have food on a white cloth 
 and plenty of tools to eat it with, there a cup 
 of tea and a cigarette before breakfast several 
 mornings a week, there novels and a sun-downer 
 and a chat with good old Mallont. It is all 
 right; I am still "justified." But then I come 
 out to the native village. I am a priest all the 
 time; in weariness, painfulness, hunger, thirst, 
 
42 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 and even boredom, I do serve God; I become 
 poor and live the life of my "brethren" that 
 I come to save. At first I have to make an 
 effort to do it, and then it fits like a glove. And 
 then well, and then I have to trek away from 
 the Berg, and I get down to the fine edges again, 
 and, God forgive me, I am glad. That's the 
 rub: I am glad. You see, there is no stuff of 
 saintship there. 
 
 The other day I debated with Mallont whether 
 the "sporting parson" did more good than the 
 other sort. Of course it was an absurd debate, 
 for Mallont could take no real part in it, having 
 never met the other sort of parson that I had 
 in my mind. I suppose he has met rather 
 reserved, gentlemanly, conventional English 
 curates, but I do not mean them. From his 
 point of view, then, the sporting parson won 
 every time. He gave me a dozen stories of such, 
 men whose cheeriness and good comradeship, 
 coupled with genuine religion, had made men 
 feel in club or bar that the Church had grit and 
 manliness, that it was not an affair of stage 
 curates and Mothers' Meetings, to be precise. 
 He maintained that all that was to the good, 
 and so it is up to a point. But is that the 
 Church ? Do you suppose that the Apostle Paul, 
 or Simon Stylites, or Francis Xavier, or the 
 Cure d'Ors made men feel that the Church was 
 cheerful, companionable, manly? It seems to 
 me that they made them feel very differently 
 
OF WANTING GOD 43 
 
 towards it either that it was a great Enemy 
 that the World should crucify or the Gate to 
 that Lord for Whom one would gladly be cruci- 
 fied. 
 
 And, of course, although I am not going to 
 labour the point, the Catholicism of modern 
 Home, or any form of the Christian religion that 
 is approximately like it, comes nearest to-day 
 to doing that. It is curious, too, that I put down 
 the four saints above exactly as they struck me 
 at the moment, types of that extravagant aban- 
 donment of everything for God that is saintship. 
 And the last two of that spiritual brotherhood 
 are Eoman Catholic, and the first two are 
 
 Of course, if you finish that sentence, you tend 
 to settle a big question, but even so it leaves me 
 with my main argument, that men to-day do 
 not want God because so few of us, even 
 Catholics, are those living epistles of Him that 
 St. Paul talks about. 
 
6. OF A SUNDAY IN THE MISSION 
 
 'THHE river flows very swiftly round great 
 boulders at the foot of a mountain, and 
 you cross the swirling water, pick your 
 way round a shoulder, climb over a little crest, 
 and find yourself on a plateau in a cleft that 
 is cut out between two foot-hills of the moun- 
 tain itself. Is that at all clear? I suppose it 
 is not, but let me put it this way. If you stand 
 at the little church door, you look out on a 
 sloping but comparatively flat plateau with 
 exactly six houses scattered about, anything 
 from one to three hundred yards from you. 
 From your feet the slope runs down to a tiny 
 stream, very gay with gladioli and other wild 
 flowers in summer, that rushes swiftly down and 
 down to the wild river below. Left and right 
 of the plateau the hills rise sharply up and close 
 you in, but they themselves are only spurs 
 thrust out from the mountain mass. Behind, a 
 valley rises ever more steeply out of sight. In 
 front, across the river, is a great chain of moun- 
 tains that runs north and south and hems you 
 in, but gives you a wide-stretching view first. 
 Six houses and the little church that is all. 
 Even with a glass you can hardly see more 
 
 44 
 
OF A SUNDAY IN THE MISSION 45 
 
 villages, but at sundown there are thin wisps 
 of blue smoke rising in pillars against the rocks 
 and grass from the hidden clusters of huts all 
 the way along the range before you. 
 
 Yesterday was Sunday, and such a day! I 
 finished by baptising twenty-six babies at a 
 service that would have taken a bishop's breath 
 away. Eeally I had done my best to get it 
 properly arranged, and the bewildered catechist 
 did present me with some pages torn from an 
 old exercise book on which were written up and 
 down, more or less unintelligibly, the names of 
 parents, villages, babies, and sponsors; but he 
 had allowed every one to crowd into the church, 
 and I could not sort out the babies from the 
 other children, or arrange the godparents 
 handily, or anything else. I did try. I 
 clamoured for the first father whose name ap- 
 peared on the paper, and several took up the 
 cry till we were told that he was dead. I queried 
 the second baby's name, which was put down 
 as "Idlet," and got them to let me choose a 
 Christian name, and I refused point-blank to 
 baptise a boy Abednego. But after that I gave 
 it up, and began. I was hot and tired and a bit 
 angry, until in the middle of the actual chris- 
 tening I had a sudden vision of the beauty of it 
 all. There was the mud and stone church, with 
 its mud altar in the apse, with crucifix and two 
 candles and nothing else at all, for we have no 
 frontal or hangings or pictures here, owing to 
 
46 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 the difficulty of getting them up. On it was a 
 tin wash-hand basin full of water, and behind 
 some sacks of Kaffir corn and a huge pile of 
 yellow mealies, harvest-festival offerings. The 
 harvest was months ago, and the grain was not 
 there to decorate the chancel, but just because 
 it was not yet sold, and there was nowhere else 
 to put it. All about me, crowding up the apse, 
 were mothers and howling babies, some being 
 suckled, some naked, some clothed; and all 
 about the mothers, and absolutely packing the 
 church, were the people of the congregation. 
 I stood there baptising; Cyril held my book; 
 another the bason when the child was a bit too 
 big to lift; and the catechist called them up, 
 fluttering his absurd sheets of paper. There 
 was not one single scrap of propriety or ec- 
 clesiasticism or decorum about it. Babies were 
 thrust at me; and I seized them, baptised them, 
 and handed them back. We disputed about 
 names and ages during the service, just as the 
 need occurred. Ever the packed mass hemmed 
 us in. And yet, as I say, I had that vision in 
 the middle of it all, and I felt like a primitive 
 apostle in the catacombs and a father among his 
 simple, homely people. 
 
 The Prayer Book? No, I fear you would not 
 have recognised it. Do you think I could pos- 
 sibly have begun, "Dearly Beloved, forasmuch 
 . . ." and so on? No, I just began like this: 
 "Now then, my people, be quiet, all of you, 
 
OF A SUNDAY IN THE MISSION 47 
 
 What have we come here for to-day? eh? What? 
 Come on now, somebody tell me." (A voice 
 from a big fellow holding a baby) "To wash 
 our children from their sins, oh, Father." 
 
 "Quite right, and mind you pray for them 
 all the time, and now I will get on with it." 
 
 The babies made too much noise for any one 
 to hear many of the prayers, but, to my surprise, 
 they all took up the sponsors ' answers and 
 thundered them like a ragged roll among the 
 hills, and they all recognised the ritual. Each 
 little group murmured fervent "Amens" as 
 their babies were "washed." And when the 
 last was done, I said or almost shouted "Now 
 then, kneel down, all of you. One 'Our Father ' 
 and-^one 'Hail Mary' for the babies, and the 
 'Divine Praises' in thanksgiving, and I will 
 give you the Blessing." 
 
 The offering at Baptism is conventionally a 
 shilling. One man hesitated before he paid 
 me for his two kiddies and demanded: "What 
 do the people give down in the lowlands where 
 the father lives?" 
 
 "One shilling each child," said I. 
 
 "Yes, but the father has come four days' 
 journey to reach us. Will he please take this ? ' ' 
 he answered, and put two half-crowns into my 
 hand. 
 
 I am utterly ashamed that I let the natives 
 get on my nerves so often and irritate me, or 
 that I lie in my blankets at six in the morning 
 
48 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 and dread getting np, for really, at bottom, this 
 is just an example of tlieir simplicity and guile- 
 lessness. Cyril was selling crosses and medals 
 outside the church at midday, and when he 
 came to me, and I counted up what remained, I 
 found he had given me three shillings too much. 
 "What's this, Cyril?" I asked. "From whom 
 hast thou been stealing three shillings?" 
 
 He smiled, and proceeded to lay out the coins. 
 "This shilling, Father," he said, "is from a 
 man to whom the father sold a cross at Christ- 
 mas last year, and he had no money then; two 
 tikkis from two women who took medals and 
 had no money last time the father was here 
 (five months before) ; and eighteen-pence for a 
 rosary which a woman took who is now dead, 
 and she left the money with her husband." 
 Now I had completely forgotten to whom I had 
 given credit, or, indeed, that I had done so 
 at all. There is such a rush during the few 
 days I can be here that I do forget these things. 
 And can you beat this for simplicity and 
 honesty? 
 
 Or take another incident. As I got to the 
 church door in the early morning I found two 
 women sitting at it with black handkerchiefs 
 embroidered with a large white cross on their 
 heads. One had come two and a half hours to 
 be there. I remembered them, penitents, to 
 whom I had assigned this penance. I asked for 
 the book and saw their record. Sunday by 
 
OF A SUNDAY IN THE MISSION 49 
 
 Sunday all through the winter, in snow and 
 frost and wind, they had been there at the 
 church door in accordance with my direction. 
 Mind, that penance was a real shame to them. 
 Is not this penitence ? 
 
 Or again, after the Baptism, I sat outside in 
 an old Burberry and heard cases. The child- 
 like simplicity of them passes words. A father 
 brought his daughter, who had run off to a 
 circumcision school and came weeping. This 
 man had "stolen" a girl which means run off 
 with her before the cattle were paid and came 
 to tell me so and get his punishment. This 
 couple had a daughter-in-law married to their 
 son, and after one month ("It was only one 
 month, Father") he died of the sickness; 
 couldn't they marry her to his brother? There 
 was a baby coming, and if they sent her back, 
 they lost the cattle they had paid, and they had 
 no more to buy a wife for the next son, the 
 brother. Also she could only marry the brother 
 by native law, as I well knew. But I could only 
 give one possible judgment. They shook their 
 whitening heads: the law of God was a hard, 
 hard law. 
 
 I was glad then that I had spoken as I did 
 at mass. Such a mass ! There were sixty-three 
 confessions to hear first and sixty-three com- 
 munions to give, and the little church was 
 packed in one big jam with many more outside. 
 Where they all come from, I never can imagine. 
 
50 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 The service would have sent a ritualist off his 
 head. Cyril led them in prayers, while I said 
 the Preparation and Introit with the catechist. 
 Then I thought they had better have the Ten 
 Commandments to-day (you see, I had heard 
 sixty-three confessions), and so I said, turning 
 to them, "I'm going to read the Commandments 
 to-day. Mind you join in the responses. 9 ' Then 
 I read, not your Prayer Book Commandments, 
 but the Commandments truly in the vulgar 
 tongue, such as "Thou shalt work six days, but 
 keep Sunday and Holy Days holy to God," and 
 so on. 
 
 Collect, Epistle, and Gospel well, it was a 
 Sunday after Trinity, and, to be honest, I did 
 not think the poor souls would understand much 
 of St. Paul to the Eomans or find the Collect 
 very helpful. Besides, they only have mass 
 about three times a year. So I said a votive 
 mass of the Blessed Sacrament, which is simple, 
 especially as I explained Epistle and Gospel 
 after or before reading them. And then the 
 Creed, for we want our heathen to hear the 
 Creed, and then I preached. 
 
 I said they had come to renew the Covenant 
 which God had made with them in Baptism. In 
 Baptism they had been made His, put under His 
 law, welcome to His love. Basutoland was no 
 longer their country, for their land was Heaven; 
 we were neither Basuto nor English, but 
 Catholics. They had given up heathenism and 
 
OF A SUNDAY IN THE MISSION 51 
 
 its customs and laws and taken God's, and in 
 return He had made them His Children and 
 People. Their lips had consented to that agree- 
 ment. And now, Jesus was coming to them, 
 and He would say, "Do you still mean all you 
 said? Then see, I seal your lips with My Blood, 
 and I give you My Body as a sign that I trust 
 you and accept you." 
 
 Then I told them to watch while I made the 
 oblations, and while they sang a well-known 
 hymn to our Lady I offered the bread and the' 
 wine and water to God. Then Cyril led them 
 in prayers, till I cried the age-long "Lift up 
 your hearts" as Paul cried in Eome, or Augus- 
 tine to his first English converts. They all sang 
 the "Holy, Holy, Holy," and the "Blessed is 
 He that cometh in the Name of the Lord," and 
 by this time I was naming the majesty of 
 apostles and martyrs in the Canon, all but 
 silently, of course. But I heard Cyril 's whisper : 
 "Bow your heads! He is coming!" and then, 
 as the bells rang thrice and thrice again, "Jesus 
 is here His Body and His Blood lies on the 
 Altar!" And then, while I prayed on and on, 
 remembering Abraham, Melchisedec, and Abel, 
 praying for the Christian dead, begging that 
 we might be included among the triumphant 
 virgin saints, and finally breaking the unbroken 
 Body and mingling the cup of sacrifice, Cyril 
 led them again in the simple prayers I have 
 taught them: 
 
52 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 "0 good Jesu, I believe that Thou art here! 
 
 good Jesu, I worship Thee in the Sacra- 
 ment; 
 
 good Jesu, have mercy on me ; 
 
 O good Jesu, forgive me my sins ; 
 
 good Jesu, receive my soul in the hour 
 
 of my death"; 
 and so on. 
 
 At the Communion I had that vision again. 
 They crowded up, kneeling all around me, poor, 
 ignorant, rough souls, but understanding only 
 that in some mysterious way I gave them Jesus, 
 the hope of life and death, and bowing them- 
 selves to the mud floor as they received. And 
 the packed church sang uncouthly, but so truly, 
 the "Agnus Dei/' "0 Salutaris Hostia," and 
 "Tantum ergo Sacr amentum." 
 
 Well, that is only typical of Sundays here. 
 They raise me to heaven, and they cast me down 
 to earth. It was wonderful ; yes, it was. Despite 
 all the weakness, sin, falling away, and so on, 
 which I know much better than the white man 
 who tells you Missions are a failure, it was 
 wonderful. But forgive me it was not An- 
 glican nor the Book of Common Prayer, nor yet 
 was it the Catholicism of Borne. Both those 
 things worry me. It is all very well, but I am 
 a minister of the reformed Church of England, 
 and I have sworn to the Thirty-nine Articles 
 and the Book of Common Prayer. Well, I do 
 more than go behind them and override them. 
 
OF A SUNDAY IN THE MISSION 53 
 
 You say that up here, in these mountains, with 
 a kindly, sympathetic bishop, it does not mat- 
 ter; but it does. I have a conscience, and it 
 was I who took those vows. The Church of 
 England may one day be different from what 
 it is ; it may, for all I know, one day be Eoman 
 Catholic; but it is not so now. Meantime I 
 am an accredited ambassador sent out with a 
 mission, and I disown my credentials and have 
 set aside my papers. That, it seems to me, is 
 what Almighty God sees. 
 
 Secondly, there are the people. I feel daily 
 ithat I betray them. They go from me to other 
 iAnglican churches, to the denial of what I have 
 taught them, to confusion and heresy, and worse. 
 Only the other day, down below the Berg, I 
 was asked to address a school about our Lady 
 and the Saints, because at the church the 
 children must needs attend they had been told 
 publicly that our Lady was not in heaven and 
 could not pray for them. Only the other day 
 a boy of mine came back to me, and, after a 
 mass, came up questioning: 
 
 "Is the bread made into the Body of Jesus, 
 Father?" 
 
 "Yes," 'I said. "Haven't I always taught 
 you so?" 
 
 "The father has," he said; "but Mr. at 
 
 said we mustn't kneel on our knee before 
 
 we go up to receive, for that would be wor- 
 shipping bread." 
 
54 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 Of course there are far better men than I who 
 satisfy themselves that to go on as I go on is 
 right; and I do not judge them. I think I am 
 learning gradually not to judge any one, how- 
 ever apparently wrong I may think them. 
 Things are too complex, my dear. So with these 
 Anglican priests: to them their Orders and 
 Sacraments are beyond doubt, and for difficul- 
 ties about the Church they are content to wait. 
 Jesus comes to the altar at their word and under 
 their hand, they believe, and that is enough. 
 Well, to their own Master they must give ac- 
 count. I, personally, have never felt this a 
 conclusive argument, and it seems to me that 
 I have been sent to a place in which a man 
 might feel the argument as strongly as possible, 
 perhaps in order more definitely to repudiate it. 
 If any man ever felt that his people had been 
 fed with the Bread of Life at his hands and 
 depended upon him, I do, and such dependent 
 children they are, too. But they are not mine, 
 they are God's, and however much I might wish 
 to, I cannot take upon myself the responsibility 
 of shepherding them without authority. I may 
 even be standing between them and God, for 
 if I were not here, that would be one conflicting 
 voice at least the less. 
 
 But that is not the point. I told you these 
 Betters would be by way of an apologia, nothing 
 trig or wise for I cannot pretend to that but 
 still the apologia of a soul. And this is what 
 
OF A SUNDAY IN THE MISSION 55 
 
 I would say very solemnly to you, that I fear 
 one day, if I make no move, that I may have 
 to stand before the throne of the Truth having 
 sworn to a profession of Faith which I had 
 ceased to believe but did not honestly repudiate. 
 
7. OF MISUNDERSTANDINGS 
 
 ONCE upon a time a sub-inspector of 
 Government Police, a trader, and a mis- 
 sionary foregathered not so many miles 
 from where I am at present, and, in the course 
 of conversation, discussed the character of the 
 native. The policeman remarked sardonically 
 that a few years hearing cases in the police 
 court gave one the true picture and would do 
 much to correct some people's ideas. The 
 trader said that, on the contrary, he was the 
 best judge, for whereas the policeman saw the 
 dull rogues (who got caught), he saw the clever 
 (who did not), but that he supposed the mis- 
 sionary, if he kept his eyes open, would see 
 the most clever, because he would see those who 
 set out to cheat God. And at that the missionary 
 upped and defended his people, as he was bound 
 to do, and the usual talk of mission-spoiled na- 
 tives and "rice Christians" followed. 
 
 But it is not easy to decide who sees most 
 of the true native character. Of course the 
 priest abroad may easily be blinded, just as he 
 is often blinded at home. Natives, like other 
 people, naturally put on their best graces with 
 their best clothes when he is about. But, for 
 
 56 
 
OF MISUNDERSTANDINGS 57 
 
 all that, it is equally true that the trader has 
 not quite the vantage point for judgment that 
 he thinks he has. He sees the man of many 
 flocks who comes to sell his wool, but it is still 
 true of our Christians, as it was of St. Paul's 
 at Corinth, that there are not many rich. And 
 if they are rich, they are usually feeble Chris- 
 tians, as the missionary knows well enough. 
 Personally, I cannot recall one really rich, faith- 
 ful Christian on the Berg, by "rich" meaning 
 the kind of native who will get 100 to 150 
 for his wool at the store in one selling. Then, 
 again, of these, as of lesser customers, the trader 
 sees the worst side. He sees the native when 
 he is dealing with that alien thing, money, and 
 when, moreover, he is out to fight the white 
 man who makes, he supposes in his ignorance, 
 inordinate profits. Nor is it always ignorance. 
 White men do make a good thing of trading, 
 and the native has had ground to be suspicious 
 and uncivil at the scales before now. And in 
 in any case money brings out the worst in black 
 and white. 
 
 On that occasion, however, all three judges 
 agreed in one particular at least, that the longer 
 you lived among the natives, the more you felt 
 that you did not understand them. The mis- 
 sionary, who had spent sixteen years among 
 them, was as sure of this as the others. He 
 said that some few years after he came out, 
 when he had mastered the language and 
 
58 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 travelled a good deal among the villages, lie 
 felt he really knew the minds of the people, but 
 that ever since he had been unlearning that first 
 impression. He said he had known the most 
 faithful lapse suddenly without apparent cause 
 or any fresh additional temptation. He had 
 heard the most intelligent develop a line of 
 argument and stick to it as perfectly reasonable 
 when it was the most arrant rubbish to a 
 European. 
 
 On the sixteen years premise I have not been 
 nearly long enough among the people to judge, 
 but for all that I propose to record for you my 
 impressions. It is now a week since I took up 
 my pen to write to you, and all the time I have 
 been living and moving amongst tiny native 
 villages and the great mountains, without a 
 white man and he as far as I from the rest 
 of his people being ever nearer than one day's 
 journey. Each day's trek has been really enjoy- 
 able, not too long and not too short, but they 
 have been so much alike that I am a little tired 
 of them. Up a thousand feet, in and out and 
 in and out again along and around the crests 
 at that level, then down a thousand feet and 
 then up again, and so on, two or three times a 
 day so the survey map says I have travelled. 
 In the early evening one reaches the village for 
 which one has been aiming, and this week I 
 have slept each night in a native hut, and each 
 night in a different one. To-night, as I write, 
 
OF MISUNDERSTANDINGS 59 
 
 I am all but up on the border. No priest has 
 ever been here before, and I should think, quite 
 probably, no European officials. It is not quite 
 near enough to the border for the border patrol 
 to have passed, and the main Government trail 
 up, between the two nearest "camps" as we 
 call them, crosses the river, above which is this 
 village, some four or five miles down stream and 
 quite out of sight. This week, too, is, of course, 
 only one of many, so, although I have not had 
 sixteen years' experience, I have something of 
 which to write. 
 
 I should say, first, that I think the native is 
 the most exasperating person it is possible to 
 meet. But he is exasperating for the same rea- 
 son that he often appears rude, because mainly 
 he has no idea that what you would call rude 
 or exasperating is so. The way he meets you 
 on trek and stops and shouts at you; the way 
 he barges into the hut where you are writing 
 or reading, hat on head and talking loudly six- 
 teen to the dozen; his slowness at grasping a 
 new thing and his unreasoning suspicions of it; 
 his habit of talking at you and over you; his 
 slow stare and laugh at you; his acquiescence 
 in what you say and his immediate doing of 
 exactly the opposite all this is annoying. A 
 good deal of it the average white man never 
 experiences, for, as you might guess, he would 
 consider it below his dignity to offer the occa- 
 sion for it ; but if it comes your way, you begin, 
 
60 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 after a while, to see that it is not meant. It 
 comes my way because it seems to me that, if 
 a priest comes as a priest to a village, he comes 
 very simply and humbly as the guest and as the 
 servant of a humble Lord, and it is not for him 
 to demand this or that, or to isolate himself. 
 Some would call that being a traitor to one's 
 colour, I suppose; but I cannot help it, for to 
 act otherwise would be to be a traitor to one's 
 God. 
 
 I have come at last to feel about natives a 
 little of what I feel about horses and dogs ! That 
 hardly sounds agreeable with my last para- 
 graph, does it? but it really is. I mean that I 
 love animals immensely, and I always want to 
 treat them as if they were human beings. With 
 my horses especially I feel this. I am always 
 catching myself saying: " Cheer up, old man! 
 only another two miles!" or "Steady on, young 
 'un! I can see further than you can up here, 
 and I know that's a bad road." But it is no 
 use talking like that, just as it is no use feeling 
 about a horse as you would about a man. I 
 do not mean, of course, that it is no use to feel 
 at all, and that one has any right to be unkind, 
 but I mean you have got to realise that what is 
 pleasant to you is not necessarily pleasant to 
 a horse, and that what is pain to you is not 
 necessarily pain to him, and so on. He belongs 
 to a different race. His mental outlook is in 
 another category to ours. So my present pony, 
 
OF MISUNDERSTANDINGS 61 
 
 Yacob, little ass that he is, simply will not let 
 me get off and lead him up or down hill. If I 
 do, he plants his legs on the ground and will 
 not move. It is no use my explaining that it 
 will be easier for him if I walk, or that I prefer 
 to walk or that I do not want to tire him: noth- 
 ing will induce him to move. There is nothing 
 for it but to sit on him, and after some long, 
 panting, breathless ascent, if I get off at the 
 summit, he will rub his nose against my arm, as 
 much as to say, "Now, that was well done, 
 wasn't it, master?" If, on the other hand, I 
 simply cannot ride him down a stiff descent, the 
 only thing to do is to fasten the reins up and 
 throw stones at him to make him go on ahead. 
 And at the bottom blest if he will speak to me! 
 One ought to remember, I suppose, that, if a 
 man gets tired first in his legs, a mountain pony 
 gets tired there last. At the end of a long day 
 if I say to Cyril: "Don't hobble the horses to- 
 night, Cirili: they must be dog-tired; let them 
 be easy," why, nine times out of ten they will 
 be half a dozen miles off in the morning. 
 
 But this is not to say that the horse is not 
 an intelligent and amiable gentleman. He cer- 
 tainly is, but his intelligence and amiability are 
 not those of a man. And it is so, I think, with 
 the native. He is not a European, and the cen- 
 turies behind him have taught him other les- 
 sons, so that your first step towards understand- 
 ing him has got to be that you must never judge 
 
62 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 him by your standards, nor suppose that his 
 mental processes will be entirely in line with 
 your own. 
 
 Once, a year or so ago, I rode painfully up 
 the last hundred of a thousand feet to a village, 
 the wind cold and biting and the rain coming 
 up. There were a couple of men and some 
 women about, and the women stared a little 
 and then went indoors, while the men sat on 
 without moving. We got off, and Cyril went up 
 to the men. They grunted at each other and 
 fired out questions, and got up and looked at 
 me and spat and sat down again. I fear I lost 
 my temper. It was six hours since I had eaten, 
 and I was cold and very tired, so I off-saddled 
 my own horse, got out a ground-sheet, lit my 
 pipe, and removed myself a score of paces. 
 There I sat on a rock in the rain and thought 
 evil things of natives. After a bit a man got 
 up and came over to me. He stood a few yards 
 off and stared. Then he said, "Hum-hum!" 
 nasally several times, and finally held out his 
 hand for a shake. I restrained myself enough 
 to take it. Then he said, Would I not come 
 to a house? I said (in English, fortunately, 
 for I was too angry to remember any Sesuto), 
 "Good heavens, man! Do you think I like sit- 
 ting on a ground-sheet in the rain?" And he 
 did not understand, and smiled sweetly, and 
 said, * ' Hum-hum ! ' ' again, and led the way. And 
 then I found that the women had already been 
 
OF MISUNDERSTANDINGS 63 
 
 removing their goods into the rain to clear me 
 a hut, and that the head man had seen us coming 
 and had gone off at once to find a sheep to slay 
 for me. You see, a native would not have been 
 particularly cold or tired or hungry, nor would 
 he have minded the rain, nor is it his code of 
 etiquette at once to usher a stranger within 
 doors and offer him a drink. But I had not 
 thought of all that. 
 
 Another time we had been travelling for 
 hours and hours without a sight of a hut. I 
 had malaria and a temperature of 103 degrees, 
 and it was raining steadily. We arrived at 
 sunset, at long last, at a village, and I told 
 Cyril we must off-saddle there. There was one 
 man only visible, and he refused. He said we 
 were too near " lands" of wheat, and the horses 
 would get in. We must go on to the next vil- 
 lage, just over that rise. We went, and the 
 village turned out to be up half a mountain, 
 round a precipice, and some two miles off. But, 
 you see, wheat lands bulked bigger to that native 
 than they did to me, and he did not know what 
 malaria was. Nor is two miles round a precipice 
 and up five hundred feet anything more than 
 " just over there" to a native in the mountains. 
 
 Perhaps I am learning a little. Nowadays I 
 ride up, get off, sit down, talk a bit, and smoke. 
 Presently I am asked to a hut. I long to unpack 
 and make arrangements for the night, but I do 
 not. Some time or another Cyril brings in my 
 
64 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 kit, or I am conducted elsewhere and find it. 
 Some time or another a fire gets lit, and 
 Cyril comes up and says, "Porridge to-night, 
 Father!" just as cheerfully as if he had said, 
 "Boast duck!" or "Lamb and mint sauce!" 
 And I say, "I think I'll have some tea, Cirili," 
 just as if I had a case of champagne in the pack. 
 With the porridge he will bring some cold pota- 
 toes and some mafi thick, sour milk very 
 good, or a chicken, with luck, and some native 
 bread. And then I eat, with no regard for the 
 European order of dishes, and possibly I have 
 some jam or a tin of sardines from my own 
 few stores. Afterwards the folk crowd in for 
 night prayers, with howling babies to be com- 
 forted at the breast and little herds in skins. 
 They sit on my bed, but it does not matter. 
 And then I get into pyjamas and read Brown- 
 ing, perhaps ; and you will excuse me if I think 
 we are getting to know each other that way. 
 
 Last night I rolled up at a village where I 
 am well known. A little kiddie in a string of 
 beads (Hesther, aged eight) rushed at me and 
 climbed on my knee and felt in my pockets for 
 sweets. They gave me a marvellously decorated 
 hut, with a dado running round about three feet 
 from the floor and figures in coloured earths 
 above of the most incredible horses, hippopot- 
 ami, ostriches, and sheep, with a human hand 
 with outspread fingers at intervals. Calendars, 
 four of them, also adorned the walls, for 1901, 
 
OF MISUNDERSTANDINGS 65 
 
 1905, 1911, and 1912 respectively. My hostess 
 came in, and dressed and chatted while I waited 
 for supper. I fed on porridge, eggs, bread, jam, 
 and tea, and a dish of cold boiled beans that 
 came in at the end. Hesther knelt by me during 
 prayers, in a sheep-skin now, very quiet and 
 devout, and my host only spat once or twice on 
 the floor on which I was to sleep. Also he 
 offered me the blanket he was wearing in case 
 I had not enough. 
 
 My dear, I wonder if God finds us as rude and 
 as difficult. I wonder if heaven and its ways 
 will seem as remote from our ideas as their ways 
 seem to me remote from mine. But one thing I 
 do not question, and it moves me much to-night. 
 Our Heavenly Father will be so much more 
 tender and more patient with me than I am 
 with them. Good-night. 
 
8. OF THE MISSION PACK-SADDLE 
 
 I DID not write to you last night, and if you 
 could have inspected my quarters, you 
 would not have expected me to do so. If 
 
 you had seen me lying in But wait a 
 
 minute ; it will spoil the tale to begin like that. 
 
 We set out Cyril and I and four horses 
 from a certain village, very much out of the way 
 in the mountains, to trek down to comparative 
 civilisation, a store, and another village. We 
 were not able to start very early because of 
 mass, but we got a good pace on when once on 
 the road, for we knew we had eight hours' trek 
 ahead of us, all unknown road, and some of it 
 across uplands without the semblance of a foot- 
 path. And we got on quite well for about three 
 hours, and then the series of catastrophes began. 
 
 I should tell you that we were trekking along 
 the very edge of the Berg above Natal, and, 
 always beautiful, it was yesterday a supremely 
 wonderful sight. Natal lies 8,000 feet below, 
 and the great krantzes on the top of which we 
 ride fall all but sheer in some places. Here and 
 there they rise to rocky castles of unclimbable 
 stone, which we have to skirt, and here and 
 there again great fissures are split in them 
 
 66 
 
OP THE MISSION PACK-SADDLE 67 
 
 which run down dizzily to the far plains be- 
 neath. Sometimes Natal lies bathed in sunlight 
 and spread out like a map; sometimes and yes- 
 terday was one of the times the clouds hide 
 it, and we are above the clouds. The solid 
 ground was beneath our feet, and on the right 
 buttress and crest and peak of the face of the 
 Berg, but on the left, so far as one could see, 
 a tossed sea of billowy white cloud. So the 
 world must look to an airman. And then sud- 
 denly all that fleecy ocean got in motion. It 
 was rolled up towards us, and came on in great 
 waves of white soft mist eddying round the 
 castles, and washing up the fissures, to spread 
 over every depression on our side of the border. 
 Beautiful as it was, it was a sinister thing. Once 
 that cloud envelops you, unless the road is well 
 known (and even then it is dangerous), you 
 must camp where you stand. 
 
 So Cyril and I rode hard. It was wonderful 
 how we escaped it. At times we cut across the 
 top of a funnel up which the white vapour rolled 
 from cloud-land with so little time to spare that 
 100 yards behind, when we had got across, you 
 could see nothing at all but a white wall. King 
 John and the Wash were not in it! But honestly 
 it was eerie, that continual rush to avoid being 
 cut off. 
 
 And then suddenly came a crash of thunder. 
 We had hardly noticed, but the storm that had 
 forced the mists before it was upon us now. 
 
68 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 \ 
 
 As unbelievably quickly as any one who knows 
 these parts could tell you the heavens began to 
 break up, as it seemed, above us, and down came 
 the hail. Yes, hail although it is mid-summer, 
 stinging, biting, freezing hail, and there was 
 little that we could do. But in a moment we 
 had to do something, for a pack-horse, stung up 
 or scared, or both, bolted a few yards and jerked 
 up his pack-saddle, which promptly broke for 
 the nih time. 
 
 There now, you have it, my grievance, my 
 bugbear, the burden of my lament the Mission 
 Pack-Saddle. How it came into the Mission I 
 cannot say. In moments of care-free benignity, 
 comfortably ensconced at home, I can conceive 
 that some one was once grateful for it. But 
 that must have been a long time ago, for its 
 pattern is, as I should say, much after the style 
 of those used by Abraham in trekking from the 
 land of Charran. It is compacted of wood and 
 naked wrought iron, besides leather, with little 
 hand-screws to work it up and down; and the 
 straps connected with it are legion. My horses, 
 even in their stable, wear a tired and scared 
 expression, and people say it is because of the 
 amount of work asked of them; but that is not 
 true; it is because they know the Mission Pack- 
 Saddle is in the saddle-room next door, and they 
 may be called upon at any time to carry it. 
 
 I swore never to use it again the first time I 
 trekked the time the bags burst to bits and the 
 
OF THE MISSION PACK-SADDLE 69 
 
 jam-bottle smashed among my blankets! but 
 I had to, and I got new leather bags at least, 
 they were not new, but they were leather and 
 packed my blankets outside. Another time the 
 cast-iron shoulder broke, and we took three days 
 to trek one day's journey. And how many 
 times straps have broken, how many times it 
 has given horses sore backs, how many times it 
 has endangered my immortal soul, I cannot tell 
 you. I hardly dare think. This time, however, 
 it only lost a screw and a nut, and Spider 
 quieted after he had bucked off the bags> 
 smashed the frying-pan, and put his foot 
 through the kettle. 
 
 We could do nothing while the hail fell, but 
 after a while it merely drizzled, and then we set 
 to. The thunder had dispersed the mist, but the 
 drizzle crept down our backs, and the hail lay 
 thick and white on the ground, and it was so 
 cold that our hands grew utterly numb. I 
 hardly know how we patched the thing up and 
 got going again, but we did with two hours 
 lost. 
 
 We could scarcely get along, either. Twice 
 the pack worked loose as a result of the accident, 
 and we slithered and slipped and wrestled with 
 stiff reins on and on and on. At 6.30 p.m. in an 
 unknown land, and obviously still far from 
 villages or the store, I said to Cyril that we must 
 camp down, and camp down we did, while the 
 night crept on apace and the rain fell steadily. 
 
70 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 Oh, I daresay numbers of ten times more 
 heroic people have done it under worse circum- 
 stances before me, but that does not make it any 
 better ! You imagine it ! You dismount in the 
 rain, and take the saddles off. Still in the rain, 
 you select a reasonably smooth piece of sodden 
 ground, and you unroll the wet tent and get it 
 up. You put a wet ground-sheet on the wet 
 ground under the wet tent the small patrol 
 size about four feet high and you spread your 
 roll of more or less wet blankets on the ground- 
 sheet. (Eemember, we missionaries are not 
 police officers; we travel with one boy and one 
 Mission pack-saddle; we cannot keep our 
 blankets dry in bags.) Then you get your wet 
 self inside, and you settle down to a cold, damp 
 supper. A few knobs of cold mutton, some 
 native bread, and water of a thick brown colour, 
 because the rain had swollen and discoloured 
 every stream, had to content us, and after that 
 I did not feel I could write to you. Instead I 
 crept into the blankets in my riding-breeches 
 and shirt, had one final and comprehensive curse 
 at the pack-saddle, and slept. 
 
 What do you say? My dear, do you think I 
 have not tried? The Government has no end of 
 them, but it will not sell, because when the 
 Prince of Wales or the Governor-General or a 
 M.L.A. visits the country they have to use 
 several score at once. They have most kindly 
 lent me one now and again, for short treks, when 
 
OF THE MISSION PACK-SADDLE 71 
 
 I really could not stand the thought of the 
 Mission Pack-Saddle or while it was in hospital; 
 but that was for short treks, and I could not 
 ask for one for so long a trek as this. There 
 is a decent saddle, indeed, on sale at a store I 
 know of a small one, but the right breed. I 
 have often looked at it and longed. But do you 
 know the price? 30! Honestly, 30! A 
 month's salary of a Durban tram-conductor, six 
 weeks of mine! Thirty pounds would pay a 
 catechist for a year, would build the walls of 
 a mission church, would enable me to fit up 
 several schools with the new black-boards and 
 the few desks that they so badly want, and 
 would warrant if I really had so much ab- 
 solutely and actually over the year's working 
 and in hand my venturing, with some hope of 
 success, on the opening of one of the half-dozen 
 new out-stations for which the work is crying 
 out. Why don't I get a new one, indeed! You 
 do not know what you say. But for all that, 
 if the thing were to let me down once too often, 
 let us say in the winter while snow was falling, 
 and if I could not mend it, as might easily hap- 
 pen, and so I could not get on, and if the snow 
 were to lie on the tops there for a couple of 
 weeks, as it often does, why, then, my loving 
 friends and relations would doubtless put up a 
 brazen memorial tablet somewhere to my 
 memory, whereon would be inscribed heroic 
 words saying that I had perished in bitter 
 
72 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 weather while doing my duty on the face of the 
 Berg. But you, my dear, would know better. 
 You would know that the true inscription 
 ought to run: 
 
 TO THE MEMORY OF 
 
 FKANCIS THOMAS WILFRID, 
 
 WHO PERISHED 
 IN BITTER WEATHER . . . ETC., 
 
 Killed by the Mission Pack-Saddle. 
 
 But, you know, joking apart only it is really 
 not joking at all this sort of thing does make 
 one wonder a little. I do not expect the Govern- 
 ment to give me a pack-saddle, for I do not 
 regard this or any modern Government as iden- 
 tified in any sense with Christianity. The 
 officials as men are very friendly; the Govern- 
 ment as a whole is very courteous; but they 
 as a class and it as an institution have no 
 definite faith, and are not out here for philan- 
 thropic purposes. Nor do I expect most of my 
 fellow-countrymen, here or at home, to give me 
 a pack-saddle, for they mostly do not believe in 
 missions to the heathen, and often whole- 
 heartedly think that the bodies of the suffering 
 poor outside the empty London churches are 
 more important than the souls of black folk who 
 crowd out what churches there are in this land, 
 but mostly have no churches outside of which 
 to sit. Nor do I expect my Bishop to give me 
 one, for he spends his time in trying to ad- 
 
OF THE MISSION PACK-SADDLE 73 
 
 minister a diocese financially on a starvation 
 pittance. But I do wonder if Christian Church- 
 people at home have a right sense of proportion. 
 My pack-saddle is only typical of ten thousand 
 similar needs of hundreds of other priests of the 
 Anglican Church who have gone to undertake 
 the Church's supreme duty on the edge of 
 civilisation and beyond, and whose work is 
 hampered, whose lives are even endangered, for 
 less than the cost of that new "brass lectern or 
 of that handsome set of hassocks. Of course 
 one cannot blame the people who give the lec- 
 tern or subscribe for the hassocks. I honestly 
 do not. But I rolled over in my wet blankets 
 trying to get to sleep last night and thought, 
 for the millionth time, that my old pack-saddle 
 is not the only relic with a screw loose and a 
 nut missing! 
 
9. OF THE BEST IN LIFE 
 
 AT my last resting-place I picked up an 
 old illustrated magazine, and I have 
 been reading it to-day at the midday off- 
 saddle. There is an article in it that interests 
 me very much, and I have read it again and 
 again, although, I confess, with little result. I 
 don't quite see what is the conclusion of the 
 writer's meditations. Perhaps, like so many 
 modern meditations, it is not meant to have a 
 conclusion. At any rate, he is discussing "The 
 Best in Life," and I cannot really make out 
 what he takes the best in life to be, or whether 
 or not and this is the important thing he 
 advises you to climb any obstacle and break 
 every convention to get it. "Love and Work 
 contain some of the best in Life," he says, 
 "without a doubt"; but that does not help 
 much. If the best of life is distributed around 
 in that way, and reaches you as a kind of 10 per 
 cent, solution in a number of bottles, it is a poor 
 business. Most of us cannot afford to buy half 
 the bottles. 
 
 But you were talking to me once about this 
 sort of thing, and I am intrigued with the prob^ 
 
 74 
 
OF THE BEST IN LIFE 75 
 
 lem. What does the phrase mean, I wonder? 
 Does it mean the best thing that living has to 
 offer, or does it mean the thing that makes one's 
 life, taken as a whole, the best life possible? If 
 the first, then of course the best in life may be 
 some crowning moment or thing long wanted 
 and hardly attained, but gone after the moment, 
 or gone after a while at any rate. One might 
 debate that it meant anything from a first kiss 
 to a first baby, or from the sense of achievement 
 on the acquisition of one's first fiver up to the 
 smiling possession of a considerable fortune. If 
 the second, I should say it varied much with the 
 disposition of the individual. Popularity; the 
 trust of one's fellow-men; freedom to wander 
 at will ; a pleasant ordinary wife in an ordinary 
 pleasant home; excitement; cricket; big game 
 shooting; study all these are things which, 
 acquired, would be acclaimed by some people as 
 offering them the best in life. Honestly, it is not 
 an easy phrase. 
 
 You remember Mr. H. G. Wells' fine novel, 
 "Love and Mr. Lewisham." It is concerned 
 with the discovery of the best in life. Mr. 
 Lewisham thought the best lay in getting on, in 
 making a name, in adhering to a time-table; 
 that ideal broken, he thought it lay in a girl's 
 love; and after vicissitudes and disappoint- 
 ments he heard his first baby crying in its cot, 
 and shrugged his shoulders at the discovery. 
 The best of life lay there. I think it does for 
 
76 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 thousands of people. To create the little life, 
 to guard and mould and cherish it that is their 
 best in life. As a philosopher one may marvel. 
 Nature is an amazing sorceress. She sends men 
 and women out to a colossal struggle in which 
 they hardly survive, and she breathes over them 
 a spell so that their worn faces only smile at 
 last, thinking they have achieved, when they 
 have brought yet another life into the age-long 
 conflict within the vicious circle. 
 
 Or I have never forgotten what I still think to 
 be the cleverest and most striking short story I 
 have ever read. I do not know who wrote it nor 
 where I read it, but there was only just one idea 
 in it, as there ought to be in a short story. It 
 can be quite briefly told. There was a clerk, 
 getting on for sixty, who, boy and man, had 
 worked for one firm whole-heartedly, ungrudg- 
 ingly, unceasingly. He had never married ; he 
 had never taken what you would call a holiday ; 
 he appeared to have no interests outside the 
 office; and within it, although trusted abso- 
 lutely, he was just the queer, unimaginative, 
 groovy old Tom whom nobody could imagine 
 anywhere else but on his stool. His salary was 
 enough for his bachelor needs. He was just a 
 bit of the office furniture. 
 
 But old Tom had his best in life, for which he 
 had lived and schemed and hoped and prayed 
 for fifty long years, a mad "best in life," with- 
 out rhyme or reason, of which he could not 
 
OF THE BEST IN LIFE 77 
 
 speak, it was too dear, but for which he never 
 ceased to hope. He wanted to visit San Fran- 
 cisco ! He, whose daily 'bus ride was all but the 
 limit so far of his life's journeyings, was at 
 heart a born traveller ; he, who seemed the most 
 unimaginative of men, had the mind of a poet. 
 Born in a dull environment, enslaved to a daily 
 routine, he had saved and schemed and planned 
 for six months' riot one day among the colour 
 and scent and beauty of lovely 'Frisco. He 
 knew its streets, the view through the Golden 
 Gate, the sound of the Pacific surf on its 
 shores, the glory of the setting sun across a 
 world of ocean, from the books ; and at sixty he 
 saw the possibility of the realisation of his 
 dream. He had at length saved the money; in 
 long years of service he had more than earned 
 six months of leave. It only remained to 
 a six. . 
 
 It needed all his pluck to knock at the 
 master's door, for he never did so, except at 
 regular times. The little old man, once inside, 
 usually so composed and dry, could hardly 
 speak for nervousness, and he only got out his 
 modest request six months' leave after fifty 
 years' service stammering, at long last. And 
 his master could hardly believe his ears. What 
 ever did lie want six months ' leave for ? He had 
 no relations! Stuff and nonsense, then! six 
 months! He could have a fortnight to go to 
 Margate, but six months ! Why, he had always 
 
78 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 been bored with holidays, and glad to get back 
 if he took the inside of a week. Was he sure he 
 was quite well? 
 
 Yes, quite sure, and he wanted six months' 
 leave . . . 
 
 But why? Let him tell his master why. 
 Come now, out with it ! What in the wide world 
 did he, old Tom, want with six months' leave? 
 Eeally it had its funny side . . . And his 
 master laughed heartily. 
 
 Poor old Tom ! That laughter finished him. 
 How could he say he wanted his best in life? 
 How could he say that he, the old crabbed clerk 
 of sixty, wanted to realise the dream of years 
 and go off to San Francisco! He could not 
 say it, and he did not. He mumbled that very 
 likely the master was right; he'd think better 
 of it ... 
 
 "That's right," said his master kindly, tak- 
 ing up his pen. "You can have that fortnight 
 whenever you like, and it need not cost you 
 anything, either; you've been a good servant to 
 the firm. Thank you. Good-morning. ' ' 
 
 An hour later he passed through his office on 
 his way to lunch and saw old Tom in the same 
 old coat at the same old desk. "Funny old 
 chap!" he mused as the door shut behind him. 
 "I wonder what the old donkey was thinking 
 about!" 
 
 I have never forgotten that story, and never 
 shall. Maybe the best in life, to nine out of ten 
 
OF THE BEST IN LIFE 79 
 
 of us, is never any more than a dream of wKich 
 we dare not speak 
 
 But The Best in Life what is it? An hour 
 ago I had almost said it was this off-saddle so 
 far as I am concerned! It does take a great 
 deal of beating the long morning's ride on a 
 cup of coffee ; the arrival at a place like this, a 
 place with a couple of willows drooping over a 
 crystal stream, a bed of rich grass, a rugged old 
 mountain behind, the wide, far-spreading valley 
 before, and the dreaming, cloudless vault 
 above ; then the rest as one flings oneself down, 
 and the joy of a pipe, and every care in the 
 whole world banished over yonder ridge, for at 
 least you can do nothing, be found by nobody, 
 and want no more just here and now. No more ? 
 Well, I wonder. Will you understand if I tell 
 you that I find myself remembering that " Frag- 
 ment" of D. G. Kossetti's: 
 
 "Who shall say what is said in me, 
 With all that I might have been dead in me?" 
 
 But I can tell you what I believe is the best 
 in life to every man, woman, and child on the 
 planet at once the best thing life has to offer 
 and the thing that makes life the best to each of 
 us. And it is not really a pious, conventional 
 answer, or not as I mean it. The Best in Life, 
 dear heart, is God. 
 
 So does Amiel open the Journal Intime! 
 
 "There is but one thing needful to possess God." 
 
80 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 God is beyond words of mine to tell. He is 
 joy, strength, beauty, grace, reward, striving, 
 love, vision, and life. Everything consists in 
 Him, and He is in everything, of everything, the 
 soul of the world. Our Lord said, traditionally, 
 "Lift the stone, and there thou shalt find Me." 
 True, infinitely true, and He is in the flower in 
 the crannied wall, and He is in the light in your 
 eyes and the gold strands that run through your 
 hair, and He was in the shining of the well- 
 scrubbed Army pots to Francis in Mr. Benson's 
 story, and it is His Breast on which I lie now 
 on this green grass, and whose Face smiles at 
 me in this golden valley. People won't realise 
 it; that's all. He is not the God they imagine, 
 not the God of Semitic Commandments and of 
 Jehu and of the late Kaiser ; passionately I tell 
 you that. The Old Testament tells you what 
 the Jews thought God was like, just as the 
 Kaiser's speeches told us what he thought God 
 was like. But men have spent their days 
 libelling God. They have thought Him far off 
 and hidden, but He is not far and not hidden. 
 He is revealing Himself all the time, smiling at 
 us out of every beautiful thing, reaching out to 
 us in every noble impulse, picturing Himself to 
 us in every glorious ideal, yes, and touching us 
 with those wise fatherly fingers of His in every 
 pain. Oh, the good, good God ... 
 
 Well, and God is the best in life. He is the 
 only best. If a man find Him, he has lived; if 
 
OF THE BEST IN LIFE 81 
 
 not, he has not been born. Not that He is hard 
 to find, and indeed He is found of them that 
 seek Him not often enough, and of them who do 
 not know that it is He when they have found 
 Him. But it is He all the same, and I will tell 
 you how I think He is found. 
 
 We men, my dear and I will not speak of 
 women are a sordid sort of beasts in a way. 
 We very easily do sordid kinds of things, things 
 which a woman, unless her eyes have been 
 opened, finds hard to understand. And, in ad- 
 dition to this, we often have sordid schemes for 
 life, or allow ourselves to grow sordid in the 
 execution of them. 
 
 But, on the other hand, there are men with 
 ideals, and still more men (if not every man) 
 who glimpse ideals now and again even if they 
 turn from them with a sigh. There are men 
 with high ideals of honourable work, even if it 
 be no more than honourable human service, 
 from the great scientist who is honestly out to 
 know that he may serve, down to the batmen 
 many of us had in the War. Patriotism makes 
 a high ideal for others. Home life makes a high 
 ideal for another, and I have seen a pathetic 
 figure of a city clerk, trudging home on 150 a 
 year down suburban streets, transformed when 
 he had safely reached his " villa" and sat down 
 in his parlour and got his kiddies on his knees. 
 Eeligion is often the very noblest ideal of very 
 noble men, if the world only knew it, from the 
 
82 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 Breton peasant, who gives up his life to be a 
 foreign missionary, up to my Lord Cardinal 
 who says humble, childish prayers when his 
 day's work is done. And there are men who 
 look into a girl's eyes and read the highest of 
 ideals there, who kiss the hand rather than the 
 lips after that look, and who would be saints of 
 God if they never fell from what they had seen 
 in that moment. One and all of these men have 
 seen God, God revealing Himself in many ways, 
 but God, the Soul of the World. 
 
 And great artists paint, and know that there is 
 something they cannot get into their pictures 
 altogether; and great architects build, and 
 when they have built, they sigh a little; and 
 great scientists spend their years, and at the 
 end there is a look in their eyes you can see it 
 always as if their researches had led them all 
 but into the Presence but not quite ; and great 
 lovers why, they usually die of a broken heart 
 because they have not been able to love as they 
 thought they would when first they looked into 
 love's eyes. And the lesser good, honest, true- 
 hearted men they, too, are tired towards the 
 close, and usually are glad to go. Maybe they 
 do not know why. But I think I know. They, 
 too, have been reaching out after God, and have 
 yet quite to find Him. 
 
 But the search, beloved, is the best in life. 
 
 It seems to me that the world is very blind 
 not to see all this, and stretched out here in the 
 
OF THE BEST IN LIFE 83 
 
 sun, I am reminded of a curious little incident 
 of which I was once a spectator. In a big manu- 
 facturing town, I wandered into a hall in which 
 a lecture was being given on the evidence for 
 God. A young minister had been piling up 
 statements, all quite good and true as I thought, 
 and was now summing up preparatory to sit- 
 ting down. As soon as he did so a workman in 
 the hall jumped to his feet, and dashed one fist 
 into the other. " It's all a lie, mister," he said, 
 "and I'll offer ye the best proof one man can 
 give another. I deny God. But if there is a 
 living God, let Him strike me dead this 
 minute!" 
 
 He flashed his hand out dramatically, and so 
 stood. It was, maybe, cheap, but it was effect- 
 ive. A dead silence fell, and a woman near me 
 shuddered. I wondered what the platform 
 would do. But we had not long to wait, for the 
 young minister got up easily and burst into a 
 hearty laugh. 
 
 It sounded very curiously in that silent hall, 
 and the workman flushed scarlet. He was about 
 to burst into angry speech, but the minister 
 stopped him and said much as follows : 
 
 "I was trimming my rose-trees the other day, 
 when a green-fly on a twig astounded me. It 
 got up on its hind legs and said, in the most 
 curious falsetto voice you ever heard, ' You 're 
 not a man ! I can't see you, and I don't believe 
 the green-fly when they say; that it is Man that 
 
84 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 sometimes kills us in such quantities. Do you 
 hear? I hope you do I don't believe in you! 
 Now, if you're a man, strike me dead this 
 minute ! 9 
 
 "Well, I was fairly taken aback. I thought 
 at first that I was dreaming, or that I had not 
 heard aright. Then I ran into the house and 
 got some sticks and some gauze, and covered 
 that twig carefully up without disturbing any- 
 thing, and went out to get some of my friends 
 to come and hear that green-fly. But they only 
 live a few hours, and when I got back he was 
 dead. I suppose he died very wise. I reckon 
 he told all the other green-fly that he had 
 proved he was right. There was no Man, for he 
 had not been stricken dead ! It fairly makes me 
 laugh now to think of that wretched green-fly! 
 
 4 'My friend, it is an insult to compare you 
 and the green-fly, man and God. The smallest 
 bacillus known is a monstrous giant in size and 
 wisdom in relation to a man compared with you 
 and God. Do you suppose that words such as 
 yours would affect God? I tell you honestly I 
 do not suppose He even hears you when you 
 speak so." 
 
 It was a smart answer, but, my dear, I cannot 
 say I like it. I think I would have put it differ- 
 ently. Suppose a father to be at play with his 
 little son, who is just getting strong enough to 
 love to hit out at his father, as boys will, and 
 who is beginning to think he is really strong. 
 
OF THE BEST IN LIFE 85 
 
 Suddenly the little fellow gets annoyed because 
 his father is such an immovable giant and won't 
 hit back. His father is obviously playing with 
 him, he thinks, and he is big now, and serious. 
 He's no baby now! So he loses his temper. "I 
 won't play with you, Dadda," he shouts; 
 "you're a nasty, horrid dadda! I don't believe 
 you can hit if you want to! Hit me, if you 
 dare ! Kill me, if you dare ! ' ' 
 
 What do you suppose the father would do? 
 If he were very wise and loving and kind, I 
 think he would say nothing, but just go away. 
 And towards the end of the day, when his little 
 son was tired with playing alone and very sorry 
 for himself, he would come back and pick him 
 up in his arms, and carry him off to bed, and 
 
 tuck him up, and kiss him. 
 
 # * # * * 
 
 That is my answer, dear. The best in life is 
 the search for God, and it does not matter so 
 very much if one hardly knows it or does not 
 find Him, for the best beyond will be His Kiss. 
 
10. OF AAEON AND GAMALIEL 
 
 OH dear! It's a strange old world! If I 
 can set down for you the thoughts that 
 have been filling my head while jogging 
 along all this day over a mountain trail all but 
 obliterated by the heavy rains (so that we had 
 to scramble like cats up rock surfaces with 
 practically no foothold, and make new ways 
 down for ourselves over slithery, wet grass), 
 you will see why I think it strange, and perhaps 
 why I find it to be so very, very old two 
 thousand very long years at least. But I am 
 not sure that I can give you the impression that 
 is left on my own mind. For it is only an 
 impression, however correct. A few words and 
 an attitude, that is all. Our conversation will 
 not strike you much unless you realise what lies 
 behind it. 
 
 We arrived last night at an out-station which 
 I had never visited before. There is a little 
 bare, rectangular Church school there and a 
 little stone hut, both sheltered under a great 
 cliff of rock and fronting a semicircular 
 meadow that runs down to a stream. The view 
 northwards is superb. The mountain chains 
 rise ever higher and higher, one running into 
 
 86 
 
OF AARON AND GAMALIEL 87 
 
 another, until the black, forbidding peaks 
 mingle in a great barrier upon which rest the 
 clouds. The people are said to live all around, 
 but most of them are hours away and quite out 
 of sight. The church and the hut themselves 
 seem to stand in a vast empty world. 
 
 The catechist had heard of my coming, and 
 had descended from his hidden hut on the top 
 of the cliffs behind to meet me. We were 
 strangers to each other, and he eager to see me 
 and eager for what I would do. After a few 
 greetings he plunged into the matter that lay 
 uppermost in his mind : ' ' Had the father come 
 to examine the school? 7 ' 
 
 I fear the father had not. I try to make a 
 point of talking to the children of each school 
 I visit about the religious teaching they are sup- 
 posed to get, but the business of examinations 
 in the three B's, which takes a couple of days or 
 more if one does all the standards properly, is 
 not much in my line, and ought not to be, I 
 think, in my province. Here it certainly was 
 not. It was not my school, and in any case I 
 had not the time. 
 
 "No," said I, "I have come to shrive the 
 people and say Mass." And at that he was 
 perplexed. He begged my pardon; he did not 
 understand. I repeated myself, and now used 
 the words "Holy Communion." 
 
 "Oh," said he, "the father means the Sup- 
 per ! ' ' And his eager face fell. Now I hardly 
 
88 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 meant the Supper. To me the Holy Com- 
 munion was instituted at the last Supper, but 
 was not that supper, and the Church early dis- 
 tinguished between the Love Feast, which was 
 the Supper, and the Eucharist, which was very 
 soon separated from it. All that I could hardly 
 explain just then, but his use of the word told 
 so much. Wherever you hear it, it means that 
 the people are Protestant rather than Catholic. 
 But I did my best. "No," I said. "I always 
 have my supper in the evening. But I mean 
 that I have come to hear the people's confes- 
 sions and give them the Sacrament of our 
 Lord's Body and Blood to-morrow morning." 
 
 At this he still looked a little perplexed, but 
 he said he was delighted, and he was sure the 
 people would be. "They must be early," I 
 said, "as I have far to ride afterwards." 
 
 "They will be in about one o'clock," he said. 
 "They live far . . ." 
 
 And at that my heart sank, for it told me a 
 great deal that the people should be accustomed 
 to come in at one o 'clock to meet their priest. 
 
 Well, I will cut all this short. As a matter of 
 fact, I could not stay till past midday or go to 
 the altar then, if I did, and I said mass the next 
 morning with only the three of us present, and 
 gave the teacher communion. He made what 
 he called a confession, but it was perfectly plain 
 that what he and I meant by confession were 
 two different things. And as to my mass well, 
 
OF AARON AND GAMALIEL 89 
 
 bless the dear fellow, he hardly knew what I 
 was about. Cyril knew, however, and somehow 
 I had great joy in pleading our Saviour's in- 
 finite merit for that place. 
 
 But, once in the saddle, thoughts crowded in 
 my inind. Up in these mountains, alone, among 
 people taught by me and used to me, one grows 
 singularly forgetful. I hardly realise, I think, 
 to what I have half unconsciously come and 
 what a cleavage exists between my work and 
 this of my brother whose out-station I am on. 
 These last three weeks, for example, as I re- 
 viewed them in my mind, I began to perceive 
 that I had done no more than administer the 
 Sacraments in place after place all five of 
 them that a priest can administer. I have been 
 riding around as a kind of vehicle for sacra- 
 mental grace. A priest who so regards his office 
 scarcely conceives himself at all. It is not my 
 words or my exhortations that matter, not my 
 wisdom in elaborating sermons, not my job to 
 examine schools. I come, in accordance with 
 the Divine plan, to allow the grace of God to 
 flow through me to these people. My main 
 endeavour is to keep the channel clean, and to 
 administer zealously and correctly. I mean I 
 just try to say my own prayers and to perform 
 my rites as they should be performed. That 
 takes nearly all the time. 
 
 Of course I do not mean that I have no regard 
 to the faith and understanding of the people. 
 
90 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 That would be absurd. But, you see, the whole 
 outlook is different. The people do not gather 
 to listen to my preaching; I do not sit down 
 overnight and make up ingenious and pious dis- 
 courses out of the Psalms, and so on. I used to 
 do that sort of thing. I would take a Psalm and 
 discover, for example, that the words " Deliver 
 me" occurred three times. " Deliver me" 
 "from temptation," point one; "deliver me M 
 "in the mire and clay," i.e., in sin, point two; 
 "deliver me" "in the time of trouble," point 
 three. On that, with introduction and conclu- 
 sion and with appropriate illustrations, I would 
 make up a discourse, and we would sing some 
 nice hymns. But now it is quite different. I 
 hear confessions, and try to deal with each soul 
 as it shows, however imperfectly, its need. I 
 say some simple, obvious mass, like that of the 
 Sacred Heart ; and, crucifix or picture in hand, 
 I point out briefly what is the wounding of His 
 Heart still, and how on this very rude altar in 
 a few minutes the same Christ will offer Him- 
 self as the still wounded Lamb for our salva- 
 tion. I hold up the crucifix between the seated 
 people and their God in Heaven. "So," I say, 
 "Christ on the Cross interposed between the 
 world and God's wrath on account of sin." 
 Then I lift the chalice and the paten. "Here," 
 I say, "will be in a moment that same Christ, 
 and I shall set Him again between you and that 
 same wrath. Not that God is wrath; He is 
 
OF AARON AND GAMALIEL 91 
 
 Love, such Love that His Victim, dispelling the 
 black clouds that gather on account of sin, will 
 once more enable you, the children of God, to 
 see the smiling of the Father's Face." 
 
 My dear, my pen has carried me away, but do 
 you see the difference? I remember once, as 
 a young man, speaking on an ingenious acrostic 
 (the kind of thing we loved) which ran: 
 
 "3 esus 
 E xactly 
 S uits 
 U s 
 S inners." 
 
 But do you know I always missed the true 
 explanation of that second word? He does 
 exactly suit us sinners, not because the remem- 
 brance of Him moves us to sorrow and good 
 resolutions, not because He did something 
 years ago in which we can mystically and retro- 
 spectively share, not as if we were all feelings 
 and souls. He exactly suits us because we are 
 men of minds and bodies to-day, and to-day He 
 will do for us visibly and invisibly, corporally 
 and spiritually, mind and body, in other words 
 sacramentally, what God has ordained as the 
 method of salvation. 
 
 Now here you have two totally distinct 
 religions, perfectly exemplified in my little visit 
 to that out-station. For the moment I am not 
 writing to you as to my view of the right or 
 
92 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 wrong of either, but I do want yon to see what 
 I mean. I came thinking myself a doctor of 
 spiritual medicines; I was expected as a 
 prophet. I came to do things ; I was expected 
 to say things. I came to work in virtue of my 
 office; I was expected by virtue of my colour 
 and education. I came to teach the Christians 
 incidentally, the heathen directly; I was ex- 
 pected by both classes in the same way. I came 
 as a son of Aaron, a Levite ; I was expected as 
 a son of Gamaliel, a Eabbi. 
 
 You might, of course, argue that I ought to 
 have come as both, and that it is the wisdom of 
 the Church of England to keep the mean be- 
 tween the two extremes; and in the latter 
 matter, at any rate, you would have been right. 
 That is precisely Anglicanism; that is un- 
 doubtedly what my brother of this missionary 
 diocese would say. But I feel that this attempt 
 on the part of the Anglican Church has been a 
 sorry failure, and that nowhere is that failure 
 better seen than in the Mission Field. Here, for 
 example, where tHe Anglican view has been 
 taught, the expectation of the prophet far out- 
 weighs the coming of the priest. And it always 
 tends to do so, because you cannot hold logically 
 and inevitably as a matter of fact that the two 
 offices are of equal importance. If you do, then 
 the sacramental side sinks, and finally sinks out 
 of sight. For if the Sacraments are but means 
 of grace, I doubt that they are such good means 
 
OF AARON AND GAMALIEL 93 
 
 as a fervent discourse or a wise examination of 
 children, especially if one has scarcely time to 
 do both. 
 
 But if the Sacraments are the actual means 
 of salvation, then the rest is but a secondary 
 help to them. If, for example, the Sacrament 
 of Penance Confession is the Divine plan for 
 the forgiveness of sins, then naturally, what- 
 ever I do, I must do that ; if, on the other hand, 
 it is only a help to some people who cannot quiet 
 their consciences, then probably a good sound 
 sermon on penitence and the recitation of the 
 General Confession will suit the case. What 
 doctor, attending a man with a broken limb, 
 would omit first and at once to set it? Neces- 
 sary as the giving of a good dietary would be, 
 that would be pretty useless without the other. 
 His directions would be secondary and supple- 
 mentary to his bone-setting. And the bone- 
 setting is to a Catholic the Sacrament, the 
 dietary the sermon. 
 
 Now underneath all this lies a much deeper 
 thing, I think, a thing which is the crux of the 
 whole matter. To me it seems that at the bot- 
 tom of Protestantism is Eationalism, and at the 
 bottom of Catholicism Revelation, however 
 much the one may be disguised, or the other 
 defended by reason. Eevelation involves the 
 hypothesis that God has shown something to 
 men which they would not have found out by 
 themselves, that He has committed something 
 
94 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 to them, given them a plan, arranged a scheme. 
 He has shown what He wants and how He 
 wants it that is the point; and the conclusion 
 is that this must be safeguarded, continued, and 
 obeyed. Man's primary duty will lie in these 
 three things, and however much he may justify 
 them by rational arguments, or apply in their 
 working rational intelligence, the fundamental 
 idea is that the scheme is not his and does not 
 need his defence. Thus to the Catholic Christ 
 came into the world and founded the Church 
 and the Sacramental System, that System safe- 
 guarded by that Church, to be a royal ladder 
 into heaven. Church and System are some- 
 thing bigger than ourselves and beyond our- 
 selves. There are rational arguments by which 
 they may be explained, justified, and all but 
 proved, but ultimately "The Word was made 
 Flesh," "Upon this Rock I will build My 
 Church ' ' these are superrational, super- 
 human, supernatural. It is ours to fall in with 
 them, to serve them. And the minister of such 
 a theory is not only of necessity a priest, but a 
 priest after a certain order. This Divine 
 scheme has its human side, and the human side, 
 because it is human, must be regular, ordered, 
 and in a sense, rigid. No man or body can as- 
 sume such a priesthood, and determine the man- 
 ner of its assumption. The stone has been laid; 
 the faith has been delivered ; the one cannot be 
 dug up and settled down in a new order, and 
 
OF AARON AND GAMALIEL 95 
 
 the other cannot be reconsidered and corrected. 
 Indeed, it is of the essence of things that if the 
 faith needs correction, then the faith has failed. 
 Now, Protestantism, although most of its sects 
 would claim some such supernatural basis, has, 
 in point of fact, relaid the stone and reconsidered 
 the faith. Of course each sect believes that it 
 has relaid the stone according to the since mis- 
 placed original, and corrected the faith back to 
 its original purity, but the very fact that such 
 relaying and correcting have been carries with 
 it the assumption of Eationalism. Some- 
 body some man judged that there had been a 
 mistake, and that something else was intended. 
 There are about 300 different Protestant sects ; 
 that is, there are about 300 judgments correct- 
 ing what has come to be back to what it is 
 judged to have been. And the inevitable fol- 
 lows. Luther judged that the original was not 
 what he saw the Church of his day to be, but 
 after another model ; it is obviously open to the 
 sons of Luther to judge that he was mistaken. 
 They have so judged, as likewise have the sons 
 of Calvin, Wesley, Spurgeon, Fox, Cranmer, 
 and a host more of their spiritual fathers. In 
 fact, this work of judging has become the 
 primary work of a Christian. So Luther said, 
 "It belongs to every Christian to know and to 
 judge for himself of doctrine. " Thus Eation- 
 alism, the application of human reason and 
 knowledge, modifies what is alleged to be the 
 
96 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 original deposit. And since admittedly human 
 knowledge is growing, it stands to reason that 
 the dogmas of religion are in a state of flux. In 
 a word, there are no dogmas, which is, indeed, 
 the pronouncement of modern reasonable 
 Protestants. And in the Mission Field, how- 
 ever much with child races we have to be 
 authoritative, our end is that they shall come to 
 think for themselves, and determine for them- 
 selves, while our plan of campaign will tend to 
 be moral exhortation far more than dogmatic 
 ministrations of rites and ceremonies. 
 
 Of course Catholicism itself may be simply 
 the result of the rationalism of St. Paul, as the 
 German critics would have us believe, or the 
 result of the rationalism of Greek philosophers 
 in the first four centuries, as Mr. H. G. Wells 
 insists. But even so, the Catholic is essentially 
 a person who does not rationalise, and he has 
 always done his best not to do so. To-day he 
 acts still as if such rationalisation was contrary 
 to the nature of things, and hence the conduct 
 of the Catholic priest, as chiefly an adminis- 
 trator of sacred rites, in the Mission Field. 
 Catholicism is essentially different from 
 Protestantism because of this point of view. 
 After all, the Catholic attitude has passed into a 
 proverb: "Kome changes not." Driven to ex- 
 plain the difference between Peter and Pius, a 
 Newman urges development, growth. Driven 
 to defend the insinuation that non-rational be- 
 
OF AARON AND GAMALIEL 97 
 
 ings ought to be in a lunatic asylum, a Benson 
 urges that the rational proofs of Faith are not 
 so much non-rational as supernatural. But, 
 either way or any way, the stubborn Catholic 
 will not admit that his religion is of human de- 
 vising, and in that very refusal, be it originally 
 right or wrong, he is involved in the con- 
 sequences of the acceptance of Bevelation. He 
 is chained to the Apostolic Succession, and his 
 religion is the Sacramental System. 
 
 The Church of England attempted, it seems 
 to me, to run with the hare and hunt with the 
 hounds. The Eeformation Anglican Fathers 
 rationalised about the seven Sacraments, and 
 decided that two only were of Christ's revela- 
 tion and thus "generally necessary for salva- 
 tion.' 7 They rationalised about Episcopacy, 
 and decided that the Pope was of human origin, 
 but Prelacy of Divine. Across the Border their 
 brethren rationalised a bit more, and made 
 Prelacy human and the Presbyter Divine. And 
 across the Border back again the Puritans 
 rationalised that no ministry was Divine at all. 
 One and all they were rationalists. 
 
 Incidentally there is no greater rationalist 
 than the non-Catholic, who maintains that the 
 words of the sixteenth century Bible are 
 verbally and infallibly the revelation of God. 
 He is the rational son of Luther. That re- 
 former, declining to believe that the Church was 
 the pillar and ground of the truth, appealed to 
 
98 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 the Bible or to such books of the Catholic Bible 
 as he himself selected ; but he did not rationalise 
 much about the nature of his new authority. 
 His sons, driven to defend themselves, evolved 
 a theory of verbal inspiration which was 
 neither his nor the Church's, and which, of all 
 theories, is the least possible to-day. Yet such 
 rationalists are they that now the shrinking 
 relic is driven to attempting to prove by ingen- 
 ious twistings that Moses anticipated Newton 
 and that the author of Genesis was a scientific 
 historian, and then demands the acceptance of 
 irrational dogmas upon the authority of a few 
 specially selected and privately explained texts. 
 
 This is a dull letter. Will you even read it, I 
 wonder? Forgive me. Up and down the hills, 
 plodding along at not much more than a foot- 
 pace, I have been thinking it all through again 
 this morning, and it will out. That poor little 
 catechist on the out-station, how surprised he 
 would be if he knew he and his supper ! But 
 it does so matter to me. Is it a supper, or is it 
 the mass? who shall say? If there be no one to 
 say, and if I have to go back to musty books 
 and bewildering histories to find out, I shall 
 cast in my vote for the supper quickly enough. 
 
 But it seems to me that there is one arresting, 
 amazing, bewildering, imperious Personality 
 who dares to speak in this world of little men, 
 a Personality that moves with a strange 
 secrecy, and yet may be found easily enough on 
 
OF AARON AND GAMALIEL 99 
 
 every highway and in every back lane of the 
 world, a Personality as old as the Seven Hills 
 and yet so radiantly young. If you have not 
 come across this mysterious, wonderful Being, 
 it is almost useless for me to write to you, and 
 I do not suppose Almighty God will hold you to 
 blame. Yet it seems to me that I have been 
 called aside into the garden and have been 
 shown wonderful things, incredible though it 
 seems to me that I should have been called at 
 all, wonderful things, amazing things, super- 
 natural things, things of beauty beyond the 
 glory of sun, moon, and stars, things of wisdom, 
 which I can only see to be very wise, tender 
 things of which I cannot speak even to you. 
 And it is no good I cannot resist the conclu- 
 sion. " Never man spoke as this Man." "He 
 hath done all things well." "He maketh the 
 deaf to hear and the dumb to speak." "He 
 bindeth up the broken-hearted, and He giveth 
 medicine to heal their sicknesses." Such sen- 
 tences were written of the Christ, and such are 
 true again to-day. But I cannot understand it ; 
 this wisdom is beyond me, this medicine a 
 bitter thing. Yet to whom else shall we go? 
 Here, at least, are words of eternal life. 
 
11. OF A VILLAGE UNDER THE MOON 
 
 THEY always say there is no loneliness 
 like that of a stranger in a big European 
 city in which he knows no one, but that 
 entirely depends on the money in his pocket. If 
 he has plenty, he need not be lonely for long. 
 I have been in a good few big European cities 
 without a friend, and even without much money, 
 but I have never felt really lonely at least, not 
 more lonely than I wanted to feel and rather 
 enjoyed. The world is, as a matter of fact, 
 superficially very friendly. The great axiom 
 that man is a social animal lies deep down in 
 most men, and a cheerful person can make 
 acquaintances in an hotel, or a bar, or a church, 
 or the street as easily as possible. And quite 
 often he can make friends, and the best of 
 friends, too, the friends that chance has thrown 
 his way, and not the friends who have sought 
 him out because of what his profession may be 
 or his social rank or his circumstances. Even 
 more, they may be the sort of friends one would 
 never make in any other way, and a man may 
 come to see God in the soul of a street-girl, or 
 humanity in the heart of a capitalist, if he is all 
 by himself in a city. 
 
 100 
 
OF A VILLAGE UNDER .TtfF, MOON i'ci 
 
 No, there are many worse lonelinesses than 
 this, and there is one I am always experiencing 
 on trek and from which I cannot get away. Do 
 you know the cheerfulness of an African village 
 on a fine night of a full moon? The huts lie 
 scattered on the hillside without order, and all 
 opening eastwards. Each household has two 
 or three such huts, often two at least knit up by 
 the big semicircular reed-fence called the 
 lelapa, and the little paths thread in and out of 
 the big boulders between each group. The chief 
 will have his big cattle-kraal of piled stones 
 below his collection of huts, and most likely 
 there will be several more smaller ones up the 
 hillside. The sun has set, then ; the girls have 
 come back with the water, and the boys from the 
 milking with the brown jars of milk, for you 
 know no woman may milk, or even enter the 
 cattle-kraal when the cattle are there, on the 
 Berg. "Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his 
 mother's milk," says the Old Testament, a 
 piece of sympathetic magic, according to Pro- 
 fessor Frazer, which has its like in our modern 
 African custom. Anyway the cattle are kraaled, 
 and within the reed fences the cheerful dung- 
 fires are lit. Cyril has brought me my porridge, 
 and it is not yet time for prayers. I wander 
 out under the moon, and I feel terribly, awfully 
 alone. 
 
 The air is full of little noises. The cows in 
 the kraal are licking their calves, and all to- 
 
102 PILGRIM PAPERS * 
 
 gether chew the cud with a slow sound of con- 
 tentment. There is cheerful loud talk from the 
 chief's house, and the laugh of a woman away 
 up on the hill in a far group of huts. A band of 
 children, the moon shining on their bodies, run 
 out of the shadows and chase each other, then 
 dive in at the low reed doors and cuddle up to- 
 gether round the boiling pot on the fire. You 
 can hear their childish talk inside, but if you are 
 I, you do not understand most of it, any more 
 than I can understand what the men are saying 
 to Cyril in the dark yonder, although I can 
 catch a clear question or reply of his occasion- 
 ally. The village Sesuto on such nights is 
 abbreviated, colloquial, friendly. It is the 
 chaffing talk of an inn-parlour at home, the 
 mysterious, jovial slang of a cheerful club. I 
 can get along on the lines of the grammar or 
 prayer book, but neither (the sorrow of it!) 
 are really human lines. 
 
 I have told you of times and villages in which 
 I have sat friendly by a fire or talked with chil- 
 dren, but I realise to-night how rare they are. 
 True, the children playing in the moonlight are 
 not afraid of me, and they will smile if I go 
 near, but I am the mysterious white stranger, 
 and the play will drift off if I move. Heathen 
 men round the fire will lapse into silence if I 
 come up, or, more educated, ask me questions 
 that often veil a half -felt racial hostility; Chris- 
 tians will speak cautiously, fearful lest they 
 
OF A VILLAGE UNDER THE MOON 103 
 
 give their own folk away, never forgetful that I 
 am white and a priest. Nine nights out of ten, 
 in most villages anyway, I have no friend. 
 
 Two things fight against me: my colour and 
 my office. Mr. Cripps has a yarn of a white 
 man who had to take to Mashona dress and 
 customs to avoid the law, and I often wish I 
 could do something like that. I would so like to 
 get inside my people. Possibly I never should ; 
 possibly, if I did, I should wish I had not. Pos- 
 sibly I might even come to envy Mr. Cripps ' 
 hero's fate of the mistaken grains of white 
 powder and the lonely little krantz. But I wish 
 I could try. 
 
 The priest, too I wonder if you realise how 
 often he is terribly alone. I do not know which 
 is the worse, to be treated by others as if one 
 were one among them or to be treated plainly 
 as something different. If the first, one is con- 
 tinually being stabbed by the different outlooks 
 and values of men in the world, and one is 
 always half longing, half dreading, to let one- 
 self go ; if the second, oh, my dear, but that bur- 
 den is so hard to bear! Speaking quite truly 
 and reverently, Jesus must have felt it so. 
 Never was there lonely man as He. God-Man, 
 on earth what isolation! We priests are the 
 only ones who can know. 
 
 But even this is not all in my case. To-night 
 I climbed up above the village and perched my- 
 self on a big stone to see it all. And I saw so 
 
104 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 much more than the village. Here am I, neither 
 a good Anglican nor a recognised Catholic, the 
 suspect of my own communion and the outcast 
 of the other. It does so hurt to feel that there 
 is no place in what ought to be home for me. I 
 know I seem to many of my brethren and 
 superiors a disloyal, wilful, disobedient son, so 
 I do not blame them ; besides, if the truth must 
 out, they seem to me singularly fussy, cob- 
 webby, blind, and, to be quite honest, dull, and, 
 indeed, they would be incredibly foolish if they 
 were not glad that I am on the Berg, more or 
 less out of harm's way, and certainly buried. 
 But, despite all mutual understanding, the fact 
 remains. It is terribly lonely, dear, to know 
 oneself in a communion but not of it, and to feel 
 that work done is work that the leaders will 
 prefer not to own. This is not a grumble, mark 
 you. I do not honestly think that it has made 
 any difference. But there it is, and very lonely 
 on the Berg. 
 
 It is in the evenings such as this that I feel it 
 most. By day, riding along, I hardly even mind 
 not having a friend to talk to, there is so much 
 to see and think about. Besides, I think I am 
 growing accustomed to not having friends. 
 " There is no friend for the stranger save the 
 stranger " that is a Eussian saying of great 
 beauty. Still I have a great number of friendly 
 acquaintances, more than most people, perhaps, 
 for I always seem to make such easily, and 
 
OF A VILLAGE UNDER THE MOON 105 
 
 always did. But friends are different, and they 
 grow fewer. I remember a priest in Africa, a 
 tall, spare, kindly man who was looking in the 
 face a slow death from disease, talking once to 
 me and saying that he found, as one grew older, 
 that one came to rely less and less on friends. 
 A man made friends, and thought he had made 
 them for his life; and then one married, and 
 another got into some other environment, and 
 slowly, imperceptibly, without either wishing it, 
 friendship faded away. (I shall never forget 
 that he said it quite bravely, with a smile.) Is 
 that not extraordinarily true! Of course there 
 are people whom one likes immensely and with 
 whom it is possible really to renew a friendship 
 from time to time, but the long and the short of 
 it is that it seems to me one grows to realise the 
 inevitableness of being alone. We began alone, 
 and we certainly end alone, but I think one 
 comes to feel more and more how true it is that 
 nobody really understands, nobody really sym- 
 pathises, and that nobody can. 
 
 The moulding years ought to make one more 
 indifferent to this, I think, because they ought 
 to make one stronger, and fashion one's mind 
 to resolute thinking, and to decisions which one 
 feels are right for oneself at all events. At 
 school and college, and for some years after, 
 one wonders continually how others will criti- 
 cise, and one strives to gain a place to justify 
 oneself. A man, at any rate, meeting the con- 
 
106 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 flict of ideas in religion and social life, is 
 anxious about them, and wants continually to 
 know what other people think. He wants, too, 
 to share his conclusions, to strengthen himself 
 by making friends with whom he can breast the 
 current of life. But as the years go by he gets 
 not so much disappointed, but less interested. 
 He begins to feel that others cannot help over- 
 much, and that it does not much matter if they 
 do not. He himself for himself must looK up 
 into the eyes of God, and it is no use, then, 
 looking deprecatingly round to see what one's 
 friends are doing. 
 
 Even love looks to me (at least to-night) the 
 last and most desperate attempt to escape our 
 inevitable loneliness. The man and the woman 
 look into each other's eyes, and they think they 
 see understanding and union for all time. They 
 always say how they would like to get right 
 away by themselves and just live for each 
 other all the time. Surely every one in love has 
 felt that. In heroic novels the man wants his 
 girl to help him to do heroic deeds, and so on, 
 but only in novels, I think. He never really 
 wants that, for when he is in love he does not 
 care two straws about heroic deeds. Nature is 
 not thinking of heroic deeds, and she is too 
 strong for both of them. They may come back, 
 as it were, and possibly hand to hand, to the 
 conquest of life, but at the moment all they 
 want is to forget the world in each other. 
 
OF A VILLAGE UNDER THE MOON 107 
 
 Of course I may be wrong, but I think the 
 sense of alliance is chiefly an illusion. It is not 
 merely that the current of life tends to bring 
 different duties and influences in their way, but 
 deep down, when Nature is tired of them, hav- 
 ing fulfilled her purpose, they rub their eyes 
 and wake up as from a dream to find that each 
 has a separate soul and a lonely one. Possibly 
 those people who seem to be able to forget that 
 they have a soul at all never feel this, but I do 
 not think there are many such. 
 
 If this is so, what do you suppose one ought 
 to do? The Berg teaches, I think, especially in 
 a native village by night. The great, lonely 
 hills, the silent, lonely stars, the dumb, uncom- 
 plaining earth, all speak. They tell you just to 
 face the facts, and not complain. They tell you 
 not to hedge and fight against the truth, but to 
 go out and on and to take what comes of friend- 
 ship and of love gladly, but undeceived. There 
 is no final shelter for one's naked soul. Our 
 mother's skirts sheltered us when we were 
 kiddies, but only for a while. So it is with 
 everything and every one, until one comes at 
 last to see that one may hide in God, but never 
 from Him. 
 
12. OF THE LOVE OF GOD 
 
 MY dear, a very curious and tender little 
 affair occurred this morning, on which 
 I have been meditating all day. There 
 is nothing in it, really, or I suppose not, and yet 
 a mystic would certainly feel otherwise. How 
 I wish one knew if Almighty God really plots 
 these things ! The Gospel is not a sure guide, 
 for if we are told that not a sparrow falls to the 
 ground without our Father, the inference cer- 
 tainly is that the fall of the Tower of Siloam 
 was not designed. Yet nothing can occur out- 
 side His Will, and I suppose all things are but 
 shadows of reality. So it may be that I saw 
 what I was meant to see, and that I understand 
 what I was meant to understand. At any rate, 
 this was the way of it. 
 
 We had been riding, Cyril and I, for the 
 whole morning along the high path that leads to 
 the north. It is a hot, stony, trying road, at a 
 level of some nine thousand feet, and the 
 ground is barer there than any for miles 
 around. There is a view, it is true, a view to 
 the right of the border peaks, across a wide, 
 hard valley, and to the left a tumbled mass of 
 mountains that melt into the horizon. The sky 
 
 108 
 
OF THE LOVE OF GOD 109 
 
 is truly a huge inverted bowl over all. Not a 
 cloud flecked it to-day, and I, with a slight touch 
 of fever, felt it to be brooding and terrible. I 
 have ridden this path and sung along it as I 
 went, deeming the heavens a perfect parable of 
 the Love of God, so immense, eternal, and all 
 covering. I have felt how one cannot escape 
 from the Love of God, or change it, and how, 
 no matter what one does beneath, still beyond 
 the imagination, north, south, east, and west, 
 God is Love. The very clouds, earth-born 
 things, are no part of that infinite blue space 
 where the light of countless suns passes eter- 
 nally on swift errands of life. 
 
 But it was all otherwise to-day. I was very 
 tired and very hot, and my head ached. The 
 ponies seemed to travel so slowly, and yet it 
 was impossible to speed them up. I made rest- 
 less, irritated efforts, and then the great scorch- 
 ing vault overwhelmed me, and I held the reins 
 in loose fingers and rode in growing pain. I 
 thought the sky was still like God, but to-day 
 He was inexorable and pitiless, as He so often 
 seems. But is He ever? 
 
 At any rate, towards midday we reached a 
 place where the road curved to the right to 
 avoid a sharp face of rock. It seemed to me 
 that to off-saddle there might offer a chance of 
 shade in some crevice of that cliff, and so I 
 called to Cyril, and dismounted. I staggered 
 along to the left over broken and falling 
 
110 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 ground, and found what I wanted, a small cave 
 that offered a refuge from the sun. In my 
 flask was a little lukewarm tea, so I had a drink 
 and lay down to sleep for half an hour if I 
 could. But I could not sleep for a long time. 
 I lay with closed eyes and aching head, and I 
 dare not tell you all I thought. Men are crea- 
 tures of mood universally, I suppose, but some 
 of us are worse than others. There are times 
 when I cannot see what end is served by my 
 existence, and when I am all one great revolt. 
 Yet how one dreads to die ! It is curious. One 
 may not fear the beyond; one may not shrink, 
 I think, from the passing; but one dreads to 
 leave this grim school with all the problems un- 
 solved, and the discipline not learned. It could 
 only mean worse on the other side, and maybe 
 the eternal loss of all our dreams. 
 
 Well, then, I suppose I dozed off. At any 
 rate, I woke up later feeling better, but thirsty ; 
 and sitting up to see if I could find a spring 
 somewhere, I saw what I had not somehow 
 noticed before. A few hundred yards away was 
 a break in the face of the cliff, and growing up 
 out of it, as often happens in the Berg, were 
 some wild poplars, whose shimmering leaves 
 just appeared above the rocks. I thought that 
 a spring might well be there, and I made for the 
 place, walking slowly in the heat. Skirting 
 some huge boulders, I could see at last up the 
 crevasse, and noticed at once that the place had 
 
OF THE LOVE OF GOD 111 
 
 been converted into a cattle kraal. The face of 
 the hill sloped over except where the split oc- 
 curred, and a low wall of stone had been built 
 out round it to enclose a sheltered spot. At one 
 corner the wall reached the cliff ; at the other it 
 stopped at the thick press of young poplars. 
 And there was a break in the middle of it for 
 the beasts to enter. 
 
 I moved forward to that break idly, for no 
 water could be immediately there, and there, 
 in the very door, stood stock-still with surprise. 
 Where the poplars grew right at the cliff's foot 
 sat a young native woman, and she had a baby 
 at her breast. Behind her, staring down at her, 
 was a native in a blanket, leaning on a stick, and 
 I could not see his face in the shadow; while in 
 front, with some half-dozen sheep of the kraal, 
 was a herd-boy, a wisp of rag about his middle, 
 squatting there on his hams, his back to me, and 
 a gourd of water in his hands. It was as if he 
 offered a gift. 
 
 None of us moved at all while the seconds 
 slipped by. I stood there in the sun, and 
 emotion flooded through me. Oh, I daresay it 
 was stupid beyond words, but it was so abso- 
 lutely a nativity. There was nothing missing, 
 nothing wrong, not even my hard, stubborn 
 heart and my bitter thoughts. In the moment 
 of my thought of God's aloofness, there had 
 been given me a vision of His humanity. 
 
 We hear so much in these days of the fashion- 
 
112 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 ing of God to human imagination. Onr thinkers 
 are always pushing Him farther and farther 
 away, till we are told that just as it was the 
 half-savage thought of Moses that conceived he 
 had seen God's "back parts/' so it is our still 
 anthropomorphic conceptions that allow us to 
 believe in the Incarnation and to speak of His 
 Face and Heart. You remember that Mr. Wells 
 offers us only a dim Veiled Being, or, on the 
 other hand, a God that is but half a God, since 
 He is no more powerful, no more sure of attain- 
 ment, than we ourselves. Mr. Wells says he 
 does not name two Gods, but one; only that 
 Veiled Being, too veiled for us to glimpse even 
 in the moments of our strongest vision, Whom 
 somehow our thought must create to fill a gap, 
 broods, despite our banishment of Him, like a 
 nightmare over all. It seems impossible that 
 He shall have nothing to say. But even if He 
 be Love, what sort of love will His be? Not a 
 human love, at any rate. His thought must be 
 in another category to ours, and His love as 
 well, if He could remain veiled and watch the 
 passion of the centuries. 
 
 Is this human love in God for which we crave. 
 You know what I mean? A dog may love you, 
 and you may love a dog, but what a poor busi- 
 ness it is ! It is not merely that he is made dif- 
 ferently from us, and cannot share our joys 
 and sorrows with real understanding. There is 
 something much deeper that is missing : the call 
 
OF THE LOVE OF GOD 113 
 
 of human heart to heart, the yearning for rest 
 the one in the other, that terrible longing for a 
 refuge and completion in the other's love that 
 belongs, so far as we know, only to human 
 hearts. 
 
 Suppose God has that! Suppose He really 
 understands just what we feel, not understand- 
 ing as you might conceive Allah to understand, 
 by an effort of His omniscience, but under- 
 standing because His Heart throbs as ours 
 throb ! How wonderful it would be ! He would 
 know how terrible life is if such love be 
 thwarted, how resistless such love is in its de- 
 mands. He would surely only stretch His hands 
 out in fatherly tenderness when we fled together 
 for refuge to Him. 
 
 I wonder what He wants. I wonder if He 
 wants us to love Him as we love one another. 
 Do you know, I think not quite that, but I think 
 that what He wants is just exactly what I have 
 said, that we should love and yet have room for 
 Him, and together take our love to Him, as our 
 best treasure, that He may joy in it. I think 
 He will be glad one day if we come saying: "0 
 Father, even our brethren forgot what we felt, 
 but we know that You remember. Neither 
 heaven nor hell will shelter us, and so we come 
 to You . . ." 
 
 That might be the meaning of Bethlehem, and 
 of the rest of that wonderful life, not merely 
 the working out of a purpose of salvation, but 
 
114 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 an exhibition of His secret mind. It is as if He 
 had smiled and said: "They will never guess 
 what I am unless I show them. Let Me cradle 
 at a mother 's breast, let Me go up to a marriage 
 feast, let Me weep at the tomb of a brother, let 
 Me be kissed by lips of sin, let My Name among 
 archangels and men be a simple baby name, and 
 they will know by that that My eyes are tender 
 when two lovers kiss . . ." 
 
 The old man stirred in the shadows, and the 
 herd-boy moved easily to his feet. The girl 
 looked up, and I caught her eyes. God and I 
 were glad. 
 
13. l OF THE TOUCHING OF THE WORLD 
 INTANGIBLE 
 
 YOU have been calling to me all day, 
 calling as really, it has seemed to me, as 
 if it were your voice, and not that of the 
 herd-boys that echoed from time to time in the 
 valley through which we rode. I have heard 
 you persistently above the song of the stream, 
 above the colours of the flowers, even above the 
 depth of the blue sky and the shining of the sun. 
 More than that, I think you have been calling 
 in and through them, though of that I am not 
 certain. If they are what I suspect, I should 
 be sure, but since I cannot tell what they are, I 
 am only certain of your voice. 
 
 I wonder very much if you know that you 
 have been calling and that I have been hearing 
 but though I wonder, I have not the least desire 
 to prove it in the way that some seem to wish. 
 That seems to me an idle thing. It would, in- 
 deed, be to me almost sacrilegious if I were to 
 try to find out how far you knew what you 
 were about, how far purposeful; it is enough 
 that your soul has been wistful for me to-day, 
 and I know it. Why, like Thomas, should I 
 want to thrust my hands into the print of the 
 
 115 
 
116 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 nails? That there have been wounds, and that 
 the wounds endure, is far more real to me than 
 any print of them. 
 
 They say that the world is crazy after Spirit- 
 ualism in these days, and even up here on the 
 Berg echoes of this newest unrest reach us. The 
 subject is, of course, intensely interesting in its 
 own way, but I want to write it down for you 
 that I have to make a big effort to get the 
 modern Spiritualists' point of view, though I 
 could easily have been a necromancer in the 
 days of the Old Testament ! I suppose the great 
 explanation is that vast numbers of modern 
 Europeans grow up without a religion, or with 
 the merest shreds of a religion, and these shreds 
 based on no sure foundation at all. Then comes 
 a shock, like the losses of relations and friends 
 in the War, and people find they have nothing 
 on which to rest. But those of us who have a 
 religion like the Catholic Faith simply do not 
 want Spiritualism. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 
 accuses the " clergy of the Churches/' I see, 
 of belittling or neglecting his great discoveries, 
 but the clergy of the Catholic Faith have been 
 teaching the principal tenets of Spiritualism all 
 the centuries of the Christian Era. Sir Arthur 
 Conan Doyle must, I suppose, being an educated 
 man, have made some inquiries concerning the 
 Catholic Eeligion, but he cannot know the 
 Catholic Faith. If, as a medical man, he had 
 gone to Lourdes instead of to clairvoyants, he 
 
TOUCHING OF THE WORLD INTANGIBLE 117 
 
 would have found stories the equal of any of 
 his as evidence of survival and of the after-life. 
 The records of the Saints, down to those of this 
 century, offer evidence as well authenticated as 
 and far more reasonable than the records of 
 Spiritualism. And then there is our Lord, 
 Whom we know to be living. 
 
 One wonders what will happen in this 
 strangely mixed age. Possibly, one of these 
 days, the popular monthlies and a man or two 
 who can win the attention of their editors and 
 their readers will discover the Catholic Eeligion. 
 Meantime the world, having laughed to scorn 
 fifty years ago the "materialism" of St. John 
 and the New Testament generally, is eagerly 
 inquiring of what material the spirits build 
 their houses in "Summerland," and rejoicing 
 in the fact that one may obtain there even 
 whisky and cigars. 
 
 It seems to me, then, that a Catholic may take 
 an extreme interest in psychology, and study 
 it; may investigate eagerly supernatural occur- 
 rences and seek to co-ordinate the laws that 
 govern them; and may well walk through this 
 world with his spiritual eyes and ears open; 
 Indeed I marvel that he can do otherwise. 
 Since we know well enough that man "sur- 
 vives"; that he passes into fuller life in the 
 great enveloping spiritual world; that that 
 world has frequent communication with this; 
 that there are established avenues by which one 
 
118 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 may come to the threshold and pass over; and 
 that we have to hand a great Divine machinery 
 for the exchange of influence between that world 
 and this, this world and that since we know all 
 these things, how can we fail to make use of 
 them? But of what use to us are these ancient 
 methods that the Spiritualists are dragging once 
 more into the light of day and advertising as if 
 they were new things? It is not necessary that 
 a table should rap in order that I may learn that 
 Sister Teresa, the Little Flower, who died the 
 other day, is actively engaged from that other 
 sphere in assisting us, and I do not need auto- 
 matic writing to assure me that my friends are 
 in a spiritual sphere of progression and purga- 
 tion and would be helped by my prayers. There 
 is more evidence of that to be found in the 
 stories of the Saints and of the Church than 
 there is for the battle of Waterloo. 
 
 This modern Spiritism, then, leaves me 
 curiously cold for all that I am intensely in- 
 terested in the subject with which it deals. To 
 me, you see, it goes to work so strangely, and 
 it almost makes one smile to be greeted by inch- 
 high headlines in the Press which read very 
 much as if they were such statements as these : 
 
 Great Pronouncement by Famous Scientist: 
 
 There is a SUN in the SKY! 
 
 Do not fail to see the sensational article in this number: 
 
 How I Discovered that DAY follows NIGHT ! ! 
 
 Revolutionary Experiments by great Naturalist: 
 
 CATERPILLARS Develop into BUTTERFLIES!!! 
 
TOUCHING OF THE WORLD INTANGIBLE 119 
 
 One smiles, I say. I suppose one would smile 
 anywhere, but especially on the Berg. 
 
 It is the grandeur, maybe, and the solitude; 
 or it may be the nearness of the sky; or it may 
 be that one is thrust out here, as it were, to catch 
 the whispers of that world about us; or it may 
 be that mountain tops are, after all, the scenes 
 of angel visits and of the manifestations of God. 
 Anyhow the half of the world that is crazy on 
 Spiritism cannot altogether laugh at Horeb and 
 Sinai and Olivet any longer. At any rate, I 
 have found the veil more thin than ever on the 
 face of the Berg. 
 
 I could write you stories if I liked, but I do 
 not propose at length to do so. There is just 
 one, however, that is in my mind (because I 
 passed the place again to-day) which I would 
 like to mention for a certain reason. It might 
 easily be worked up into a tale for a magazine, 
 but I shrink from that because somehow (for- 
 give me if this is very silly) it would seem to 
 me to trade on the poor souls whose secret has 
 been for a moment or two shown to me. The 
 tale-telling would be like the exhibition of a 
 cripple or, still more, as if one were to earn a 
 guinea or two by working up the story of some 
 simple tragic love that had been confided to 
 one. 
 
 But there is a place here, on the Berg, very 
 lonely and remote, to which my boy and I came 
 one dying evening in late autumn, having 
 
120 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 travelled far, and made a hasty camp. We had 
 pushed on to cover the ground on the homeward 
 trail, and there was hardly light to do more 
 than espy a fountain and gather some bushes 
 and roots for fuel ere the dark fell. The kettle 
 boiled, and, our food eaten, we rolled in blankets 
 and tried to sleep. The boy went off easily, but 
 I could not. I lay first on one side and then 
 on the other; I stared at the stars; I resolutely 
 turned my face to the opposite hillside each 
 in turn, but all no good. There was a faint moon 
 and no wind. The night was very still. 
 
 The first indication of anything unusual that 
 I saw was a shadow between myself and the 
 hillside. I regarded it intently, and saw that 
 it was a man. He passed along in the faint 
 moonlight and entered what I saw in the 
 moment of his entering to be a hut. You might 
 suppose that I should have been curious or 
 frightened; but I was neither, only interested. 
 And I grew more interested when I saw more 
 huts, more figures, and even I am not romanc- 
 ing to you, dear, and I certainly was not dream- 
 ing dogs. I think it was at that that I began 
 to puzzle if we had not, perchance, missed seeing 
 the village when we encamped in the late even- 
 ing, and I rolled over and sat up in the blankets 
 to ask my boy. He was apparently asleep still, 
 for he was not moving, but covered up entirely, 
 as a native sleeps, and I leaned over to waken 
 him. But just then I was arrested by a figure 
 
TOUCHING OF THE WORLD INTANGIBLE 121 
 
 coining towards me from the opposite slope of 
 the valley. It was that of a man, quite distinct 
 to see, naked except for a loin-cloth, and carry- 
 ing spears. He was staring straight in front 
 of him and running hard. I knew that he was 
 shouting as well, though I cannot tell you how 
 I knew, for I am not sure that I heard with 
 my ears. The sight of him held me. It was 
 all over in a few seconds after that, for he was 
 coming swiftly nearer, and I was right in his 
 path, and a terror began to fall on me as I 
 realised it. Then, when he was only a few yards 
 away, the moon shone for a moment more 
 clearly; I saw what I took to be a great gash 
 in his shoulder and breast; I cried out some- 
 thing and gripped my boy. And as I did so 
 there was nothing, and when I turned and 
 looked towards the village, there was nothing 
 there, either. 
 
 My boy awoke slowly, slowly enough to en- 
 able me to get over any fear I had and to put 
 him off with a question or two on other subjects. 
 After a while, too, I slept, and did not wake till 
 dawn, nor did I dream. But in the morning 
 light I walked to that hillside and poked around, 
 and then called the boy. "Yes, Father," he said 
 after examination, "there have been huts here, I 
 should say, and they have been burned down 
 see this stone, and that but a long time 
 ago. . . ." 
 
 When I read what Rupert Brooke says of the 
 
122 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 empty, spiritless Kockies, I thought of that 
 night, and I have thought of it again and again 
 since. There have been other things, too, up 
 here, but my point is that, whenever I think of 
 such happenings, they seem to me to be of less 
 significance than the consciousness of you that 
 I had to-day. It is a small wonder that we 
 sometimes, some of us, see the shadows of what 
 has been, either the shadows cast by the mind of 
 our sub-conscious self or the objective shadows 
 of that real spiritual world thrown, for some 
 reason and for some moments, on the screen of 
 this but half -real, temporal world. Doubtless, 
 if we did not blind ourselves, we should see 
 much more. But the matter that seems to me 
 great is that one can be conscious of listening 
 just the other side of a curtain all but all the 
 time; that one can ride for a day and feel that 
 at any moment the visible might dissolve like 
 those old magic lantern exhibitions of our child- 
 hood and show another picture; and that spirit 
 can cry out to spirit so certainly across what 
 may seem gulfs to us now, but which shall 
 surely prove to be no more than a little space 
 across which two may lean and kiss. 
 
 So, my dear, have I heard you persistently 
 all day, above the song of the stream, above the 
 colours of the flowers, even above the depth of 
 the sky and the shining of the sun. Tour call- 
 ing made me restless at first, for I wanted more 
 of you than that, far more than I can say. And 
 
TOUCHING OF THE WORLD INTANGIBLE 123 
 
 I told you so, and lifted my face to yon, and 
 sent my message out; and I have peace to-night. 
 Perhaps you were asking definitely just for that, 
 and perhaps now you too are more content to 
 wait. 
 
14. OF THE TRUE RICHES 
 
 'T^HERE are certain verses in the Bible 
 which contain only half-truths, if, indeed, 
 they are truths at all, shocking as I sup- 
 pose it is to say so. Of all such verses that 
 I dislike one of the worst is, I think, a text 
 which finds a prominent place in what remains 
 of the religion of Englishmen, for most English 
 people are still at least buried by the Church. 
 "We brought nothing into this world, and it is 
 certain we can carry nothing out" there you 
 have it. It is just not true. For myself, I hate 
 the saying. 
 
 You wonder why, perhaps, I should think of 
 writing to you while up here on such a gloomy 
 subject, but, as in the case of so many other 
 things, this wonderful old Berg has so much to 
 say about it. The Berg has been preaching to 
 me all day long on the foolishness of the text, 
 and I rather like the sermon. So I want to pass 
 it on to you. 
 
 The Berg said, Erst of all, that of course 
 there was an elementary and superficial truth 
 about the words, and that no teacher could show 
 me that better than itself. We were passing 
 some tumbled piles of stone at the time, and they 
 were immediately offered me as a proof. For 
 
 124 
 
OF THE TRUE RICHES 125 
 
 several generations men and women had lived 
 there, lived busy, crowded lives in their own 
 way of love and hate and passion; had built 
 their houses of the grass and stone around; had 
 ploughed up their lands; had wrestled with 
 Nature and fought through snows and drought; 
 and then had passed as mysteriously as they 
 had come. Disease or War swept them off, or 
 maybe they only trekked away no one now 
 can say. A few years, and you had to look 
 closely to know that they had been there. The 
 face of the Berg was again as it had been. They 
 had brought nothing into this world, and they 
 took nothing out. 
 
 So I reasoned, like a silly fool, for it was not 
 true even of them. Those little babies of a 
 vanished past had brought with them the 
 heritage of a racial curse older than history, 
 each one bringing his share. Each had come 
 heavily handicapped to the race, so that they 
 had made no progress where others run fast and 
 far. No good angel, moulding their souls from 
 the treasures of God, had borne them into this 
 world, but into each embryo being had been 
 packed that which would inevitably dwarf their 
 intelligences, sell them to passion, and brand 
 them among men. Of Ham I know nothing, and 
 care less; I doubt he ever lived; but it might 
 well have been a sensualist such as he who sent 
 these so far from empty-handed to live their 
 day on the face of the Berg. 
 
126 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 Then do yon snppose that even they went 
 empty-handed out? I cannot. Their fifty years 
 would have been enough to burden them still 
 more with selfishness, ignorance, and the crav- 
 ing for animal passions. And none of that cargo 
 was jettisoned when, ship by ship, they sailed 
 out from their brief anchorage into the un- 
 known. What the Owner made of it all when 
 their bills of lading were given in, I cannot even 
 guess, but at least He could not have expected 
 much else. I know enough of primitive man 
 to know that. 
 
 On the other hand, there are such as Viola. 
 You remember what went to the making of 
 Viola: 
 
 "Spin, Queen Mary, a 
 Brown tress for Viola! 
 
 "Scoop, young Jesus, for her eyes, 
 Wood-browned pools of Paradise. 
 
 "Lave, Prince Jesus, a 
 Star in eyes of Viola ! 
 
 "Breathe, Regal Spirit, a 
 Flashing soul for Viola! 
 
 "Child-angels, from your wings 
 Fall the roseal hoverings 
 
 On the cheeks of Viola." 
 
 There was a rich loading for you! Just so 
 the greater part of our treasures of art, music, 
 
OF THE TRUE RICHES 127 
 
 literature, and beauty was brought to us. But 
 who loads this ship thus and that ship as those 
 others, who can say? Or why? And the pathos 
 of the contrast between Viola and any one of 
 those vanished dusky babies! 
 
 But speculation of that sort is rather useless, 
 and, after all, it need worry us very little. I 
 have met men who seemed to find it an in- 
 tolerable thing that any man should come into 
 this world rich with treasure, or cursed, but I 
 fail to see myself why they should feel so. God 
 is great and just. If He is also inscrutable, 
 what are we to complain? And maybe it is 
 better to enter burdened hopelessly and succumb 
 in the end, after a well-fought fight, than to 
 enter rich and squander the treasure. "How 
 hardly shall they that have riches enter the 
 Kingdom of Heaven/' Never, at any rate, was 
 truer text than that, and you will remember 
 that the servants were sent out into the high- 
 ways and hedges to bring in, not the rich, but 
 the blind and halt and maimed. And the Lord 
 of the feast doubtless sees to it that they have 
 healing salve for their wounds, and water in 
 which to wash the stains of travel, and newer, 
 cleaner, brighter robes than ever they wore here. 
 I have found it in my heart to envy them. 
 
 The other half of the question is enormously 
 more interesting the question of the treasures 
 we can gather on our journey and bear away 
 with us. The old Berg, needless to say, has no 
 
128 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 hesitation as to their nature, and it seems so 
 obvious here that one hardly likes to write it. 
 For instance, last night I stood and watched 
 the sun set over the great rift in the Berg that 
 makes the valley of the Orange river, and why, 
 I hardly know the beauty and peace of the 
 world made the tears come to my eyes and the 
 breath catch in my throat. It was so utterly 
 lovely and still oh, my dear, if only I could 
 tell you ! And then I thought to myself : < ' Sup- 
 pose, now, you were standing on a gold mine 
 you might be would the gain of the gold 
 mine be worth the treasure of that sunset?" 
 And the old Berg silently answered me, not 
 without the rather sarcastic smile of old age, 
 and I knew, indeed, it would not. For the gold 
 would never be mine, no, not though I found, 
 mined, exploited, revelled in it; I should needs 
 leave it all behind; but as for the gold of the 
 sunset, it is mine for ever. 
 
 They are fools who slave all their years for 
 an existence ; utter fools who live among bricks 
 and mortar all their days; fools, that is, unless 
 they have learned the secret of this new 
 Philosopher's Stone whereby even the dirt and 
 dinginess of a city suburb can be minted into 
 the eternal gold. For let us set it down, my 
 dear: it is possible to grow very wealthy even 
 in a slum, like some of the folk "Down our 
 Street/' It is possible, but it is very hard, and 
 I refuse to believe we humans were ever meant 
 
OF THE TRUE RICHES 129 
 
 to have to labour so for our gold. Why, here I 
 pick it up in handfuls every day; I even, God 
 forgive me, grow tired of picking it up; and 
 sometimes, if I dare write it, I know I even seek 
 to waste what I have acquired. And this eternal 
 treasure, that we can carry away with us, is not 
 easily lost. Easily won it is, but hardly lost. 
 Oh, the good God! 
 
 Yes, I do not doubt that Diogenes in his tub, 
 Simon Stylites on his pillar, the filthy old 
 anchorite who talked to Eichard Eaynal, and 
 many more like them, can go rich away when 
 their hour comes, and certainly many of them 
 have. But it is a vocation. One must be called 
 to it. The pity is that nine-tenths of the mod- 
 ern folk, who have to live their lives out all but 
 as much tied down, in fact, as any of these, have 
 not been called to it. They have been pushed 
 into it; that is all. They cannot get out, per- 
 haps, but for the most part they do not wish to 
 do so. And then they bring children into the 
 world, not happily naked, but all wrapped up in 
 their own old grave-clothes of mind, and their 
 children bring children, and God help us all. 
 Why should you and I have been delivered from 
 all that, I wonder? The insoluble question 
 again let us leave it. 
 
 The fact is that you and I are among the 
 millionaires. A man is not held to be conceited 
 if he proclaims that he can sign a cheque for a 
 million dollars, so why should it be conceit for 
 
130 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 you and me to say so of ourselves? I am, then, 
 becoming a millionaire. I have learnt to laugh 
 with joy at the antics of the world in a dozen 
 blades of grass. I have seen suns die and flame 
 again so often that honestly their glory is 
 rarely long out of my eyes, and I know, at least, 
 that it never will go for ever. I have heard the 
 morning stars sing for joy and the whole wide 
 earth take up the chorus so often that the re- 
 frain is ever in my ears. I have felt the tingle 
 of the cold, and the blaze of the sun, and the 
 blows of the wind, and the sting of the rain so 
 often that I know now that they are brethren 
 and Death their dear sister. And I have seen 
 God walk so often among the trees in the cool 
 of the day, and have met His angels so often on 
 their errands, that I know, wonderful though 
 it is, that He is Friend, and that whichever of 
 the angels He sends to me will be sent friendly- 
 wise. Oh, I am rich, I am very rich, my dear. 
 It is all quite true : there are fabulous riches on 
 the Face of the Berg. 
 
 And you you are growing rich, are you not? 
 You must be, for you have given so much away. 
 Eich as I am, I all but envy you your riches. 
 You will pass over with wealth so untold that 
 surely the trumpets on the other side will blow 
 as for the coming of a queen. I have watched 
 you grow rich, and I have marvelled at your 
 treasure. The sharpest thorns in all the Crown 
 were offered you, and you took them with a 
 
OF THE TRUE RICHES 131 
 
 smile, ana pressed them down so simply, but so 
 truly, that the very Offerer must have won- 
 dered to see you, and from each thorn has 
 sprung an eternal rose of such beauty that no 
 gold of earth can value them. The bitterest 
 drink filled the chalice offered you, and you 
 drank each drop so bravely that now no treas- 
 ure of rubies can exceed yours. Pearls? You 
 have wept them one by one into that safe 
 hiding-place where no thieves break through 
 nor steal, whither you shall go one day and find 
 them. 
 
 Poor old Job ! I hope he was only a mystery 
 play after all. He said some wonderful things, 
 and not for the world would I have missed 
 them, but, my faith, he was a poor old man! 
 Even at the end he counted his wealth in sheep, 
 and oxen, and asses, and wives, and children, 
 and houses, of which, indeed, he wrote truly 
 enough when he said he could not take them 
 away. Possibly he discovered, after all, that he 
 was richer on the other side than he thought ; he 
 ought to have been, considering the music God 
 sang in his ears. But if he was not only a mys- 
 tery play, and if he is really poor over there, 
 why, then, when we come together with the in- 
 finite riches we have gathered on earth and car- 
 ried over with us, we will seek him out, and bid 
 him share. 
 
15. OF THE SHOUTING OF THE SONS 
 OF GOD 
 
 EVEEY one writes of the sunsets, very few 
 of the dawns, I suppose because even 
 poets are not often up early enough to 
 see them. Occasionally sleeping on deck in the 
 Tropics, or rather trying to sleep, an early 
 morning whiff of air wakes a tourist, and he 
 sees; and still more rarely brave spirits climb 
 Alps before the light, and write home about it. 
 But we moderns see mostly the flaming sunsets, 
 even in smoky cities, for the sun in his dying 
 even glories in the smoke, and our tragedy em- 
 purples half the sky. 
 
 But on the Berg one may see the dawn very 
 often, for one goes early to bed on trek for lack 
 of anything better to do when the dark falls and 
 supper is over, and one rises early to trek as far 
 as possible before the heat. I wake nearly 
 always in that mystical half -hour when it is still 
 dark and yet one knows that the hours of dark 
 are numbered, and I lie in my blankets and 
 watch the sun rising more mornings than not. 
 May I write of it, then, and the more so because 
 commonly it is not in the least what one would 
 expect or the sort of spectacle that is written 
 about? 
 
 132 j 
 
SHOUTING OF THE SONS OF GOD 133 
 
 In the first place, you do not often see glories 
 of crimson and gold, or even of silver and blue. 
 The sun does not peep over the tops of the 
 mountains, or rise suddenly from the edge of 
 the dark world like a disc of fire. You cannot 
 watch dark change to light in ten minutes, or 
 the colours flame up, as at sunset they flame 
 out even in England, while you wait. True, in a 
 sense, all the colours are there, and there is a 
 gilding of mountain-tops, but it is not spec- 
 tacular as we have learnt to reckon spectacles, 
 or not often, at any rate. 
 
 No, it is infinitely more mysterious, more 
 symbolical, more mystical. There is next to 
 nothing to describe, and yet there is so much to 
 think about. And there is time to think, for the 
 dawn takes a long time. 
 
 Yes, that is the first wonderful thing about 
 it: it takes a very long time. At evening you 
 can say: "Oh, the sun is setting; come and 
 see," and you can stand and see and go away 
 all in a little while. But on the Berg, at any 
 rate, it is rare that it would be possible to call 
 a person to see the dawn, and possibly it would 
 be rare to find a person with sufficient patience 
 to wait for it. For the sunrise is majestic in its 
 unperturbed leisure, in its slow solemnity. 
 
 You wake, and you know that the world is all 
 aquiver for a new birth. It is incredible, that 
 sense that every animate and inanimate thing is 
 coming slowly to an ecstasy which, you feel, is 
 
134 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 only half understood. The world is poised on 
 tiptoe to welcome a Divine, incomprehensible 
 mystery. It feels that it is about to bathe in the 
 eternal fire of immortality, but it does not know 
 it never knows, and never will know just 
 what that means. So there is an awed hush, 
 and, like Elijah in the mouth of the cave, you 
 catch the murmur of a still small voice that is 
 no more than the breath of silence. I cannot 
 really write to you of it. Again and again, at 
 some midday, I have smiled to myself at the 
 remembrance and known that it could not have 
 been, but again and again, before the dawn, I 
 have wrapped my face in my blanket to wait 
 while God went by. 
 
 It is the birds who are brave enough to break 
 that silence. We have no great songsters on the 
 Berg indeed, by day you would say that we 
 had none, for there is hardly a bird-voice except 
 that of the big crows that adjure the disturbers 
 of their solitude from some rock by the way, or 
 the doves in the river willows. But in the dawn- 
 ing you hear them. The little birds that run 
 among the stones rather than fly and the 
 smaller birds still that sweep in clouds over the 
 lands all begin to twitter expectantly. And 
 there are a thousand other sounds, I know not 
 of what. The air is atremble with sound. You 
 turn the ear to catch it, and cannot tell if you 
 heard it or if you did not. It is as if solemn 
 personages cried to each other across vast 
 
SHOUTING OF THE SONS OF GOD 135 
 
 spaces in voices too great for us to hear, just 
 as the tiny insects beneath our feet seem not to 
 hear us. And the wind rises, too, and bears on 
 its breast the murmur of water from a hundred 
 tiny streams, while the whisper of its message 
 stirs the very soul of the world and moves it to 
 a prayer. 
 
 Then the light begins. You do not know that 
 it has begun until you perceive suddenly that 
 the night is no longer night. It is utterly im- 
 perceptible, that gradual lightening. At first it 
 is the darkness that grows less heavy while not 
 ceasing to be dark, and then it is the world all 
 about that takes shape rather than the dark 
 that goes. Far more slowly than the turn of the 
 tide the day rolls in, but, as the tide, it laps the 
 crags and kopjes and widens slowly, slowly, from 
 a wash of something that is only just not light 
 into light itself. More than an hour will go by 
 up there in some fold of the Berg, and still you 
 will not see the sun. You rise finally to look for 
 him, impatient and eager for the warmth of his 
 kiss, and at long last, why, there is the golden 
 radiance crowning the mountain-top, and there 
 is the wide shaft of fire stabbing the valley ! 
 
 The very slowness of it all gives one the 
 impression of irresistible power, and it is that 
 sense that keeps me wrapped closely in my 
 blankets many and many a time when I ought to 
 be up. The dawn is alive ; it is, as it were, the 
 aura of a living person, the immanation of 
 
136 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 Power. The night does battle with it ; the very 
 Berg towers up to resist it; the great valleys 
 clutch themselves and their treasure of dark- 
 ness; but all in vain. The dawn suffers in- 
 numerable checks of rock and spur that stay its 
 coming. It moves so slowly that the hearts of 
 the watchers tremble lest it should not come, 
 but it moves so surely that one knows there is 
 nought to do but to abide its coming. If a man 
 is in tune for it, that slow coming breathes a 
 wonderful and tender confidence and peace, but 
 if he is not, it can make him fear. 
 
 I wonder often if the Lord Christ will come 
 again like that. I do not see why He should 
 not. His first coming was so entirely unex- 
 pected, and even although it seems now to us to 
 have been very plainly written of and clear, still 
 no one expected the Mother and the Babe at the 
 Manger. So then of His second coming we 
 may not understand the texts. Maybe His 
 radiance is already painted on the clouds on 
 which He sits, and that is why men do to-day 
 as a whole place Honour and Liberty and Jus- 
 tice higher than before. I wish I could see 
 Truth set high, however, for it seems to me that 
 that is a star of the morning for which we care 
 less and less, in whose very existence we hardly 
 believe. But I do not know; at any rate, He 
 may come so. The trembling hearts may yet 
 find that He has been coming all the time and is 
 here ; they may find that it is not so much that 
 
SHOUTING OF THE SONS OF GOD 137 
 
 He has come as that the night has gone. And 
 in the moment of discovery, as they rise and 
 say: "Why, it is day/ 9 the sun himself will 
 appear above the far horizon, and we shall see 
 the King in His Beauty. 
 
 And perhaps Christ comes to individual souls 
 rather like this. Men are not often convinced 
 by an argument, by a book, by a preacher, by 
 any one thing. Often, during the process of 
 conviction, a man is not conscious that he is 
 being convinced at all, and especially is this so 
 with religious truth, the process of which is 
 above us, beyond us, outside us, like a dawn. 
 The change steals silently and imperceptibly 
 over the wide horizons as well as over the valley 
 at our feet. Suddenly we see this or that more 
 clearly, why we scarcely can say ; and as likely 
 as not the thing seen to be clearer seems to have 
 no connection with the sunrise of the main truth 
 at all. And then in a moment we perceive that 
 the night has gone; we see that the sun 
 illumines every tree and rock and valley; we 
 know that nothing is without a purpose and a 
 meaning, that all things are part of a great 
 whole, and that the sun of truth has risen upon 
 us. Nor can we give much of an explanation. 
 We really scarcely know ourselves how it came 
 to pass, only that once we were blind and now 
 we see. 
 
 But for all this, the dawn is very cruel. It is 
 inexorable fate. It comes, it floods the world 
 
138 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 with hope, it rouses us eager and expectant, 
 and in a little the intolerable heat overlaps the 
 world; we trek on, hot and parched, we fail to 
 attain, and we cast ourselves gladly down as the 
 spent day dies. The kindly night deepens and 
 veils and smothers, but far too soon the world 
 trembles once more at the approach of its 
 tyrant and lord. He has been but playing with 
 us. He will call us up and thrust us out again 
 with a smile, but it is a cruel smile. He knows 
 well enough that we cannot do all we would, 
 that we shall not attain what we wish, that our 
 strength will fail, and that he is too great for 
 us. 
 
 And that is so like life. At twenty one is so 
 sure that it is good, and one glories in one's 
 strength ; at thirty one is walking in a pitiless, 
 hard light; at forty one sees that the day is 
 already on the wane; at fifty one wonders if 
 there will be rest and .plenty in the evening ; and 
 
 at sixty ? Ah, I do not know. Maybe there 
 
 are brave hearts who think confidently of an- 
 other dawn as they know their day is done, but 
 there are more to whom the falling veil of dark- 
 ness can alone give peace. 
 
 But I will tell you of my hope. The dawn 
 does not fulfil the promise of the stars ; it con- 
 ceals them. The glare of the risen sun of our 
 poor planet floods us in a garish light, and 
 wearies with its heat, but the soft-lit stars are 
 still there, if hidden, remote, undying, very 
 
SHOUTING OF THE SONS OF GOD 139 
 
 patient. Waking in the dawn, one sees them, 
 and if they are lost in the day, they shine again 
 more brightly with the night. So maybe the 
 stars of our ideals still glitter about the throne 
 of God and in the halo of His Mother. Maybe 
 our last night will pass with the dawning of 
 those other suns. Maybe the whole wide world 
 expects that day, is groaning and travailing for 
 it, and hopes anew that it has come at last with 
 every dawn. Maybe in the dawning it is but the 
 expectancy of a song that has not yet been sung 
 that one catches, and from the longing of their 
 ardent hearts may learn what it will be when 
 the Sons of God shout for joy. 
 
16. OF THE BITTER CROSS 
 
 THIS began by being an altogether delight- 
 ful day. Arriving fairly late last night at 
 an out-of-the-way village right up one of 
 those swift little streams that flow inland from 
 the Berg to join up eventually with the Orange 
 river, we found a white man and a missionary 
 already there. This is rare enough, as you can 
 imagine, and a very pleasant surprise, but it 
 was still more pleasant when the missionary 
 turned out to be my friend Fr. Lemans. I 
 found him sitting on the floor of a hut, his back 
 against the wall, eating with a native spoon 
 from a basin of mafi (or thick milk) with mealie 
 bread crumbled upon it. He was as surprised 
 to see me as I was to see him, for it is rare that 
 we actually hit on each other in our zigzag 
 trekking, though we frequently cross each 
 other's trails. He got up, a shortish, stoutish 
 man, his face all smiles, and then we sat down 
 together, and I helped him with his mafi. Cyril 
 brought my packs into the same hut, and later 
 on you might have seen us, each stretched out 
 on his blankets, on either side of a candle stuck 
 in an old tin, and each smoking many pipes of 
 peace. 
 He had been long on trek, and he has been far 
 
 140 
 
OF THE BITTER CROSS 141 
 
 longer in such, work than I. Indeed, I was a 
 boy at school when he first came out to the Berg, 
 and he has been steadily roaming up and down 
 these mountains with one object while I have 
 been painfully sorting out my ideas in half a 
 dozen countries. Never did Frenchman love 
 home and kindred more than he, and if you will 
 listen, he will ramble on for hours about the 
 diocese in which he was born, its lovely 
 churches, its kindly bishop, and its devoted 
 faithful. Yet he has turned his back on all that 
 for ever. For Christ's sake and the Gospel's he 
 has neither wife, children, lands, nor home ; and 
 if there be a wistful longing sometimes, just 
 tinging a phrase or underlying a sentence, still, 
 for all that, Fr. Lemans is very content, I think. 
 He and his are a strange commentary on life, 
 my dear. You and I want so much, do we not? 
 and we are so torn by this and that, by love and 
 passion, by hopes and fears ; but he seems to me 
 to have almost no hopes and no fears ; if love, 
 certainly no passion; if inevitable worries, cer- 
 tainly no distress. He has his work, and he 
 does it ; and he does not argue about his Faith 
 or aoubt it ; as to the future, well, another will 
 carry on when he lays down his tools; the 
 Church changes not, and the future is with God. 
 So he travels all but unceasingly from tiny 
 hamlet to tiny hamlet, living among the natives, 
 not seeing a white man for weeks, and rich 
 enough on twenty pounds a year and the grant 
 
142 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 of a new suit when his old one is in rags. When 
 he came his Catholics were less than a couple of 
 score in all these mountains ; now he has about 
 six hundred communicants, a regular route, a 
 line of small churches, and a steadily growing 
 army of hearers and catechumens. His disci- 
 pline, length of instruction, and standard of 
 knowledge for baptism are surprising, and I 
 like it especially that he has three days' spirit- 
 ual retreat for natives before he baptises them. 
 I wish we could do something like that, but, 
 sticking as we do to the traditional times of 
 Baptism at Easter and Christmas, this is more 
 than our one-man parishes can manage at such 
 busy times. Fr. Lemans never seems cast down, 
 and never, on the other hand, particularly joy- 
 ful. Doubtless he has his moments, but on the 
 whole this is typical of his life, one-centred, 
 devoted, but in a sense indifferent. He appears 
 to me to keep his eyes on God and to do his 
 duty, and it is no matter to him how Almighty 
 God may arrange affairs about him. In sun or 
 storm, in success or failure, God knows best. 
 Lemans knows he is a lonely pawn on the board, 
 and he is contented so. 
 
 One result of all this is that it is none too easy 
 to get him to talk much about his work. He 
 would never write a book about it, and I sup- 
 pose he would never allow himself to write to 
 any one as I am writing to you. That is the 
 queer thing about people like Lemans. Sup- 
 
OF THE, BITTER CROSS 143 
 
 posing he met yon, he could hardly possibly do 
 other than love you, could he? And although, 
 of course, you are you to me, I should have 
 thought he might have met some one somewhere 
 who would flutter his dove-cot for him. If he 
 did, what would he do ? He would be in this, as 
 in other things, so much greater than I, I sup- 
 pose, that this too would be crushed out of 
 sight, or, shall we say, poured out as a sacrifice 
 to Almighty God? If so, would he be wise, or 
 would he be foolish? that is the question. 
 
 Most of us are tempted to say, foolish, and I 
 tell you honestly I am not sure that he is not, 
 only I object strongly to conventional hum- 
 drum, stodgy people, who acquiesce in bour- 
 geois social and moral rules, calling him foolish. 
 The kind of Englishman who would call Fr. 
 Lemans foolish is the man who mistakes a fit of 
 passion for love, and finds out his mistake, but 
 settles down to ordinary middle-class married 
 life, with the assistance of regular heavy meals, 
 and a business. To my mind that man is a 
 thousand times more of a fool. Lemans makes 
 a sacrifice for the sake of an ideal; the other 
 felbw lives without ideals for the sake of con- 
 ventions. He is neither a decent Christian nor 
 an honest pagan. I think, if I hate any one, I 
 hate him. 
 
 But there is something in the creed of the 
 honest pagan. The sunshine is so good, flowers 
 are so gay, the grass is so green, the world so 
 
144 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 wide, human nature so lovable, and God so 
 remote. When I think of these things, I wonder 
 often if the creed of the Cross is not a mistake. 
 I remember how the little waves laugh in the 
 sun on the white sands of green coral islands set 
 in the blue sea; I remember how the moon 
 comes up over the desert, transforms the 
 hovels, illuminates the minarets, and glistens on 
 the great fronds of the palms ; I remember how 
 the wild flowers gleam in the grass under the 
 tall beeches of the forests of the Ardennes ; yes, 
 and I remember the tinkle of laughter and 'the 
 chink of glasses on the marble-topped tables of 
 the boulevards, while the taxi-lights twinkle 
 down the wide streets, and Paris is Paris. Just 
 to live for all these and, much more, with you, 
 would it not be good? Would it not even be 
 right? Where and who is God that the shadow 
 of Him should darken our paths ? After all, did 
 He not make these things, and did He not mean 
 us to dance our little May-fly lives in the good 
 sun of His creation? At least, He never meant 
 us to live in a suburban villa with half a dozen 
 yards of smoky shrubs in front and the next- 
 door neighbour ? s gramophone sounding through 
 the thin wall, and with our lives bounded by 
 office or shop. He could not have meant us to 
 pass the golden days mere moving cogs in the 
 great heedless machine which the greed of 
 modern man has made, and in which so many 
 dwarfed souls acquiesce. 
 
OF THE BITTER CROSS 145 
 
 But the biggest proof that Fr. Lemans is 
 right is set forth in those books which picture 
 the wonderful tenderness and good humour and 
 love that can exist in such surroundings. Per- 
 haps you do not see the connection, but I believe 
 it is there. Books like Mr. Riley's, that picture 
 the unselfishness that can exist in a Bradford 
 slum, are the finest testimonies on earth to the 
 reality of the soul, and if the soul is real, then 
 God is real, and self-sacrifice is real, and ideals 
 are real. Then it is better to have an ideal and 
 endure for it than to have no ideal and laugh in 
 the sun. It is better that one ? s soul should grow 
 through pain and discipline than that it should 
 be lulled to sleep with the song of birds and the 
 magic soundlessness of the moon and stars. 
 
 The amazing thing is that such ideals can 
 become so much more dominant than the world 
 in which we live. Even I know that. I can 
 travel among these mountains and see no 
 beauty in the rocks and krantzes, no laughter in 
 the flick of the little lizards that dart across the 
 way, no peace in the widening valleys, and no 
 joy in the wind. Or I can travel when the driv- 
 ing rain makes me laugh, and to be forced to 
 camp on some barren summit when there is 
 next to nothing for the fire and still less for the 
 pot is just a joke. I can hardly bear the sight 
 of Cyril and his people sometimes, and at 
 others I can smile at their stupidity and feel 
 myself moved to heartfelt tenderness by their 
 
146 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 sin. Why, do you say? Why because if there 
 be light in the soul, the whole wide world is 
 good; and if there be darkness, there is no sun 
 in a tropic sky. And we are all like that. You 
 are, I know. 
 
 But, oh, what pitiful playthings of the great 
 Powers we all are, too ! Even our ideals deceive 
 us, and what is to be done when ideals clash? 
 Suppose there is a girl somewhere whose ideal 
 is Fr. Lemans and his love, while his ideal is 
 that grim blackened cross ! Can religion dictate 
 to her that her ideal must be the cross likewise? 
 Has it that dread right, I wonder? I lay oppo- 
 site the good priest and imaged it a little home 
 in France under a laughing Provengal sky and 
 a hard-faced middle-aged peasant woman from 
 whom vanished a score of years ago the hope 
 and light of life. I daresay she is regular at 
 mass, and I can see her set face over her beads. 
 She works from sunrise to sunset; and before 
 the kitchen fire in the evenings, when the big 
 pot simmers and the peaceful cat basks in the 
 warmth, she sees grim pictures of what might 
 have been, and what must be, in the flames. 
 There are very many such for one cause and 
 another, are there not? Patriotism, Love, Be- 
 ligion what monsters they are ! Men dare and 
 die for them, and their names are written on the 
 scrolls of History, but what of the pitiful vic- 
 tims they have crushed beneath their feet? 
 
 I believe there are fools who quibble at the 
 
OF THE BITTER CROSS 147 
 
 Garden of Eden story, but what fools they are ! 
 If ever a world lay under a curse, it is this. 
 Probably Lemans is right, and we deserve it 
 and must accept it. Probably he is right also 
 when he thinks that the good God is far more 
 sorry than we, that His Heart is very pitiful, 
 and that He is preparing a better place for us. 
 It cost Him the Cross to do it, and it will cost 
 us the cross to reach it. That is the Catholic 
 Religion. And, like the Berg, there are days 
 when it is very lovely and days when it is very 
 cruel. 
 
17. OF TERESA 
 
 YESTEEDAY I wrote you a letter that 
 ended rather sadly, but I began by saying 
 that I had expected a delightful day. It 
 had been delightful, although I did not feel like 
 it when I came to take up my pen to write to 
 you. But I mean to tell you now what made it 
 so delightful apart from the fact that I had met 
 dear old Fr. Lemans. For in the morning we 
 set out together, and his tongue was unusually 
 loose, or rather it became loosened as we rode, 
 and he told me one or two delightful stories 
 that it does one good to hear. 
 
 He began as we passed a village high up on 
 the hillside. We were riding low down in the 
 valley, and he had visited the place the day 
 before. He pointed it out to me and said: 
 "That's one of my places about a hundred 
 souls altogether, and practically every one a 
 Christian. " 
 
 "Oh," said I, "it's rather remarkable to find 
 a village wholly Christian. I suppose they were 
 your people down below and trekked up here?" 
 
 "No," he replied, "it's altogether a different 
 story. Care to hear it?" 
 
 Of course I said I should, and he told me what 
 follows : 
 
 148 
 
OF TERESA 149 
 
 Fifteen years or so ago there was only one 
 Catholic in that place, an old widow, who lived 
 much alone, and whom Fr. Lemans used to come 
 and visit two or three times a year when he was 
 in these parts. For seven years he came, and 
 each time he was well received, preached to the 
 heathen, and gave the Sacraments to this 
 woman; but there was never a convert. As 
 always, it was not that the people had any other 
 definite faith or that they disbelieved what he 
 told them, but only that they preferred polyg- 
 amy and the rest of it, and apparently the Holy 
 Spirit was not moving in their hearts. 
 
 One evening, then, towards the end of that 
 time, he was sitting in his hut in the village 
 after supper and saying his office, having come 
 for one of his visits. There came a knock at the 
 door, and he put his finger in the book to mark 
 the place and said: "Come in." 
 
 The old widow entered. She sat down, and 
 for a while she had nothing but commonplaces 
 to say. He began to wonder why she had come, 
 as he had already talked with her and heard her 
 confession, when she said suddenly (to put it 
 into vernacular English) : "Look here, Father, 
 this can't go on!" 
 
 "What can't go on?" he demanded in aston- 
 ishment. 
 
 "Why," she explained, "here have you been 
 coming to this village two or three times a year 
 for seven years. Each time you preach to the 
 
150 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 heathen, and they listen, and when you have 
 gone they say how true your words are and that 
 doubtless they ought to become Christians. But 
 they do not. Once I thought the wife of 
 Mojakasane (for so I will call the headman) 
 would become a hearer, but she caught a fever 
 in the winter instead, and died. And now I 
 grow old ; it cannot be that I have many more 
 years to live. When I die, you will not come so 
 much, if at all, to this place, and it is plain to 
 me that we must do something." 
 
 She stopped, out of breath. It was a long 
 speech for her. Fr. Lemans wondered what 
 was coming but he tried not to show it. Instead 
 he said: "Well, but what can we do? I do not 
 know what else to say, and you pray for them 
 regularly, do you not!" 
 
 "Yes," she said, "but, Father, the Holy 
 Saints did more. I am no saint, but a sinful old 
 woman, yet is my life my own, and I have plenty 
 of time. Now, if it seems good to the priest, let 
 me offer myself to God for these people. I am 
 too old and too ignorant to become a nun, but 
 could I not live up here in some such way as 
 the good sisters live down below? And maybe 
 God would see, if I gave myself altogether to 
 Him, and would have mercy on these, my 
 people. ' ' 
 
 "What would you propose?" asked Fr. 
 Lemans curiously. 
 
 The old woman hesitated. "It is little I can 
 
OF TERESA 151 
 
 do, oh, Father/' she said apologetically. "But 
 did not Our Lord tell us in the Holy Gospel to 
 fast and pray? If now I prayed at night, and 
 before the sun is up, and at sunrise, and at 
 midday, and when the sun is near setting, and 
 at sunset, and before I sleep, and if I did not 
 eat until sunset three times a week, and then 
 but stilly -sliilly, maybe Our Lord would have 
 respect to my petition." 
 
 "But you cannot read," objected the priest. 
 "So what would you pray? And what would 
 you eat on the other three days ? ' ' 
 
 "Let not the priest think me foolish," depre- 
 cated the old woman. "It is only I, old Teresa, 
 that speak. It is true I cannot pray the prayers 
 of the sisters, but I can say the rosary; and I 
 am old and thin : on the other days I need not 
 eat." 
 
 I suspect that Fr. Lemans was startled out of 
 his habitual calm, but he did not show it. "You 
 could not do so much," he said almost roughly. 
 "You would fail and break your rule. It is 
 better to try less and to succeed." 
 
 Tears came to old Teresa's eyes. "No, my 
 father," she pleaded. "Let me but try. And 
 do you ask the good sisters to pray for me down 
 below that I may not fail." 
 
 He told me that he consented, and that when 
 she had gone happily away he went out and 
 stood under the stars. And a fragment from 
 
152 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 the Holy Gospel came to his mind: "I have not 
 found so great faith, no, not in Israel." 
 
 So next morning at mass Teresa made her 
 vow, and knelt on as in a trance while he packed 
 up his goods. Nor did she speak as he left. 
 
 It was towards the end of the season, and he 
 went straight back the four days' journey to 
 Eoma. A few weeks later the snows fell, and a 
 hard winter set in. Well, to conclude it, he was 
 at the midday meal one day, when he was told 
 a native wanted to speak with him. He went 
 out and found a herd-boy whom he did not 
 recognise. "Lumela, my son," he said, " whence 
 come you?" 
 
 "I come from Mojakasane's, oh, Father," 
 said the boy, "and I bring the words of Teresa 
 the old. She sayeth: 'If the father will, let him 
 come speedily, for I die.' " 
 
 "Is she very ill?" demanded Fr. Lemans, 
 looking at the snow and thinking that it was 
 four days' trek even in summer. 
 
 "She has not left her house these many 
 weeks," said the boy, "and I heard my mother 
 say that she could not live. 9 ' 
 
 So Fr. Lemans went back to the house and 
 saw the Bishop, and he gathered his things and 
 his pack, and that same afternoon he set out. 
 He did not say anything to me of the journey, 
 but I could fill in the gap. I know a little what the 
 mountains are like when the wind blows over 
 
OF TERESA 153 
 
 the snow and the days are short. But on the 
 sixth day he arrived at the village. 
 
 They were looking out for him. Mojakasane 
 greeted him. 
 
 "Did the priest come by the lower road 
 across the drift yesterday?" he asked. 
 
 "Yes," said Fr. Lemans. "Why do you 
 ask?" ' 
 
 "Then Teresa had a true dream and saw 
 him yesterday," said the man. "She saw him 
 when his horse stumbled by the bank on the 
 ice, and she cried out lest the father should slip 
 off." 
 
 Fr. Lemans stared at him, for it was so. 
 "Lead me to her," he said shortly. "You talk 
 much, Mojakasane." 
 
 She lay on her blankets, very thin and very 
 feeble, and he saw that she was indeed dying. 
 He crossed over to her, and kneeled by her side. 
 "Praise to Our Lady!" she said weakly. "I 
 knew the priest would be in time." 
 
 He gave her the Sacraments then and there, 
 and she seemed stronger after them. When all 
 was over, she held his hand and said sadly: 
 "Oh, my father, thou wert right, and I was 
 wrong. I should not have expected that God 
 would listen to the prayers of such as I. Now 
 I die, for He does not wish me so to live." 
 
 Fr. Lemans was much moved. "Teresa," he 
 said, "you must not speak so. Who can tell the 
 Mind of God? His ways are past finding out. 
 
154 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 What you have done you have done lawfully 
 and in faith ; let us leave it with Him. ' ' 
 
 At that she was a little comforted, and at last 
 slept, but just before she fell asleep she said to 
 him after a long silence : " If but one had been 
 converted, I should know that God had had 
 respect unto my prayers. " 
 
 "Teresa," he said again, "you cannot know 
 the Will of Almighty God." 
 
 After a little he left her, for he too was very 
 tired, and he did not wake until in the dawn a 
 woman came to him. "Teresa is dead," she 
 said. "We thought she slept, but we find that 
 she is dead." 
 
 He stayed for the funeral, and watched 
 rather sadly while they threw in the hard earth. 
 Even then, he told me, he did not expect what 
 would be. But as he left the place Mojakasane 
 came up to him. 
 
 "Father," he said, "I would become a 
 hearer ..." 
 
 "That was seven years ago," Fr. Lemans 
 added. There was a church there now, and all 
 had become Catholics these several years. Her 
 grave lay just beyond the east wall of the 
 church; "but," said he, "I think her place is 
 with the holy saints." 
 
 We did not speak for several miles after that. 
 Then I asked if he had seen such faith and 
 devotion in many of his flock. "No," he said, 
 "in very few. There was one case of a young 
 
OF TERESA 155 
 
 man you might like to hear that but for the 
 most part they do not seem to have it in them, 
 not yet, at any rate," he added tranquilly. "It 
 is no use looking for flowers before a great deal 
 has been done, and even after the ploughing and 
 sowing it is first the blade and then the ear. 
 At present we are not much beyond the young 
 plant stage, and it is a difficult country. The 
 seedlings have many enemies; but we can 
 wait." 
 
 I nodded. It is so. But it is rather beautiful 
 that there should be even one such story pos- 
 sible up here on the hard, rough Berg. It is not 
 a story that would count for much among the 
 people who deal in gold and diamonds and sway 
 the destinies of this country, nor, for that mat- 
 ter, would I care to tell it to most of the people 
 I might meet in your drawing-room, my dear. 
 But I am glad to have been able to tell it to you. 
 I think, deep down in your heart, you will 
 rather treasure it, though you hear so much of 
 the other side of missions, and I suspect you of 
 laughing a little even at me at times! She 
 would have been the roughest of diamonds, you 
 know. I expect she wore the dozen or more of 
 skirts beloved of Basuto women, ate her por- 
 ridge with her fingers, and spat vigorously 
 from time to time on the floor. Yet of such is 
 the Kingdom of God, and, to be honest, I tell 
 you the story that the work she did therein may 
 not be limited to Mojakasane's village. 
 
18- OF WILFKID 
 
 I SHALL first tell you the thing as he told it 
 to me, and you can make your own com- 
 ments, if indeed you want to make any. 
 You can guess how hard it is for a parson not 
 to point a moral, but I have done that so many 
 times in these letters that now I shall refrain. 
 It is Fr. Lemans who speaks you remember 
 Fr. Lemans? and he is speaking to me as I lie 
 stretched out on the grass outside old Mallont's 
 store watching the drying of my blankets in the 
 hot sun, which is very necessary, seeing that 
 Spider chose to attempt the swimming of a 
 river with them on his back but yesterday. It 
 is not done by respectable pack-horses fully 
 loaded. But then, as you have doubtless often 
 felt, none of us in my little outfit are over- 
 respectable. I have forgiven Spider because he 
 thus won for me a day's rest and this story, and 
 I hope you will, too, before it is finished. So 
 now: 
 
 (Fr. Lemans.) Yes, I agree with you about 
 native teachers. They must have supervision 
 at this stage, and our present systems of educa- 
 tion are not planned for the Bantu, worse luck ! 
 But it isn't only education they want. For it's 
 
 156 
 
OF WILFRID 157 
 
 not too often one finds a Christian native with 
 a real vocation to the ministry. I fear they 
 think a great deal about the money and the 
 position . . . Priests? Well, of course, we've 
 no native priests on the Berg, not yet. Nuns, 
 yes, but not priests. Of course they would have 
 to be celibate and members of an order. They'd 
 get their clothes and their food. They would 
 have no lands, no wife, no children, no cattle. 
 If priesthood with you meant that, how many of 
 your natives would come forward, do you sup- 
 pose? 
 
 But I've known one vocation a rather strik- 
 ing affair. I think once, talking about old 
 Teresa, I just hinted at it to you. I'll tell you 
 the story if you like. 
 
 It was a few years ago now, and I was up here 
 for a baptism. We had had our three days' 
 retreat in the village, and after the Sacrament 
 I was going to my hut, when a boy came up and 
 said he wished to speak to me. I stopped. "All 
 right," I said. "What is it I" 
 
 "I cannot tell the father here," he said. "Let 
 us go to his house." 
 
 So we went to my house, and we both sat 
 down. The boy plunged into it straight away. 
 "I want to be a Catholic, Father," he said. 
 
 I told him I was glad to hear it, that he must 
 come to the classes regularly and start at once 
 to say his prayers, and I wrote his name down. 
 Just the usual thing, you see, and when I had 
 
158 PILGRIM PAPERS 1 
 
 finished I expected him to go, but not a bit of 
 it ; he sat on. 
 
 6 ' Well," I said, "what next!" 
 
 "I want to tell the father why I want to 
 repent," he replied, "if the father will listen to 
 me." 
 
 I was rather tired, but I told him the father 
 would listen, and he told me this tale. 
 
 "A week ago, my father, I was asleep in my 
 hut. I was a heathen, and I had not been much 
 to church. Suddenly I awoke, and I saw that 
 there was some one in the room. I could just 
 see that there was some one, but no more. I 
 was sleeping in a little hut alone, and the hut 
 was nearly full of wheat bags and skins, so that 
 I thought perhaps a man had come in to steal. 
 Therefore I cried out loudly: 'Who is it?' 
 There was no answer, and as I was about to speak 
 again, still rolled up in my blankets for I 
 feared to get up I noticed a wonderful thing. 
 The figure was getting plainer, and there 
 seemed to be a light about it. I was frightened, 
 and although I tried to shout loudly, I could 
 only whisper: 'Who is it?' once more. 
 
 ' ' Then, my father, while I watched, the figure 
 grew very plain. It moved over to me, and it 
 was a man, and there was a light in his breast. 
 He came close to me and looked at me, and I 
 looked into his eyes, and as I looked I knew that 
 I must be his servant. He did not speak, but he 
 lifted one hand and pointed to the light on his 
 
OF WILFRID 159 
 
 breast, and I saw that beneath his coat there 
 was the likeness of a heart on fire and red. And 
 then, as I stared, he said to me three times very 
 distinctly: ' Wilfrid, thou hast not chosen Me, 
 but I have chosen you. 7 Each time as he said it 
 I saw him less clearly, and I heard less clearly, 
 and at the last I could hardly see his face or 
 hear his words. And afterwards I saw him no 
 more.' 7 
 
 The boy stopped. Now you know these 
 native visions and dreams as well as I do. I 
 daresay, if it had happened to me when I first 
 came out, I should have been much impressed, 
 but now well, I had been in the mountains many 
 years, and I knew how often these people are 
 converted by dreams. I thought to myself that 
 the boy had seen such a picture many times; 
 and as for the rest ah, well, the good God 
 knows! What shall we say? 
 
 So I was not very surprised, impressed you 
 would say. No, but I would not hurt the boy, 
 so I said: "Yes, it is plain God has called you. 
 You saw Our Lord of the Sacred Heart. Whom 
 do you know by the name of Wilfrid?" 
 
 "The father speaks true," he said. "This 
 very day, when he held up the new picture, I 
 Saw again the man of my dream. That is why I 
 have come to the father now. As for the name 
 4 Wilfrid,' I do not know it at all, but it is plain 
 it is to be my name when I am baptised." 
 
 I heard him in silence. I thought to myself 
 
160 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 that I would not question him closely on either 
 point, first that he had not seen a picture of the 
 Sacred Heart before, and second that he had 
 not heard the name of Wilfrid. You know these 
 people. They often lie ; whether they mean all 
 their lies, who can say? Perhaps he truly 
 thought he had not seen the picture; perhaps 
 he only meant that he had not understood Who 
 it was. It was a little thing, and besides the 
 dream was only one among many that I had 
 heard. So I asked no questions. I said: 
 "Good-night," and perhaps a few words more, 
 and the boy went. The thing passed, too, almost 
 from my mind. 
 
 But as time went on I began to notice Wil- 
 frid, as I shall call him at once. I used to see 
 him three or four times a year, and always he 
 was at Eoma for Easter. He was very quiet, 
 and he was very good. He learnt most quickly, 
 so much that he knew all that he had to know 
 for Baptism before he was even a catechumen. 
 For all that, I would not hurry. I made him 
 wait, and for two years I watched him more and 
 more, until I was very interested when the time 
 came for his Baptism. 
 
 He came to Roma for it, as he was most 
 anxious to do, and I have never before or sftice 
 seen any native so devout. He prayed always 
 before the Sacrament, and when he made his 
 confession I wondered for the light there was 
 in his soul. After it he did not at once go; 
 
OF WILFRID 161 
 
 instead he said to me, but hesitatingly: 
 "Father, there is something I would say to 
 thee." 
 
 "Say on, my son/' I said. 
 
 "Dost thou remember the vision of Our Lord 
 which I told thee whereby I was called into the 
 Church?" he asked. 
 
 "Yes," I said, "I do. It was a great mercy 
 of the good God, and you should give Him great 
 thanks." 
 
 He nodded eagerly. " It is so, my father, ' ' he 
 said. "But my thanks are little. What are my 
 words, that I should be able to thank? More- 
 over, Our Lord spoke to me, and I have yet to 
 obey His words." 
 
 "You are to be baptised to-morrow," I said. 
 "Surely in that you will obey them." 
 
 "In that I shall," he replied. "But let my 
 father forgive me I do not think they will be 
 finished then." 
 
 "What do you mean?" I demanded, for I had 
 had no such case before. 
 
 "I would be a priest, Father," he said. 
 
 Now at that I was astonished. As I have 
 said, it was more than I would have expected. I 
 knew that the boy knew well enough what it 
 meant our people of course do and I was 
 silent, thinking for a while. Then I spoke, and 
 it was plain immediately that I had said the 
 right thing. 
 
162 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 "You are the one son of your father, and he 
 is a heathen; is it not so, Wilfrid?" I asked. 
 
 " Yes, " he said. 
 
 "What, then, will your father, the headman, 
 say when he hears that his son will not raise up 
 children to his name?" I demanded. 
 
 "I fear to tell him," said the boy simply. 
 
 Well, of course, you know as I do what chil- 
 dren mean to a native. I saw trouble looming 
 ahead, and I also saw the greatest temptation 
 for the lad. Thinking quickly, I thought to 
 myself once more that while I ought not to dis- 
 courage him, I had better not make too much of 
 it. So I said: "Look here, Wilfrid, to-morrow 
 you will be washed from your sin. After that 
 go home and see how you can live as a Chris- 
 tian. Say no more to any one, and on the day 
 you first receive the Blessed Sacrament we will 
 speak of these things again." 
 
 He came from the font next day with shining 
 eyes, and he went off home with the rest. But 
 this time I remembered and prayed for him. 
 
 Months later he wrote me a letter. In it he 
 said his father was urging him to marry, and 
 had chosen the girl, but that he had begged for 
 nothing to be done till after Easter, when he 
 would be at Eoma for his first communion. I 
 read that letter several times. It did not say 
 much, but somehow it said a great deal. Then, 
 like the Jewish King, I went into the Sanctuary 
 to spread it out before the Lord. 
 
OF WILFRID 163 
 
 Easter came, and with it Wilfrid. We were 
 very busy, we priests, of course, and I had no 
 chance in Holy Week to speak with him. But 
 it was I who gave him the Blessed Sacrament on 
 Easter Day, and I just noticed that his eyes 
 were fast closed as I placed the Host on his 
 tongue. And that evening he came to speak to 
 me. 
 
 He came into my room and remained stand- 
 ing before me. He was very quiet, but his eyes 
 shone; they shone as I have never thought to 
 see, but as I have read of eyes shining in fhe 
 lives of the holy ones; indeed, they shone so 
 that I did not speak. But he began at once. 
 
 "This morning," he said, "He Whom I saw 
 before came to me with the Blessed Sacrament 
 Himself. He did not speak at all, but I looked 
 into His eyes, and I saw there, my father, what 
 I had seen before, and more. Oh, my father, 
 I cannot marry: I must keep myself for Him, 
 only for Him. And I have come to thee that 
 thou mayest help me, my father." 
 
 Now I was in a difficulty. I thought quickly. 
 We had no place for him, and, moreover, I still 
 wondered myself as to his vocation. If I was 
 wrong, God forgive me. There had already 
 been talk of his going to school, but his father 
 would pay no fees, and he had no money. What 
 could be done? Then I thought that possibly 
 they would take him in Natal, only I could not 
 
164 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 say at once, and, besides, it would mean seeing 
 the Bishop and much correspondence. 
 
 " Wilfrid," I said, "if Our Lord wants you 
 to be a priest, He will help you. Go back home 
 now, and I will see what I can do. Eefuse to 
 marry, and I will write to you as soon as I have 
 anything to suggest. If you have a real voca- 
 tion, never forget it, and keep yourself from all 
 hindrances." 
 
 "I will, my father," he said. "Besides, this 
 morning I vowed myself to Our Lord." 
 
 He spoke very quietly, and he did not again 
 emphasise his immediate difficulties, so that I 
 did not think more of them. I was doubtful 
 over the wisdom of his vow, and I wondered 
 what he had said, but I judged it best to say 
 little. Perhaps I was foolish, God knows. Still ; 
 all I said was ' * God keep you, Wilfrid, and Our 
 Lady have you in her prayers. J ' 
 
 "I think so, Father," he said quaintly after 
 the native manner, and we talked of a few in- 
 different things. Then he went. 
 
 About Christmas, if I remember rightly, a 
 man came down from his village, and I asked 
 after Wilfrid. "He is gone to the mines in the 
 City of Gold, "he said. 
 
 I was genuinely astonished and sorry. I 
 questioned him, but got no answer that threw 
 any light on the affair. He did not know 
 Wilfrid's address, and I could only pray that 
 God would keep him in the midst of such great 
 
OF WILFRID 165 
 
 peril to his vocation, if, indeed, he had one, 
 which I now began again to doubt. And a year 
 went by. 
 
 One day I came back from a two months' 
 trek, and after greetings one of the fathers said 
 to me : l ' Oh, by the way, there is a boy dying in 
 the hospital who much wants to see you. He 
 comes from the mountains somewhere. " 
 
 "What is his name?" I asked, and they told 
 me. It was, of course, Wilfrid, and he was 
 dying of rapid consumption, caught in the 
 mines. He had been brought in at his own re- 
 quest to die in our hospital. 
 
 I went at once to see him, and I hardly knew 
 him, so shrunken and thin he was. But there 
 was still the light in his eyes, for which I 
 thanked God. We could talk only a little, and I 
 promised to bring him the Blessed Sacrament 
 next day, but he was very weak. I did not like 
 to question him about his going to the mines. 
 Nor did he say anything, and so we parted. 
 
 But that very night I was sent for, about 
 midnight, with a request to go to him with the 
 Sacraments. I hurried to the church and then 
 to the hospital, and I found him indeed plainly 
 dying. But he was radiant. He knew the end 
 was coming, and it seemed to me that he had 
 something he was anxious to say the while I 
 administered the last rites to him. And when 
 they were over, it came out. "I had to go to 
 the mines, Father/ 1 he said, "or my father 
 
166 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 would have forced me into the marriage. As it 
 is he has already paid the cattle for the girl, 
 and she is waiting at my place. He wrote to 
 tell me of it while I was there, in the City of 
 Gold, and then I did the only thing I could do : 
 I threw myself on our Lord, and I begged that 
 He would not forget that He had chosen me. 
 And quickly this sickness came, oh my father, 
 and now I go to Him. Oh, yes, grieve thou not, 
 for for He has chosen me." 
 
 He was very weak, and he could say no more. 
 I just held his hand, and I think I said that I 
 understood. He lay with closed eyes till the 
 dawn, while I watched and wondered if he 
 would speak again. But he did not with his lips. 
 Only, just as he died, his eyes opened wide 
 again, and there was that in them more radiant 
 
 still of which I cannot speak. 
 
 ***** 
 
 "They shall come from the east and the west 
 and the north and the south, and sit down with 
 Me in the Kingdom of My Father. " 
 
 "And I looked, and, lo, a Lamb stood on 
 Mount Sion, and with Him an hundred, forty 
 and four thousand, having His Father's Name 
 written on their foreheads. . . . These are they 
 which are virgins, and which follow the Lamb 
 whithersoever He goeth." 
 
19. OF SOME SICK VISITS 
 
 THIS has been a morning of sick-visiting, 
 and I am spending an afternoon of soak- 
 ing rain writing to you about it. After 
 mass and a scrap of breakfast we started, the 
 catechist and I, I carrying the Blessed Sacra- 
 ment. The school-children had lined up very 
 simply and naturally outside, making a kind of 
 avenue from the church door to my horse, held 
 by Cyril, and as I came out, bearing our Lord, 
 they all fell on their knees. Cyril held my 
 bridle while I got on; then he too knelt on the 
 stones. And without words the catechist 
 wheeled his pony and rode off, and I followed. 
 It was the sort of morning that you love, and 
 I thought of you incessantly, despite What I 
 carried, as we went. We had not to go down 
 to the river, but up and round the mountain, in 
 and out of clefts, over shoulders, up crests, mile 
 after mile. We were soon high above the Mis- 
 sion and up in a magical world of clouds. The 
 storms, blanketed in white mist, would come 
 sweeping down on us, hiding the river valley 
 far below, till we wandered, at that height, 
 seemingly on the roof of the world. It is still 
 very early spring here, and, save that the grass 
 
 167 ' 
 
168 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 is green, the country looks dead not a tree, not 
 a flower, nothing of that verdant, luxurious 
 vegetation which in the semi-tropical summer 
 will clothe the course of the little mountain 
 streams, nothing but the irregular scraps of 
 ploughed land, dotted here and there on the 
 hillside, without hedge or boundary stones, and 
 the bleak mountain sides. It certainly was not 
 pleasant going. First we were wet; then the 
 wind would dry us ; then round the peaks would 
 come the swishing mists again, and we would 
 be once more wet ; then again we were dried and 
 had a snatch of sunlight; and then, just as it 
 was beginning to rain again, we made a dash 
 for it and reached the huts. 
 
 You would not think people would, or per- 
 haps even could, live up here. In comparison 
 with the plains below any of these Berg vil- 
 lages, such as that near the church, seem grim, 
 small, and poverty-stricken, but in comparison 
 with that these that we had been passing on our 
 three-hour ride were much smaller and poorer 
 again. Yet it is surprising how many people 
 there are here; in almost every mountain fold 
 a hut or two, and here four huts make a village. 
 It was such a village we had reached, and in the 
 four huts live a dozen adults at least. They 
 came flocking, with the children too. The tiny 
 hut was ready for me, swept and partly emp- 
 tied, with skins on the floor and a rough, home- 
 made wooden stool waiting for transformation 
 
OF SOME SICK VISITS 169 
 
 into an altar. The folk crowded in, "rough 
 souls ' ' and poor, but I mean it when I say wise 
 souls and rich. Listen while I tell you. 
 
 I had come to give Communion to a sick 
 crippled woman of middle age who cannot walk 
 at all. I draped the stool and placed my cross 
 and candle, robed myself, and was ready. It 
 comes almost as a shock to find how familiar 
 they are with the prayers in so remote a place, 
 these Christians of ours who have certainly 
 learnt wonderfully these last few years, what 
 time they have assumed Mary-medals and 
 rosaries. But I shall not write of that, rather 
 of a little incident at the close. 
 
 The vestments were off at last, and I came to 
 shake hands with the cripple. She, however, 
 was fumbling with a dirty rag beneath her 
 clothes, and at last produced a small bundle. 
 Many knots had to be wrestled with, but finally 
 a coin appeared, and was held out to me for 
 " collection. " I took it, wondering; it was a 
 sovereign. "Do you want change?" I asked, 
 and doubtfully, for I had none. This, however, 
 she did not even understand, and it had to be 
 explained at great length, for she had never 
 changed a coin in her life. When she under- 
 stood, she emphatically refused, and, as I stood 
 still doubtfully turning over the gold, I was told 
 the story. 
 
 It appears that I communicated her before, 
 three years ago, before I went to the war in 
 
170 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 East Africa, and that that had been her first 
 communion. When I had left, she had been 
 much troubled because she had had no money 
 offering to make. She never had had a coin. 
 A cripple, and of course unmarried, she had 
 just existed in that tiny village, fed and clothed 
 in rags by somewhat grudging relations, who 
 had little use for such as she ; but, as I say, she 
 had been much troubled over her lack of money 
 for her offertory. Then, a year later, a brother 
 came to see her on his way to his own village 
 with the money of his year's wool and grain 
 just sold at the store, and in a fit of generosity 
 he had given her a pound. God knows what 
 that sovereign must have represented to that 
 woman ! Her friends could have bought her at 
 the distant store, sugar, and coffee, and beads, 
 and a new piece of coloured stuff for her head, 
 and sugar again, all but unlimited sugar. I 
 fancy her turning it over and over, questioning 
 as to the store she had never seen (which, you 
 know, is a wonderful palace of delights to these 
 people) and as to the treasures potentially hers 
 and then remembering the collection. Of 
 course it was a good chance that no priest would 
 ever come her way again, as none, I suppose, 
 now ever will, for I should think that she is 
 dying. But she lapped the only money she ever 
 had had in all her life in a dozen folds of rag, 
 and hid it in her clothes against my possible 
 return. And three years later it fell out that I 
 
OF SOME SICK VISITS 171 
 
 came, and at her second communion she gave all 
 her treasured fortune to her God. Oh, my dear, 
 these poor rough souls! Perhaps I am an 
 emotional fool, but I tell you I groped my way 
 out of that hut blind for the moment with tears. 
 
 We struck off transversely to make a second 
 visit, and this again was to a woman, recently 
 baptised in sickness by the catechist. She lives 
 in one of two huts perched up like an eagle's 
 nest, and she turned out to be the oldest native 
 that I have ever seen. She was crouching over 
 a tiny dying fire in a hut full of smoke, babies, 
 dogs and chicken. There were many smells. 
 I was given a seat on the floor, and promptly lit 
 a cigarette. 
 
 That started it, for she had never seen a 
 cigarette before. It seemed to me amazing to 
 find a creature so remote from the world, 
 especially as she can hobble about a bit and has 
 all her faculties. But soon it appeared that I 
 was only the second white man she had seen, 
 except for a distant view of a Government 
 Police Inspector on border patrol. (The other 
 had been the E.G. itinerant priest who had 
 visited a relation in some huts lower down, not 
 long after the Boer war.) So all this led to 
 talk, and I tried to find out her age. 
 
 Well, she had come there "long, long, long 
 ago," when, as she said, there were practically 
 no people in these mountains. She had fled 
 with her son, since dead, when the ' i slayers ' J of 
 
172 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 her husband had been sent by the chief to eat 
 up all that was his. In these remote mountains 
 she had shaken off the bloodhounds, oh, "long, 
 long, long ago." She had been old when the 
 magistrate and the store, later on, had come 
 into these parts, too old to go with the rest and 
 see. She remembered the great Moshesh, as 
 far as I could make out before he had con- 
 solidated his power. She must be easily a 
 hundred years old, possibly a hundred and ten. 
 It is staggering to think of the period that 
 that old souPs life has covered. When Welling- 
 ton fought Napoleon she was alive, I daresay. 
 She was a woman before a white man crossed 
 the Orange (unless it were some chance 
 hunter), before the Voor-trekkers, before an 
 ounce of gold had been found at Johannesburg, 
 or a diamond at Kimberley. In those days there 
 was neither steamship, nor train, nor bicycle, 
 nor motor-car, nor aeroplane, nor breech-load- 
 ing rifle, nor a tin of preserved food, nor a 
 safety match, nor, I think, a safety pin, in the 
 whole wide world, European soldiers still car- 
 ried halberds into action (they did at Waterloo, 
 you know) ; they still cut off limbs in cold blood 
 and dipped the stump into boiling oil ; and that 
 most terrible of all beasts of prey, the bacillus, 
 was still unguessed and unsubdued. And I be- 
 lieve I should be right in asserting that the only 
 Church of England clergyman in what is now 
 the Union of South Africa plus Ehodesia was a 
 
OF SOME SICK VISITS 173 
 
 military chaplain at the Cape. Yet is even she 
 now sought out in my unworthy person. 
 
 I asked whose were the figures on the medal 
 she wore about her neck. 
 
 " Mary, the Mother of God/' she said, "and 
 Jesus." 
 
 "And Who is He?" I asked. 
 
 "God," she said simply. 
 
 At that I wondered much, more than you can 
 think. Here had I found in one morning two 
 souls richer far than some episcopal dignitaries 
 of my Church. 
 
 Then we knelt to pray. I must say she is a 
 unique and astounding old soul, for at a hun- 
 dred she had been able to learn the "Our 
 Father," the "Hail Mary," and the "Glory be 
 to God." It may not seem much to garner in 
 a hundred years, perhaps, and it is, I suppose, 
 a frail enough equipment for the great journey 
 that lies so soon before those tottering, hard- 
 ened feet, but I think don't you? that it will 
 carry her through. 
 
 I am quite willing to confess to you that the 
 conditions of the after- world are utterly beyond 
 my understanding. I accept Heaven and Hell, 
 and a place of Purgation and Preparation, 
 partly because the only authority that I can see 
 in this world, or that I trust at all, teaches me 
 so, and after all there is a measure of reason in 
 them. It seems plain and reasonable, too, that 
 there will be progression and steps by which 
 
174 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 one will mount to the Throne of God ; but other- 
 wise I am a sheer agnostic. I preach and argue 
 about spiritual things, it is true, and I can see, 
 as it were, tags sticking out of the tangle which 
 may perhaps straighten out into threads, but on 
 the whole it is a conflicting and incomprehen- 
 sible mystery. Often, among the people, I am 
 entirely dazed by it, dumbfounded as to what 
 men will make of Almighty God or Almighty 
 God of men. Paris, London, the worshippers 
 in St. PauPs, as well as the professional girls of 
 our modern streets, only add to my bewilder- 
 ment. In my library there are books and books 
 on the subject, the intellectual wealth of the 
 world's universities, but frankly they do not 
 help me much. Doubtless all this is largely my 
 own fault and my own stupidity, but you, my 
 dear, have confessed to me that you are in much 
 the same boat. Hence I want to suggest to you 
 two new teachers, a crippled woman and a cen- 
 tenarian, on the face of the Berg. They have 
 learned so little, and they know so much. 
 
20. OF THE BISHOPS' PEAYEBS 
 
 DO you know, I have never yet addressed 
 a missionary meeting without having an 
 uneasy feeling afterwards. I always 
 feel as if I had created an entirely wrong im- 
 pression, and I remember how distinctly I was 
 aware of having had a wrong impression given 
 me by many missionary meetings when I first 
 came out to Africa. It is, of course, all but in- 
 evitable. A speaker necessarily selects interest- 
 ing episodes, days that were at least days of 
 action and in some sort successes, with which to 
 occupy half an hour's talk, more especially 
 when the financial aid of his work depends 
 largely on that half hour. He may be very far 
 from wishing to create a false impression, in- 
 deed, personally, I have nearly always tried to 
 emphasise the fact that I had to omit an account 
 of the routine, the monotony, the failures, in 
 my speeches ; but, try as he will, that other im- 
 pression is created. You see, there is the colour 
 and the beauty and the victory; it would be 
 wrong not to depict it; others, after all 
 traders and officials speak enough of the other 
 side in the ears of the world ; and perhaps it is 
 impossible in half an hour to give a true 
 vignette. I think that is it. I could not sketch 
 
 175 
 
176 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 the work on the Berg for you so that you might 
 see it as I do looking back over the years, how- 
 ever much I tried. 
 
 But in these letters I begin to feel much as I 
 used to do after a missionary meeting. Here 
 have I been writing to you evening by evening 
 almost the striking incidents of the twelve 
 hours. Yet in each twelve there have been 
 probably ten when I had no vision and no song, 
 and for every day on which I could look back 
 and say, "Well, I must write to her of this," 
 there have probably been two when I rolled 
 myself in my blankets, glad to sleep and forget. 
 So, my dear, I begin to feel that you may be get- 
 ting a wrong impression, and as to-day was one 
 of the other kind of days (albeit even this with 
 the leaven of humour), I intend to write it up 
 faithfully for you. 
 
 It began this way. I slept at a store, as I had 
 a round to do yesterday which landed me there 
 after midday, and it seemed useless to go on 
 another hour to the church when early this 
 morning I should have to come again from the 
 Mission past the Store to reach yet another 
 village in which there were our people. So I 
 told the catechist to be very early, and turned 
 in. I was up at six, dressed and in the saddle 
 half an hour later, and there I sat. At a quarter 
 to eight the catechist turned up. It was a 
 dullish morning, and he quite cheerful, and, I 
 fancy honestly unconscious of having wasted 
 
OF THE BISHOPS' PRAYERS 177 
 
 my hours. At 9.30 we reached the village. By 
 this time I was tired and hungry and likely to 
 be more so before I could in any way satisfy the 
 needs of the body. The hut was just a hut, and 
 no particular preparations had been made. 
 However, I set up an altar and arranged every- 
 thing, for, however poor the place and however 
 simple the furnishings, it seems to me that 
 nothing should lack for the coming of the King. 
 Then I sat to hear the half-dozen confessions, 
 sat with despair and, I fear, anger in my heart. 
 One woman at least knew what she was about ; 
 the rest were quite hopeless. The last man re- 
 peated the Creed instead of the Confiteor, nor 
 would he be switched out of it, and knew ab- 
 solutely nothing of what he was there to do. He 
 and the rest came because the catechist told 
 them to do so, all but the first woman that is. 
 Afterwards I got hold of him and began to in- 
 struct him, but then asked where he came from. 
 He told me, and that he was going back in a 
 few months. I gave it up then ; I know that in 
 that part of the Anglican Church they do not 
 teach the Sacrament of Penance. 
 
 Well, then we began the mass. The hut was 
 crowded, I of course at the altar, with the 
 catechist to serve and lead the people's prayers. 
 And the hopeless muddle he made of it ! I was 
 so distracted that I hardly knew what I was 
 doing, and I should have been happier alone. 
 Yet the fellow has had a year's training at a 
 
178 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 Catholic Training College, at my expense in- 
 cidentally, which only shows that one year will 
 not eradicate ten of ignorance and neglect. 
 
 There were a lot of heathen, and I preached 
 to them. Somehow or other I was very moved 
 and tried with all my heart to win them. At the 
 end one man came up and said he would like to 
 speak to me privately. So I took him aside. A 
 convert ? Oh no ; he wanted me to give him an 
 old coat. 
 
 And about twelve o'clock I had a crust of 
 bread and a cup of so-called coffee, and after 
 that honestly thanked God for the gift of 
 tobacco. 
 
 Of course most of this was not the natives 7 
 fault. If I had recited, for example, the Prayer 
 Book Service of Holy Communion straight 
 through in a loud voice, the catechist would 
 probably have said most of the " Amens" at the 
 right time, and the people would dutifully have 
 repeated them after him. Also they would have 
 been able to repeat the General Confession in 
 the same way. That is what most of them are 
 used to, and that is why most of them know 
 nothing. My dear, I tell you my blood absolutely 
 boils when I think of it. I fear I see red. Of 
 course I have no right to do so ; in any case who 
 and what am I so to criticise my elders and 
 betters and the incomparable Prayer Book? It 
 has often been rubbed into me that it is mad and 
 uncharitable so to do. 
 
OF THE BISHOPS' PRAYERS 179 
 
 But the point is that for some reason or 
 another our authorities will not understand the 
 mental limitations of these people. (Forgive 
 me if I write dogmatically, won't you? It is 
 only meant to be a forceful form of argument, 
 you know.) They will not see that the language 
 of the Book of Common Prayer, even in their 
 own tongue, is utterly and entirely beyond 
 them. Look here, it is I Image the folk in that 
 hut to-day, five Christian women and one Chris- 
 tian man and some heathen, none of whom could 
 read, none of whom ever mix with people of 
 ideas, to whom, in that remote village perched 
 on a crag of the Berg, practically no news of the 
 world ever comes, and whose very vocabulary 
 is limited to a few score words concerned with 
 babies, mealies, cows, and sheep. 
 
 "Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, Who 
 of Thy tender mercy didst send Thine only 
 begotten Son to suffer death upon the Cross for 
 our redemption; Who made there, by His one 
 oblation of Himself once offered, a full, perfect, 
 and sufficient Sacrifice, Oblation and Satisfac- 
 tion for the sins of the whole world ; and didst 
 institute and in His holy Gospel command us to 
 continue a perpetual memory of that His 
 Precious Death until His coming again . . ." 
 how much of that, beautiful as it is, do you 
 think such people would understand? Why, I 
 dare to say that they do not know the meaning 
 of half the words even in Sesuto, and as to fol- 
 
180 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 lowing the complex grammatical construction 
 oh, but why go on? I suppose our English 
 fathers in God cannot disillusion themselves of 
 the idea that because it is Sesuto therefore 
 Basuto will understand it, yet they would have 
 known, if they had been in France, that when 
 it was English not one Tommy in ten under- 
 stood it. Yet the most ignorant [Tommy is a 
 University professor compared to these, my 
 people. 
 
 To stand up, then, and recite all this in an 
 even and audible tone, while the catechist fol- 
 lows with painful and painstaking energy in his 
 book and blurts out "Amen" when it is indi- 
 cated, is simply to waste one's time. Yes, I 
 have written it, and it shall stand. Of course 
 the good native folk reckon that it is 
 "prayers," and that you are a white moruti and 
 doubtless have power with God, and they will 
 put on clean clothes and smile and shake hands 
 and come miles for the same performance when 
 you are about next time. But for all that it is 
 waste time. They learn nothing, and only by a 
 miracle can grace filter through to their souls. 
 I do not say that Almighty God will not and 
 does not work such a miracle, but I do say that 
 He does not expect us to jettison our intelli- 
 gences and wait for it. Yet I have known a 
 holy man spend three days in these parts, 
 'knowing that he will not get back in a year, and 
 devote the time for public prayers of two of 
 
OF THE BISHOPS' PRAYERS 181 
 
 them to the recitation of complete Matins, with 
 the utmost reverence and decorum and edifica- 
 tion to himself and the angels. 
 
 Of course I do not recite the Book of Com- 
 mon Prayer in that even and audible tone. I 
 say the Canon of the Mass all but in silence. 
 My own people and catechists know exactly 
 what I am doing, thanks to the ritual and the 
 bell. While I recite the first part the cate- 
 chist says such words as these, and the people 
 after him: "0 Almighty God Send Thy Holy 
 Spirit; Change this Bread into the Body of 
 Jesus; Change this Wine into the Blood of 
 Jesus," and at any rate even the heathen know 
 what that means, and marvel. Then when the 
 bell has rung, and the elevation has been made, 
 again catechist and people speak: "0 Lord 
 Jesus Thou art here We worship Thee on 
 the altar; Father in Heaven Accept this 
 Sacrifice of Thy Son Jesus Christ Who died 
 on Calvary And is now on the Altar. ' ' And in 
 the silent interval they do not need to be told 
 to bow themselves in humble, trustful adora- 
 tion. 
 
 You see the difference, I take it. I do not say 
 that natives used to this could give you a theo- 
 logical disquisition on the Eeal Presence. I do 
 not say that they even all believe it. I do not 
 want to argue that it agrees or disagrees with 
 ancient liturgies, and doubtless it is even hor- 
 rifying to those who are still in eager and 
 
182 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 clamorous doubt as to the precise moment of 
 our Lord's coming and the precise manner. But 
 I do say that nobody is hindered, except by a 
 lack of mental power which is too great an 
 obstacle for anything short of a miracle to 
 overcome (and there is such among the na- 
 tives), from perceiving that the Church teaches, 
 to quote from St. Chrysostom, that as the 
 shepherds found our Lord in the stable, so do 
 Christians find Him on the altar. The Saviour 
 of the World, the Lamb of God, is lifted up then 
 .in such a way that the most ignorant may look 
 and live. 
 
 My catechist this morning, not wholly used 
 to such a mass, lost his head, clung to his Book 
 of Common Prayer, rang bells wildly, forgot to 
 say anything, and finally at any rate, this is 
 the perplexed native 's usual saving grace ! said 
 nothing. So after my communion I knelt down 
 and said the easy prayers for him. Then I 
 started to sing the " Agnus Dei," and that he 
 was able to continue alone while I gave com- 
 munion. That, too, they all did take up, al- 
 though that again is not provided for in the 
 rubrics of the Prayer Book. And may I say 
 it, my dear? do you know that even then, per- 
 plexed, worried, and tired as I was, there sud- 
 denly stole over me a sense of the peace of God 
 and of a Presence beyond all words. It is mar- 
 vellous and wonderful how He comes again and 
 again. It is against all reason to build an in- 
 
OF THE BISHOPS' PRAYERS 183 
 
 tellectual position on feeling, against all- my 
 reason at least to defend Anglican orders by 
 such an argument. I know it, and I have said 
 it a score of times. But well, perhaps there is 
 a good deal in Fr. Faber's hymn, after all: 
 
 "The Love of God is wider than the measures of man's 
 
 mind, 
 And the Heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind." 
 
 Besides, of course, strict Roman theology 
 allows that, seeing I am acting in good faith and 
 that the people believe, they are fed with the 
 Food of the spiritual Body of Christ. 
 
 As we rode home Augustino spoke. 
 
 "Why is it, Father," he said, "that the 
 Prayer Book has so many long, hard prayers 
 and so few short ones?" 
 
 "Well, it was written for English people," I 
 said feebly. 
 
 Silence for a few minutes. Then 
 
 "The father's prayers are very short and 
 very beautiful. The people understand them." 
 
 "They are not my prayers especially," I 
 said. "And besides any little prayers that you 
 might make up and say to Jesus when He 
 comes, would do instead, and they would be 
 very likely better if you made them up your- 
 selves. The priest, of course, has to say the 
 hard, long prayers, but the people can talk to 
 our Lord in their own way from their heart." 
 
 "It is so, Father," he said, "but this people 
 
184 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 is very ignorant. Why, even I grow mud- 
 dled (!). Will not the father write an easy 
 prayer-book for us, that we can understand?" 
 
 "He will not," the father replied. 
 
 "Why not?" he demanded. 
 
 I looked at him. What could I say? How 
 could I tell him that one such was already 
 written, but that it would be disloyal to give it 
 him? How could I explain that its doctrine 
 would not meet with general favour? How 
 could I account for the fact that, as no two 
 priests of the Anglican Communion ever cele- 
 brate alike, it would tend to be a sectarian 
 action if I were to publish such a book, and in 
 any case be all but locally useless ? So 
 
 "It is the work of the Bishops," I said. 
 
 "When will they do it, then?" he demanded. 
 
 "I do not know," said I. 
 
 Do you, my dear? Between ourselves, does 
 anybody? 
 
21. OF A DISPUTED QUESTION 
 
 I AM writing down for you to-day what I 
 wrote mentally yesterday, so that I shall 
 write in the historic present. It is a most 
 wonderful night of stars and moon, oh, my 
 friend, and I have not allowed Cyril to pitch 
 my tent in order that I may take it all in. We 
 are up again on the great hill-tops, having been 
 down to the Berg Camp, for, I suppose, the last 
 time. The moon is so bright that I can see 
 rocks and grass and a little stream leaping and 
 tumbling in molten silver. The horses graze 
 just over yonder, and the night is so still that I 
 can hear them cropping the grass and moving 
 leisurely about. The stars are beyond my pen. 
 I am on my back staring up at them, and if I 
 stare long enough I leave the earth altogether 
 and start off up to them. I can veritably feel 
 the solid world swinging away under me, and I 
 am just poised, or swiftly fleeting, through the 
 viewless wastes of air. But I never make any 
 appreciable headway, and, as you can guess, 
 when I give the effort up in despair, I find that 
 I have not even moved. All of which, my dear, 
 is a parable of many things and not the least of 
 what I must needs write to you. 
 
 185 
 
186 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 Do you know, I am singularly happy. I sup- 
 pose I ought not to be. I pinch myself again 
 and again mentally to try to feel hurt, but it is 
 no good. I am happy, and there is an end to it. 
 I suppose I am happy because after great 
 mental stress it is such a relief to come to a 
 conclusion, and the people who would be an- 
 noyed with me for coming to this condition are 
 really the people who have no idea of what 
 mental agony can be. Do you not think hon- 
 estly that the people who call us poor Catholic- 
 minded clergy of the Church of England hypo- 
 crites and traitors are rather hard? They can 
 never have known what it is to strive to see the 
 right between conflicting claims till your brain 
 reels, and your mind is in torment, and death 
 would quite strictly be as much of a relief to 
 you as it was sometimes to those poor souls on 
 the rack. The very rack itself was less than the 
 torment of the mind that honestly wants to do 
 right and is not sure, and cannot, cannot see. 
 
 And now, for some reason or another, I feel 
 I see, not very much, but enough, and I am so 
 happy, after all. 
 
 But this is rather putting the cart before the 
 horses, is it not? To begin properly, I have just 
 paid my last ministerial visit to the Europeans 
 at the Camp. You must picture the Camp the 
 Government Eeserve with its half-dozen Euro- 
 pean houses of officials and its two or three 
 stores, not much in London, but a great deal 
 
OF A DISPUTED QUESTION 187 
 
 when you are trekking on the Berg. Lest any- 
 thing I may say should read rudely, do let me 
 write it down at once that kinder, more hos- 
 pitable, or more straightforward people I do 
 not wish to meet than those at this Camp. They 
 are all English, I think, for the most part the 
 Public School breed grafted on a colonial stock. 
 Heavens! I believe I have put my foot in it! 
 But what I mean is, men bred at home in the 
 Public School, yet somewhat more easy and 
 open-hearted as a result of our mountains and 
 stars and winds. You could hardly better that. 
 
 I am happy, then, not because I have paid my 
 last visit to them, but because it is my last min- 
 isterial visit. There are still days of trek 
 ahead, but I have done with the Camp. Four 
 days in all have I been there, and on the Sun- 
 day, as usual, I celebrated the Holy Com- 
 munion, and then, later, said Matins and 
 preached. The previous Sunday I was among 
 natives, as I shall be the next, and it is because 
 I have done with the serving of two religions 
 that I am glad. For, my dear, stripped of all 
 the study cobwebs, that is what it is. I am a 
 Catholic priest (in theory) on the Berg; I am a 
 Protestant minister (in fact) in the Camp. And 
 the two religions are not beautifully comple- 
 mentary ; they are very decidedly contradictory. 
 
 Up on the Berg, as you must have seen by 
 now from these letters, I just teach and act in 
 accordance with my faith, and I give the natives 
 
188 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 the simple, straightforward Catholic religion. 
 Up there Jesus comes to the altar in His own 
 adorable real Presence, and the bread when 
 He has come is only truly Bread if you write it 
 with a capital B as one of His names. The 
 offering of Him is a propitiatory Sacrifice for 
 the living and the dead. Forgiveness is nothing 
 other than the plan of God, the Sacrament of 
 Penance. The companionship of the saints, and 
 particularly of the most holy Mother of God, is 
 our happiness and strength, and a God-given 
 means of grace. That is my faith up there. 
 
 Has it ever struck you what such as I have to 
 do in the Camp? Believing all this, we have to 
 act as if we did not. I tell the good folk that 
 they ought "most chiefly" to confess their sins 
 when they assemble and meet together; and I 
 do not believe it. I have to place our Lord's 
 Body in the hands of those who believe the 
 Sacrament to be no more than bread. I have to 
 offer the propitiatory sacrifice of the mass, not 
 in the words of the ancient Western rite which 
 makes no doubt of it at all, but in the improved 
 phraseology of a turncoat archbishop who most 
 definitely believed the very contrary, or, at any 
 rate, wrote in such a way that people who did 
 so disbelieve might still happily attend the ser- 
 vice. And I have studiously to ignore the inter- 
 cessions of the whole company of heaven as if 
 that was a matter of no importance, and I have 
 to squeeze my own prayers for the dead into a 
 
OF A DISPUTED QUESTION 189 
 
 crevice in the prayer for the Church Militant 
 here on earth. Now what is this but the serving 
 of two religions ? 
 
 Of course some of my friends in the ministry 
 would declare that I did wrong; that I ought 
 either definitely to teach my faith and use the 
 " additional devotions" (how that phrase 
 makes me smile, because they are so very ad- 
 ditional that there is mighty little left of the 
 original!) which I use among the natives, or 
 else that I ought to stick to the Prayer Book, 
 perhaps, but make it quite clear, in sermon and 
 manner, what I hold. Possibly I do attempt the 
 last in some degree, but I am a sad coward, and, 
 what is more, I believe I am cursed with some 
 ability to see both sides of a question. " After 
 all," I say to myself, " these good folk have 
 been brought up in their faith by wiser, older, 
 and more learned divines than I, and that same 
 Protestant faith of theirs is still professed, un- 
 rebuked and even honoured, in the Church at 
 home by other wiser, older, and more learned 
 divines." Here, too, there is no choice of a low 
 or a high church, so that if I drove them from 
 the altar (as in some cases even my moderate 
 and tentative ministry has done, and as, if I 
 did otherwise, I surely should) they would have 
 nowhere else to go. 
 
 Even more, I can never escape from the con- 
 viction that they are more right than I. It is all 
 very well. Cranmer and Parker and Whitgift 
 
190 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 would have had no use for me. I fear that even 
 Laud would have been distressed could he have 
 journeyed with me on the Berg these last few 
 months. Still more, even if you reckon that this 
 is a disputed question, it is a disputed question. 
 I mean that I hold to one historic interpretation 
 of the Prayer Book, and I have taken my stand 
 on the supposition that it is meant to allow 
 Catholicism at the least; that one may supple- 
 ment it; that it is the Romish, and not the 
 Catholic, doctrine of mass and relic and Purga- 
 tory that the Articles forbid. But a third un- 
 biassed person, having respect to the weight of 
 learned opinion on either side, would surely feel 
 that the question was still in dispute, and that 
 therefore it is rough of me to act as if it were 
 closed with these Englishmen of a different 
 opinion on the face of the Berg. 
 
 The question that confronts such as I am, 
 therefore, is a singularly difficult one. It is a 
 choice between a right and a wrong each way, 
 and it seems impossible to get both the rights on 
 the same side. Am I to accept what might truly 
 seem the call of God and, so accepting, minister 
 in a false position, or am I to make the position 
 honest but as a result cease to minister? That 
 is the present moral quandary, and you have to 
 add to it the continual worry as to whether 
 one's judgment about the Church of England 
 at all is right or wrong as to whether she is 
 or is not a living part of the Catholic Church. 
 
OF A DISPUTED QUESTION 191 
 
 Surely we are more to be pitied than most men, 
 especially when we labour under the frown of 
 those in high places and in an unsympathetic 
 and hostile atmosphere. 
 
 You may ask, my dear, why I feel I have 
 settled the matter now. The answer is very 
 simple : the Berg has done it for me. Its silence 
 and majesty and unchangeableness seem to 
 have been saying in my soul : ' ' You complicate 
 matters! You try to bear God's burden! You 
 worry too much! Just you do what is plainly 
 right, and be still." And it is perfectly plain 
 to me that it is wrong to serve two masters and 
 profess two religions at once, and that the 
 double-facedness of the Anglican Church is no 
 honest position for a person who has made up 
 his mind. My mind, such as it is, is made up. 
 Like my people up here, I know perfectly well 
 that the ignorance, rudeness, and need of my 
 soul are satisfied by the Catholic religion, and 
 that alone. In the Church of my birth the truth 
 of the Catholic religion is held in suspense. 
 Question her as you will, there is no voice nor 
 any that answers, unless the answer she gives 
 is "I don't know," or "I shan't tell," which is, 
 as a matter of fact, what the average man 
 understands her to say. So long, then, as that 
 is so, I am faced with the intolerable position 
 of the Camp and the Berg, and I am bound to be 
 in full communion with those who deny what I 
 believe, and whose denials have the approbation 
 
192 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 of the Church behind them as much as or more 
 than my affirmations. You may have seen the 
 reasons which the Bishop of Delaware has so 
 ably given for his resignation of office and min- 
 istry in the Church of England in America. I 
 cannot better them, unless it be to add that I 
 leave also for something of the reason that St. 
 John is alleged to have left the Public Baths 
 when he knew that Cerinthus was inside ! 
 
 But you may still think it strange that I 
 should be happy when such action involves so 
 much the leaving of these people of mine up 
 here, of whom I have now written to you often, 
 especially. Should I be? I wonder. You see, 
 I have never been able to get away from the 
 feeling that I have been deceiving them all 
 along, for I have been coaxing them into a 
 sheep-fold alleged to be secure against wolves 
 when I know that the wolves actually lurk there. 
 To cut out metaphors, you cannot think what 
 such work is like. Anglican Church natives 
 trek up here from elsewhere and find a different 
 religion from that in which they were brought 
 up. Trained catechists come to me, and I take 
 them on, and then have to set about teaching 
 them a new religion. On the other hand, my 
 people go down from here, look in vain for what 
 they have learned, and become lax and indif- 
 ferent for want of the help they need. And the 
 . future looms with danger. Even now they are 
 beginning to read, to get magazines from both 
 
OF A DISPUTED QUESTION 193 
 
 points of view in the Church of England, or, 
 even as one boy of mine recently, papers by 
 Anglican divines denying the Lord's Divinity 
 and historic Eesurrection and Ascension. And 
 it is I who have steered them into these troubled 
 waters rather than into the Harbour of the 
 Peace of God. 
 
 So, you see, although I am sad deep down 
 at leaving those who have taught me so much 
 and who have reposed in me faith and love, still, 
 in a way, I am so glad to be leaving a false posi- 
 tion that all this is swallowed up. How differ- 
 ent it would have been if I had been able single- 
 heartedly to throw myself into this work, know- 
 ing that I was building on a rock ! I cannot but 
 envy the priests of the Roman Mission here. 
 When a man falls in that Mission, he can die 
 gladly, for he knows another will step into his 
 place to work with the same end in view and to 
 teach the same things. He knows he is part of 
 a world-wide Church in which heresy is ruth- 
 lessly suppressed. His sheep may fall victims 
 to the wolves, but it will be their own fault. 
 There are none in the fold, nor can wolves enter. 
 
 Thus, then, I do indeed grow sad. Oh, my 
 dear, if only I had been different ! if only I had 
 seen clearer years ago ! if only I had not been 
 afraid ! But regrets are useless, and besides I 
 do not think I am of the stuff of which such 
 priests are made. Of all heroisms I know none 
 to excel theirs. Faith is, of course, their shield 
 
194 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 and anchor; but for all that it means much to 
 give one's life to these rugged mountains, to 
 spend the years tending these people, who, with 
 all the glimpses of vision that they give you, 
 are still stiff-necked, hard to understand, diffi- 
 cult to befriend. These shepherds have left 
 home, wife, children, fatherland, the joy of art 
 and study, the rewards of men, even the joy of 
 seeing much accomplished, the joy of raising a 
 memorial in the earth. They are content, like 
 their people, to live a while on the Berg's face 
 and die, letting their dust scatter to the winds, 
 unknowing and unknown. I am not cut out for 
 that. Could I, for example, have left the 
 thought of you! 
 
 The thought of you! Yet have I truly won 
 you? And I go out now, alone, to what? I do 
 not know. The Eoman Church seems no mother 
 to me, holding out tender arms, and I am not 
 drawn, as they say converts are drawn, by the 
 beauty and art of her churches and ritual. If I 
 go to her, it will be because I must save my soul 
 and I cannot find my Lord elsewhere. Yet as I 
 write it is not the face of that age-long Church 
 and Mistress that is before me, but rather 
 yours, that I see as so dear, so very lovely, so 
 tender in your love. Must I surrender you? 
 
 Oh, my dear, my dear, there is a cloud over 
 the face of the moon, and the wind is stirring 
 mournfully among the mountain grasses, and 
 the night grows chill. 
 
22. OF THE COST OF MISSIONS 
 
 WILL you read a letter that is one sus- 
 tained "grouse"? I rather want you 
 to do so for a reason that I gave you the 
 other day, when I said that I always feared, 
 in writing and speaking about missions, the 
 painting of a too golden, one-sided picture. 
 Here and now I propose to expose to you the 
 other side as it was shown to me in a happen- 
 ing begun when last I was in this village, and 
 concluded last night. 
 
 It was at a place of which I am rather fond, 
 where a chief is building a church for us him- 
 self, and in which we had a score of Christians. 
 The head of the little Christian community is a 
 fellow with an Old Testament name whom I will 
 call Hezekiah, for his real name is no better. 
 Hezekiah, then, is a fairly wealthy man in flocks 
 and herds, and he has many huts, and in one of 
 them I have ever been used to stay. Several 
 times have I come, at the close of a hot long 
 day, and been very glad of my reception. A 
 hut has been swept for me, milk and bread and 
 sometimes meat seemingly freely offered, and I 
 have felt myself among friends. When first I 
 came to the Berg, I was told by an old priest of 
 
 195 
 
196 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 Hezekiah that he had been baptised as a child, 
 and might be looked upon as the " elder" of 
 that little Church. When I met him, I found 
 at once that he was very ignorant, but I heard 
 that he "took prayers," and I did not conceive 
 that he had any pretensions to be more than a 
 Christian farmer. 
 
 Well, at our last visit, then, after prayers and 
 supper, came the shock. Hezekiah said he 
 wanted to speak to me, and on coming in it was 
 plain that the veneer had been stripped off. He 
 began by saying that he had come for his 
 money. Utterly mystified, I asked, "What 
 money?" The money for his work these many 
 years as a catechist, he said. I replied that I 
 had no idea that he was a catechist ; where had 
 he been trained? who had appointed him? still 
 more, what had he done ? 
 
 That opened the floodgate. He named the old 
 priest, who used before my time to make very 
 occasional visits here, and he said he had been 
 appointed catechist by him; that ever since he 
 had worked for the Mission, teaching and pray- 
 ing ; that we had come many times now, sleeping 
 under his roof and eating his food ; and that he 
 was tired of waiting and doing all this for 
 nothing at all. And now he heard I was sending 
 a new catechist . . . 
 
 I am glad I kept my temper. I asked for the 
 registers of his classes ; he had none. I pointed 
 out that there were practically no heathen 
 
OF THE^COST OF MISSIONS 197 
 
 under instruction here, and that that was why I 
 was sending a catechist, recently trained at col- 
 lege. I said I had never been told of his ap- 
 pointment or that any salary had been prom- 
 ised him, but that I would write to the old priest 
 and inquire. And finally I apologised for eat- 
 ing food which I had thought a gift, and I asked 
 how much I owed him for it. 
 
 In the months that followed I got at the truth. 
 The old priest told me, astonished, that he had 
 never called him catechist and made an ap- 
 pointment, still less named a salary, but that he 
 had asked him, as a man who could read, to say 
 Sunday prayers. Hezekiah had begged cassock 
 and surplice, and had been in the habit of 
 monotoning a mutilated version of Morning 
 Prayer on "g" on and off ever since. He had 
 never taught or wanted to teach. He was the 
 big man in that black and white church dress, 
 and the collects monotoned on "g" had been 
 the beginning and the end of his missionary 
 labours. Gradually the idea had dawned that 
 "the Mission" ought to pay him. And now it 
 had all come out. 
 
 Last night I called him in, and did my best to 
 put it right. I spoke of the duty every Chris- 
 tian man owed to God. I told him that none of 
 us were "paid" for religion, and that even we 
 priests were only given a living wage, not as a 
 wage, but as a means to live and devote our 
 whole time to God's service. I urged that, as a 
 
198 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 matter of fact, simple prayers and simple in- 
 structions would help people nearer to God 
 than the sort of thing he had been doing. And 
 well, with the best intentions, I only poured 
 oil on the fire. He was very rude. When he 
 had gone, I gave way to despair, for he had 
 shown me how a mission can fail. 
 
 It is our failure. Cassocks and surplices and 
 monotoned prayers oh, shades of Pusey and 
 Keble, these can be the sepulchres of true 
 religion! I feel like a Puritan and a Noncon- 
 formist when I think of the folly of allowing 
 ignorant natives to dress up and recite Matins. 
 Then I feel like a Eoman Catholic when I think 
 how badly we fail to show what the Church of 
 God really is. To them a nightmare of imagina- 
 tion, called The Mission, run by rich white 
 priests (why I don't think they know), is the 
 Church, or else it's "Charch," as they hide- 
 ously say, our agency, like that of the Mafora 
 (or French Protestants) of the Ba-Koma (or 
 Eoman Catholics), for Europeanising the coun- 
 try. The idea of its being the Ark of Salvation, 
 the Kingdom of the Poor Thorn-crowned King 
 in which it is an honour to serve for nothing 
 with all one's earthly goods and powers that 
 is far from the generality of our converts. So 
 have I catechists who will not stir five miles 
 without "the Mission" finding them a horse, 
 or use anything of their own in the service 
 unless it is paid for. 
 
OF THE COST OF MISSIONS 199 
 
 Poor Hezekiah ! What have we done for him 
 these twenty years? Alas ! nothing, I fear. His 
 dull black mind is not really enlightened at all. 
 His blind eyes have seen no vision. All his 
 praying and all his dressing up has not once 
 carried him to the threshold of that other world 
 where one falls on one's face as one dead. The 
 Gospel has not really reached him at all. His 
 religion, like his name, is none other than that 
 of the Kings of Israel and Judah, and maybe 
 not as good as theirs. He cannot be placed 
 among the Beatitudes at all, and if he has mas- 
 tered the Ten Commandments, of what good 
 are they? "Master, all these have I kept from 
 my youth up. . . . But one thing thou lack- 
 est. . . ." Hezekiah has not learned the initial 
 lessons of Christ Love and Sacrifice. 
 
 Maybe I have not said enough to make you 
 see that this is really a true picture. If so, I 
 can only ask you to believe that I would not 
 exaggerate it. Maybe you think I ought not to 
 write so of any of our people, and that in any 
 case he is no worse than many Europeans. But 
 what is the use of always keeping silence, and, 
 besides, is it any excuse to compare him with 
 our own pagan white folk, to whom the Christ 
 is no more than a shadow in history? What is 
 the use of hiding it? This is where Missions 
 fail. 
 
 Hardly ever would I dole out cassocks and 
 surplices if I had my way, hardly ever would I 
 
200 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 give practically untrained men the Book of 
 Common Prayer, and never, I think, would I 
 teach them to read its prayers. Nor would I 
 build them churches ; nor, as soon as there were 
 any number of Christians, would I pay their 
 priests ; nor, as a priest, would I ever arrive at 
 a village with money or food or horses of my 
 own. 
 
 What do you think of all this ? The dream of 
 a visionary? Perhaps, but can you dispute the 
 dream with me? Is not the Kingdom within 
 you? Does it not lie in love and reality and 
 sacrifice? Is not the church of mud and reed, 
 erected by the people themselves because they 
 want to build a house to which God may come 
 in His Sacrament, better than any stone and 
 iron building built for them by Europeans ? It 
 seems to me that the whole essence of Chris- 
 tianity lies in the life within. That must spring 
 of itself and grow and bring forth fruit of 
 architecture and ritual and service as well of 
 transformed lives. It did so in Europe, and it 
 must do so in Africa. Augustine came barefoot 
 from the glories of Borne, and the church in 
 Canterbury was a lowly Saxon building of mud 
 and thatch. 
 
 So with the priest, too. True, the Seventy 
 were sent out with purse and staff, but still they 
 were to abide only where welcomed and eat 
 what was freely given them. So soon as the 
 Church in any place was formed and needed its 
 
OF THE COST OF MISSIONS 201 
 
 whole-time minister the labourer was worthy of 
 his hire, A white man hired by natives ! Even 
 so. It was God Himself who said: "I am among 
 you as he that serveth." 
 
 My dear, we mix up Christianity and Educa- 
 tion, Christianity and Civilisation, even Chris- 
 tianity and shirts and trousers. People say one 
 must, but it is a lie. I have been a missionary 
 all my days, though they may be few, and, thank 
 God, I have never taught any one to wear 
 trousers ! But I have laboured all my time with 
 a load on my back, for people would think of me 
 as interested in schools or as a white man or as 
 a Europeanising agency. But the truth is that 
 you do not make a man a Christian by teaching 
 him to read the Bible, or by showing him how to 
 dress, or even by making roads through his 
 country and giving him police. All is sub- 
 servient to this : that you awake his soul to see 
 God. Offer him the simple sacramental religion 
 of Jesus Christ. He may refuse it, but that is 
 not your business. He may accept it; then let 
 the rest follow. And if he accepts it, he himself 
 will give of the best he has in labour, gifts, and 
 love, to build his own church and to feed and 
 cherish his own priest. These are the two last 
 things of which poor Hezekiah thinks, and no 
 wonder, for I do not believe he has ever seen 
 what Christianity really is. A native priest 
 wrote the other day publicly that Christianity 
 was Education and Good Manners, and I do not 
 
202 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 even blame him much, for I fear we have taught 
 him so. 
 
 Possibly, having got so far, you will still have 
 enough toleration left to ask what I would sug- 
 gest. Practically I believe the answer is a very 
 simple one: the work of Missions should 
 primarily be the work of religious orders, and, 
 just as when a man proposed to build a tower, 
 the work of Missions ought not to be attempted 
 unless the cost has first been considered. Nor is 
 the cost to be reckoned in s. d. Raymond Lull 
 reckoned better when he worked out the sum in 
 blood and tears, Christ's gospel can only be 
 preached by Christ's men. Father Lemans, 
 with 20 a year, carried from place to place by 
 his people and fed by them, never dispensing 
 surplices and cassocks and never asking his con- 
 verts to recite the Breviary at one another, is 
 doing something. Very likely he has his Heze- 
 Mahs : I should not be surprised ; St. Peter had 
 his Ananias and Sapphira and his Simon 
 Magus. But Father Lemans, like St. Peter, is 
 under no delusions in regard to them, and, alas! 
 we are. 
 
 There you are . . . 
 
 That is an honest grouse! But now I am 
 going to say the General Confession in the first 
 person singular and go to bed. 
 
23. OF A MOUNT OF TEMPTATION 
 
 SUPPOSE I write you a genuine but old- 
 fashioned missionary story in the best 
 missionary society meeting style! I can 
 do so, for one such has just been truly enacted 
 with your humble servant somewhat prom- 
 inently in the cast. It may interest you, so here 
 goes! And wasn't my last letter a horrid 
 grouse! Here is the corrective. 
 
 There is a chief we will call him Motseke 
 who has asked me several times, personally, 
 and by messenger, to come to his village, and 
 twice I have tried to visit him. But he has been 
 always so delightfully vague as to the where- 
 abouts of his " place, " like most mountain 
 natives, who make no account of half a day's 
 ride in one direction or another, that I have 
 never been able to find him. Last winter I de- 
 layed a day looking for him and found him not, 
 but merely a heavy snowstorm instead. How- 
 ever, this time, seeing I have days in some sort 
 to spare on the Berg now, I set out with definite 
 intent. 
 
 I knew he was on a certain river, and I deter- 
 mined to follow its course till I found him. The 
 map marked no road and no villages, but that 
 
 203 
 
204 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 was a little matter, for the map was made some 
 ten years ago, and everybody, except the people 
 who want the Berg for the white man, knows 
 how rapidly the native population is growing 
 and filling it. We set out, therefore, at dawn 
 one day from a fixed point ; and we determined 
 to follow the river until we reached another 
 fixed and known point, for Motseke must lie 
 between the two. There was a road of sorts, 
 but such a road! The river, called "The 
 Twister" in the native, does indeed wind and 
 twist, and the tiny trail wound with it round the 
 mountains through which the Twister has cut 
 its way these ages since. There is nothing more 
 tiring than such a road. You come to a great 
 fissure in the mountain, and across it, going 
 round the bend to a second fissure, you see your 
 trail. It is perhaps a few hundred yards away. 
 Yet you must follow the trail right up the fis- 
 sure, cross the inevitable little trickle running 
 down it, and wind wearily round the precipice 
 of the other side. Anything up to an hour of 
 hard, stony work will bring you at last to the 
 point you saw. 
 
 For the best part of a day we travelled so, 
 and then we cut up between two peaks on to a 
 table-land that was rich in grass and cattle. 
 Things looked promising, for the herdmen 
 nodded sagely at the name of Motseke. We 
 crossed the pastures, and towards sunset the 
 path fell away down a valley. We rode harder. 
 
OF A MOUNT OF TEMPTATION 205 
 
 Seven villages of dependants we passed, and in 
 the dusk made tlie eighth, that stood on guard 
 at the entrance to the valley. Cyril rode up and 
 inquired, and turned and waved his hand. Mot- 
 seke was found at last. 
 
 He came out, an agile, eager, hearty, but 
 white-haired old man, and he all but ran to meet 
 me. He seized my hands, and began to bellow 
 to his people. So excitedly and fast he spoke 
 that I hardly caught his words, but Cyril inter- 
 jected translations : " A priest had come at last ! 
 For seven years had he, Motseke, been seeking 
 a priest to visit his village, and, lo ! none could 
 
 be found. He had been to and to 
 
 and to , and then he had heard that I 
 
 travelled in the mountains, and he had come to 
 me. Ho! ho! ho! A priest had come at last! 
 Now they would have a school and a church and 
 a catechist. Had I not seen all the villages, 
 all his herds? and all were mine!" And at 
 that point he let go of my hands to gesticulate 
 and shout to his men. 
 
 I told you what sort of a story this would be, 
 and so you must have the local colour. There I 
 stood, in my dreadful, tattered old Norfolk 
 jacket, my face peeled and burnt, my horses 
 around drooping with fatigue. Before us was 
 the semicircle of huts on the hillside, below us 
 the green valley, the great river, and the purple 
 mountain barrier rising beyond. Stars were 
 even then peeping in the paling sky, and it was 
 
206 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 very still. Smoke from dung fires rose per- 
 pendicularly in grey columns, and one caught 
 the scent of it while the men came running at 
 the old man's bidding with his gifts. They 
 piled them at my feet. A sheep, a turkey, a 
 couple of fowls, eggs, milk, mafi, a dish of raw 
 potatoes and some beansthese were among 
 the first offerings, and when they had done the 
 old fellow reiterated that all he had was mine. 
 He then asked for how long I would stay. "A 
 month ?" "No," I said, "that was impos- 
 sible." "Well, two weeks, then?" I shook my 
 head. "A week?" "No," said I; "I must 
 leave the next morning," and so, much as I 
 was grateful for his gifts, a few eggs, some 
 milk, and a bowl of mafi were all that I wanted. 
 Poor old fellow! It was really pathetic. He 
 sat down on a big stone, and put his hands to 
 his head. "For seven years," said he, "I have 
 waited for a priest to come to my place, and 
 when he comes he stays one night!" But I 
 could not help it. I had already spent more 
 time than I could afford. I was due at the Mis- 
 sion, where people would be waiting for me, in 
 two days, and I knew it would take all my time 
 to get there. 
 
 I moved inside the lelapa, or semicircular 
 fence of reeds which acts as a break-wind in 
 front of the huts, and asked for water in which 
 to wash. They brought me a big bowl of warm 
 water, and I stripped to the waist and got down 
 
OF A MOUNT OF TEMPTATION 207 
 
 to it. In the middle of my ablutions the old 
 chief came in, and immediately, to my con- 
 fusion, called his wives and his people generally 
 to watch. A small crowd gathered, and to them 
 he made a speech something as follows : 
 
 "My people, see the priest of the Church! 
 Have I not always told you that we would have 
 a priest of the Church here or no Church at all? 
 You know the native baruti" (i.e., teachers) 
 
 "of " (and he named another Mission). 
 
 "What do they do if they come here? Do they 
 wait for me to give them a sheep? No! They 
 demand it. Do they kill and share it? No! 
 They drive it before them to their own place. 
 But this priest of all our gifts he says, 'Give 
 me but a little milk and a few eggs, and I am 
 content ! Give me but a little water in which to 
 wash, and I have all I need ! ' Look at him now, 
 oh, my people ! See his white skin. His heart 
 is as white as his skin ! Did I not say we should 
 have a priest of the Church or none? Did I not 
 say well?" 
 
 ( Chorus. ) ' * Ah, thou saidest it ! Thou said- 
 est well!" 
 
 They gave me a hut, of course, and I dined off 
 hard-boiled eggs, bread, mafi and jam, and tea ; 
 but then, before I turned in, I went outside. It 
 was a night of almost full moon, and I climbed 
 up a little behind the huts and sat on a rock to 
 watch. The valley lay bathed in the misty light. 
 
 If I listened hard enough, I could just hear 
 
208 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 the water of the river a long way off in the 
 intense stillness. Small sounds, indeed, came up 
 to me from the unseen huts of villages at a dis- 
 tance the bark of a dog, the cry of a child, 
 once the crow of a sleepy cock, that ended 
 ludicrously as if the bird had fallen asleep 
 again in the middle of it. So I sat and surveyed 
 the native world, the whole valley all but un- 
 visited, its villages unmarked on the map, un- 
 evangelised, and I thought of many things. 
 
 It did just enter my head to wonder for a 
 moment if it might not be better for me to leave 
 it as I found it, and build no school and no 
 church. But I thought so only for a minute. 
 My withdrawal would not mean that Western 
 civilisation would not come, nor would it mean 
 that the natives would cease to go to mine and 
 store and return with European treasures and 
 vices. Moreover, Christianity is not to me (as 
 a gentleman in a smoke-room once put it) "a 
 highly developed philosophy unsuited to the 
 native even if he can in the least under stand it." 
 To me it is the highway to God of which it is 
 written that wayfaring men, though fools, can- 
 not err therein; it is the ark that floats above 
 the waters of a surely drowning world. 
 
 And yet have I not already told you that I do 
 intend to go away? Well, my dear, that night 
 I questioned that decision more intensely than 
 I have done for any day these last two months. 
 I think that moonlit valley side was my mount 
 
OF A MOUNT OF TEMPTATION 209 
 
 of temptation. It may sound extreme to you, 
 but it seemed to me- that these people were 
 offered me if I would but fall down before the 
 Tempter. "Sacrifice your conception of truth 
 and right for the empire of these" that is how 
 it came to me. There was the appeal of their 
 weakness, their eager welcome, their lovable- 
 ness, and their need, and against it only that 
 my religious system does not seem to me honest 
 or true. But its truth and honesty are in grave 
 dispute, and many hold that it has both ; more- 
 over, it is so insidious a whisper that says: 
 "You, and you alone, will have to do with them. 
 You can teach as you will and build as you will. 
 What does the Lambeth Conference or the 
 Anglican attitude in England matter to you up 
 here? For the sake of these poor souls, stay 
 on!" 
 
 Then I remembered again the two mission- 
 aries returning to China at the time of the 
 Boxer riots. Urged to avoid peril, one said: "I 
 must return because of my sheep," but the 
 other answered more quietly: "I must return 
 because of the Shepherd. " It is a strange par- 
 adox, but I, who would stay on account of the 
 sheep, feel that I must go on account of the 
 Shepherd. A man must be true to Christ first 
 true, at any rate, to what he cannot but feel 
 for himself is involved by being true to Christ. 
 
 So in the end, if it be a conquest, I conquered. 
 Being a modern, I knocked out the ashes of my 
 
210 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 pipe and went down the rocky hillside to bed, 
 but, my dear, it was my boat and my nets that 
 I left there, and the dead to bury their dead. 
 
 Next morning I did all I could do, up to the 
 light I have to-day. I chose a site for a church ; 
 I settled details ; I promised windows and door 
 on the part of the Mission if they would build, 
 and roof that is, I offered to do what they 
 cannot do. And last, but far from least, I set 
 up a little altar within that reed fence, and I 
 offered the Holy Sacrifice in the clear, sweet 
 morning light in the presence of the one Chris- 
 tian woman, her half-dozen christened children, 
 and at least a hundred heathen. To them I 
 explained that I was making the greatest 
 prayer to God on their behalf that could be 
 made. If a man would gain his end of a chief, 
 did he not bring sheep or ox? Who were we 
 that God Almighty and All Holy should hear 
 us? But we brought in this Prayer a Victim, 
 and for His sake God would hear. And that 
 Victim? None other than His Son, Who by a 
 miracle would there, unseen but surely, change 
 Bread and Wine into His living self. And to 
 God's Majesty I said in my secret heart : "Have 
 Thou respect, God, not to my weakness, my 
 ignorance, my sin, but to the Sacred Victim on 
 ten thousand Catholic altars this day through- 
 out Thy world, with which I do at least will to 
 be one." 
 
 As shortly after I lifted the Sacrifice in my; 
 
_, OF A MOUNT OF TEMPTATION 211 
 
 hands for all to see, my upturned face caught 
 the first rays of the sun, just risen high enough 
 in the east to overtop that reed fence. Its 
 splendour fell on the bowed and awed heathen 
 group behind, and dazzled my poor eyes; and 
 to me it seemed no less than a sign that while I 
 was yet speaking He had heard. 
 
 "We were camped on the sand 
 
 By a fire so good to see 
 Under a tree so grand, 
 
 And the stars were over the tree. 
 
 "That night aside the fire 
 
 Learned I my road to go 
 In the joy of a God's Desire, 
 In the ruth of a Rood of woe. 
 
 "A fire on a rock in the sand 
 Faith lit at dawn for me 
 Under a Tree so grand, 
 With a Star yet over that Tree." 
 
 Arthur Shearty Cripps, 
 
24. OF EELICS AND FRIENDS 
 
 NOT long ago I wrote you a letter in which 
 I found myself talking to you about 
 loneliness, and I want to go on and tell 
 you something more that is in my heart to say. 
 For to-day we rode five hours in the morning 
 under a blistering sun, and when the midday 
 off-saddle became a necessity, I told Cyril that 
 I would find a spring of really cold water and 
 some shade if I had to walk five miles for it. I 
 should think I walked one mile at least anyhow. 
 The water in the little open streams was warm, 
 as it often is, for it flows shallow over the rocks 
 with the sunlight on it all day; but one can 
 nearly always find, high up above the stream, 
 some little cool spring that leaps up in a bed of 
 green straight from the bowels of the earth, to 
 trickle down to the main current below. I not 
 only found such an one, but one that sprang up 
 in a tiny cave completely sheltered from the 
 glare outside. The cave overlooked a wide, 
 deserted valley into which the brook ran, itself 
 following a crevasse in the side of the hill that 
 had an air of complete solitude. There were no 
 huts near. The grass was untrampled, the 
 flowers ungathered. The water plants grew 
 rank and unbroken, and when I sat down and 
 
 212 
 
OF RELICS AND FRIENDS 213 
 
 kept still, there was no sound at all but the 
 trickle of the stream. It was intensely restful. 
 I thought of Piccadilly Circus without the least 
 envy just then, at any rate ! And it dawned 
 on me that I really did not want at that moment 
 even you ! 
 
 Well, as I lay in the shade of that rock I went 
 over in detail with satisfaction an orgy of 
 destruction in which I indulged a few months 
 ago. I had turned out, then, all my old letters 
 and papers and photographs and treasures, and 
 destroyed them ruthlessly. I barely kept one. 
 There were letters from my people and my 
 friends, and letters from the great men (to me) 
 that I once knew letters of congratulation, ad- 
 vice, criticism ; letters from several parts of the 
 world about my books; letters on being or- 
 dained, on leaving my first curacy, on coming 
 out to South Africa; and so on. There were 
 photographs of boyish holidays, of Cambridge, 
 of my first parish and all were destroyed. 
 There were poems and essays and short stories. 
 How queer it is to read what one thought splen- 
 did and treasured years ago ! All went. There 
 were old diaries and some faded flowers and 
 some quaint relics, and I burnt them all. At 
 first I thought I would save a few this letter 
 for its signature, that for its contents; this 
 photograph for its sentiment and that because 
 the subject of it is a big person to-day; but they 
 all went into the fire in the end. Or at least I 
 
214 PILGRIM PAPERS] 
 
 will be quite honest: I kept what would pack 
 into a small pocket case, but that was all. When 
 I had finished I felt free to go. 
 
 Why does one keep these things, do you sup- 
 pose? I expect you have often read the biog- 
 raphy of some bishop or statesman, and rather 
 wondered at the host of relics there seemed to 
 be of him when he came to die. I have, at any 
 rate. As one reads one sees the man gathering 
 things about him consciously and unconsciously, 
 not only possessions, but the accumulation of 
 years, little, worthless relics that he and others 
 treasured. This one, when they come to write 
 his life, tells a tale of the nursery, and that 
 records an incident of school life. Here is a 
 letter in which one can read what the Prime 
 Minister said to him when he became a bishop, 
 and here another telling us what he said to the 
 Prime Minister. It flows on almost endlessly, 
 but of course there is an end. And at last you 
 have the two-volume biography at half a guinea 
 a volume, pre-war price ! 
 
 Now do not be a beast and say either of the 
 things you are thinking ! To begin with, these 
 are not sour grapes. I am not running down 
 such people's biographies because mine is not 
 likely to be written; indeed, I am not running 
 down such biographies at all. I find them 
 curious and interesting, very human, if a little 
 perplexing. And I did not destroy papers and 
 letters because it would not have done to have 
 
OF RELICS AND FRIENDS 215 
 
 had them read! No, I destroyed them for an 
 entirely personal reason, for a reason which I 
 herein intend to set out before your Worship, 
 and which I thought out all over again at our 
 midday halt to-day. 
 
 It seems to me, then, that the mind of man, 
 designed to be his servant, is an extremely 
 subtle and dangerous servant. If a man does 
 not take care, his mind runs away with him be- 
 fore he knows it, and that in all kinds of ways, 
 not the least the way in which a person becomes 
 persuaded to accumulate possessions, and par- 
 ticularly what I have called relics. We say: "I 
 can't destroy that: it reminds me of So-and-so 
 such a person, such a holiday, such a place." 
 We say (chiefly to ourselves): "Oh, I'll keep 
 that letter: it will cheer me up one day to see 
 that So-and-so appreciated my work. ' ' And so 
 the relics gather till a man has sacks of them, 
 drawers full, boxes full, desks full, until, indeed, 
 a man has no idea what hosts of such things he 
 possesses, and he cannot lay his hand on any- 
 thing because he has so much. 
 
 But all that is great foolishness. It ties up 
 the spirit. To begin with, it is no use looking 
 back, and no use whatever trying to recapture 
 the spirit of the past. The very confession that 
 one wants to do so is the confession of a failure. 
 Past things and people impressed us, and if 
 there was any value in them, they left their im- 
 pressions upon us. Those impressions went to 
 
216 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 the moulding of us, and we are what we are 
 because of them. But eyes front! What was 
 moulded into you is yours, and what was not so 
 moulded can never now truly be yours. It is 
 waste of time and, what is worse, waste of senti- 
 ment to look back wistfully or regretfully or 
 even happily. The past is past except so much 
 of it as was assimilated by you and so carried 
 on to the present. 
 
 Then the half of that looking back is vanity. 
 I, for example, hated to destroy my old stories 
 and verses. Truth to tell, I felt tender towards 
 them and still half believed in them. But no, 
 they are not really of any value ; if I could write 
 then, I could write better to-day. Let us have 
 some test and destroy ruthlessly what does not 
 come up to it. For myself, one sort of test is, I 
 think, publication. If one has practically no 
 name or reputation, no publishers will take 
 work unless they think it has merit. Of course 
 a publisher may make a mistake either way, in 
 the rejecting or the accepting, but it is a test, 
 and given a reputable publisher and reasonable 
 work, it is no bad one. As for those things of 
 yesterday, that then one loved so much and set 
 such store upon, into the fire with them ! Only 
 a genius writes imperishable stuff at twenty- 
 three, and even he will write it again and better 
 at thirty-three. 
 
 As a matter of fact, that there are exceptions 
 does no more than prove the rule, and it is no 
 
OF RELICS AND FRIENDS 217 
 
 use legislating for oneself on the basis of a pos- 
 sible exception. Such case law is always bad 
 law. Why worry with the dead of past years? 
 Let the dead bury their dead. The untram- 
 melled spirit is likely to prove of more value 
 than any litter of past years, and it seems to me 
 that the spirit is trammelled by all this sort of 
 thing. And it is so also with possessions. I 
 think I would rather have access to some one 
 else's garden than have one of my own ; I would 
 rather the great pictures were in a gallery than 
 in my house ; and I would rather be able to visit 
 a palace than live in it. To have and to hold 
 brings worries, or breeds a soporific satisfac- 
 tion. Very often it does both. To possess, too, 
 is very largely to be tied down. That is true of 
 material things in actual fact, and it is largely 
 true of the spirit. Doubtless to have continually 
 to fight for life and to have to wonder where the 
 next suit or the next meal is coming from is 
 just as bad, but at any rate that may breed the 
 dauntless spirit. But it is not even a dauntless 
 spirit that I want particularly. I want rather 
 a whimsical, light-hearted, indifferent-to-things 
 spirit, a spirit that takes the best from each 
 moment and each experience, and then drops 
 the husk of it and goes on. I want a spirit that, 
 if creative, will be content to create and leave, 
 leave for others to use if they want to do so, 
 leave without a concern or a regret if others 
 find no use for the work of one's brain. After 
 
218 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 all, for the creator creating is its own reward; 
 if others enjoy, their enjoyment may be allowed 
 to gladden one for a moment or so, but it must 
 not be allowed to satiate. 
 
 All this is so true about one's friends. A 
 friendship that requires a correspondence to 
 keep it up is worthless, as worthless as a love 
 that requires the contemplation of relics for its 
 stimulus. So long as there is gain in a friend- 
 ship exchange of ideas and intercourse will 
 flow naturally from it; but friendship must 
 breed that exchange, and not require the ex- 
 change in order to exist. People say: "It is 
 hard to keep up with one's friends!" But I 
 would say that the moment one is conscious of 
 having to strive to keep up with a friend, that is 
 the moment in which that friendship becomes 
 worthless. Do not, then, put it in a drawer and 
 make an effort to pull it out now and again and 
 look at it. You and I, swung across each other's 
 track by the whirl of life, exchange glances and 
 instinctively hold out hand to hand. And it is 
 very, very good that it should be so. Hand in 
 hand you and I press forward together, and, 
 my dear, it is more than happy, this friendship 
 of ours, is it not? But if the whirl inexorably 
 swing us apart, or if that handclasp of ours 
 should cease to be the clasp of mutual help and 
 assent and become a tie which holds either of us 
 back, why, then God help us to part with a 
 smile, and God keep us from looking behind. 
 
OF RELICS AND FRIENDS 219 
 
 We shall have had our day, its best, for as much 
 as it was best we shall carry always in our 
 hearts; for to-morrow we have always to live. 
 
 No, the world is very full of fair things and 
 good comrades. There is the unimprisonable 
 beauty of its mountains and forests and seas 
 and plains, and there is the marvellous beauty 
 of the works of its children in the days gone by. 
 And always there are the sun and the rain and 
 the wind for to-day. I would tramp gaily 
 through it, then, yes, tramp through it in spirit 
 though I live out my days in one village, re- 
 membering that all the good is mine to take, and 
 mine to keep always provided I give it all away. 
 The joy of the morning song of the birds is 
 mine always ; the joy of the dew-dusted flowers 
 is mine always; the joy of the canvases of the 
 great artists, of the buildings of the great 
 Faith, of the laughter and bravery of humanity, 
 all mine always, so long as I do not try to grasp 
 and store my treasure, but speak of it, write of 
 it, live in the strength of it, and create through 
 the love of it. And when I come to lay down my 
 stick and traveller's knapsack for the last time, 
 I would that there should be nothing more of 
 mine to dispose of, nor any treasure other than 
 that which the souls that God, of His goodness, 
 has given me have taken to themselves long 
 since. 
 
 You remember Francis Thompson's end, and 
 how there was nothing left but his published 
 
220 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 works, and a small box of odds and ends con- 
 taining old pens that would not write, a broken 
 pocket-knife, a few bits of string, some un- 
 opened letters a pathetic little collection, they 
 said. But I like that, especially the unopened 
 letters, for a letter opens itself, or else it is not 
 worth opening. And the other day I came 
 across an all but forgotten poem on another 
 poet, a few verses that carry with them that 
 wonderful quality of real poetry that cannot be 
 explained and that goes straight to the heart. 
 They have gone straight to my heart, and I be- 
 lieve that they will go straight to yours. If 
 they could be a little true of me, I would be very 
 glad. Here they are: 
 
 "He came to the desert of London Town, 
 
 Grey miles long; 
 
 He wandered up and he wandered down, 
 Singing a quiet song. 
 
 "He came to the desert of London Town, 
 
 Mirk miles broad; 
 
 He wandered up and he wandered down, 
 Ever alone with God. 
 
 "There were thousands and thousands of human kind 
 
 In this desert of brick and stone; 
 But some were deaf, and some were blind, 
 And he was there alone. 
 
 "At last the good hour came; he died, 
 
 As he had lived, alone; 
 He was not miss'd from the desert wide: 
 Perhaps he was found at the Throne." 
 
25. OF CONCLUSIONS 
 
 SO you think my letters are a strange mix- 
 ture, and you want to know what I really 
 do think about things ! I can forgive you 
 the first statement, because I suppose they 
 really are a mixture. But why not? I never 
 could see that it was a just view of life that kept 
 religion in one watertight compartment, love in 
 another, business in a third, and so on. Every- 
 thing is part of a whole, as God made it, and the 
 other is an artificial arrangement for which I 
 have no use. If I cannot love and enjoy all the 
 more intensely because I believe, then there is 
 something wrong with my belief. That is one 
 of the things I think, anyway, my dear ; and, for 
 the rest, I am really engaged in trying to find 
 that highway through life in which the way- 
 faring men, though fools, shall not err. It has 
 been promised, and I believe it to be there. Up 
 here, high on the Berg, I think one has a chance 
 to descry it. 
 
 But your demand for something like a clear 
 statement interests me. After all, my time is 
 nearly up here, and perhaps it is time I made 
 you one, time, too, that I made myself one, since 
 
 221 
 
222 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 soon I shall be down from the Berg and back in 
 the rush and confusion. 
 
 Very well, then: I think there are just two 
 problems in life. The first is the adjustment of 
 Nature and Religion, and the second is the dis- 
 covery of the true Religion. Possibly I have 
 not said much about the first, but it undoubtedly 
 stands first. It is always in my mind as I ride 
 about on the face of this old Berg, and I fail to 
 see how it can help being there, since one is so 
 close to Nature up here. Among the flowers 
 and mountains under the sun and the stars, and 
 dealing with natives, one is truly close to 
 Nature, and I am bound to confess that I find 
 Nature a great problem. I can see law and 
 impulse and purpose in Nature, but all I see 
 perplexes me enormously. On the one hand, my 
 mind such as it is cannot get away from the 
 belief that Nature is God's business, but, on the 
 other hand, it seems to me a strange business 
 for God to be mixed up in. For example, the 
 other day I rode with a good fellow who made 
 certain enthusiastic observations as to design in 
 the world. We had been watching dung-beetles, 
 and he said that when he considered the won- 
 derful scavenger system of Nature beetles, 
 rats, flies, and so on and the wonderful bal- 
 ance of things, he saw God's hand in it all. I 
 assented cautiously. I, too, see a wonderful 
 system; I, too, utterly fail to be able to think 
 that a purpose and a system can grow out of 
 
OF CONCLUSIONS 223 
 
 nothing without a mind behind, that a blind 
 force could come into existence blindly and pro- 
 duce a world. But if a Mind designed this 
 world, it seems to me to be a Mind as much in- 
 terested in the well-being of a typhus bacillus as 
 in man. Flies, for example they clean up dirt, 
 but the diseases they spread have slain more 
 men than all the wars. Why? Because Nature 
 is just as interested in finding a suitable home 
 for a microbe and breeding him as she is in 
 doing the same for man. We are all part of a 
 system, yes, but of a ravening, heartless, colos- 
 sal system in which life matters, and not man. 
 
 So I come to it that man is an animal; that 
 his passions and impulses are really his law; 
 that conventions and human arrangements 
 ought to be broad-based on Nature, unless you 
 can produce some other and stronger authority. 
 Given that, of course, our systems ought to be 
 based on that authority. They ought not to try 
 to ride two horses at once, as I think they do. 
 But let us set that problematical authority aside 
 for a moment. Then a certain programme pre- 
 sents itself. 
 
 Take, for example, the big sexual questions. 
 Nature is out to breed men and microbes as 
 hard as she can. She has designed the sexes to 
 attract each other, and love is really her little 
 joke. Man, however, is the one animal that has 
 really learned the art of combination, and he is 
 putting up a struggle, not merely for existence, 
 
224 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 but for a very big place in the sun. He is going 
 to do his best to check Nature in the matter of 
 microbes and to develop Nature in the matter 
 of himself. The State at present is our biggest 
 human organisation, and when I think of the 
 State and Nature, it seems to be that I see a 
 social and sexual programme to which, maybe, 
 we are coming, but coming all too slowly. The 
 State ought to breed children, without a doubt. 
 It ought to encourage the sexual union of the 
 fittest, and see that if the non-fit take that for 
 which their nature craves, everything is done 
 that can be done to prevent the natural dis- 
 astrous consequences. Surely that is the merest 
 common-sense. Moreover, education has made 
 man and woman equals, and the State ought to 
 allow for that. In a word, I can see nothing for 
 it logically, on this hypothesis, but Eugenics, a 
 very advanced socialism, the wholesale intro- 
 duction of the easiest possible Divorce system, 
 and so on. So, and only so, can man on the 
 earth hope to win out against his fellow- 
 creatures, and direct Nature to his own ends. 
 
 But is this all? Well, on the face of the Berg 
 I realise as never before that men have souls, 
 even black men, slaves to Nature though they 
 are. And I realise that this visible world is 
 only a tiny matter in comparison with the in- 
 visible that touches us at every turn. The whole 
 of it, Nature and all its laws, is but the garment 
 of something else. I am more sure of these 
 
OF CONCLUSIONS 225 
 
 things than of anything else. Maybe I am a 
 colossal fool, but honestly, as I look out over 
 these mountains, I see the spiritual a thousand 
 times more clearly than the material. A flower 
 dumbfounds me, for although I see the flower, I 
 see far more plainly God. 
 
 To me, then, you see, cutting right across 
 Nature and her ravening laws, comes the ex- 
 pectation of what I shall call Grace. By that 
 I mean the expectation of something that will 
 lift us out of this world of apparently ceaseless 
 and aimless becoming, something which will be 
 the authority of the soul, something which the 
 God Who designed Nature has also designed by 
 which we may win free in the end from this ( 
 ravening old world, transmuting the baser^ 
 metals as we do so. And to fit the expectation' 
 comes the Catholic Vision, as I shall call it. 
 
 You cannot prove that a flower is beautiful, 
 and you do not want a proof. Just so, this 
 Catholic Vision appeals to me, arrests me, 
 dominates me, without a proof, though I do not 
 say there are no proofs. To me the story of 
 Bethlehem is so penetratingly, wonderfully 
 beautiful that I cannot think of it without tears. 
 God in a human mother's arms, and in such a 
 mother's, and in such a wise the idea is more 
 lovely than the morning star, more masterful 
 than the sun at noon. From it the Catholic 
 scheme flows as sweetly and as naturally as a 
 brook from a spring. Such union of the human 
 
226 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 and Divine would inevitably lead to the forma- 
 tion of a human and Divine society like the 
 Catholic Church. Her idea of the Sacraments 
 is no more and no less than Nature shot through 
 by Grace, and every hillside on the face of the 
 Berg shouts to me of the reasonableness and 
 likelihood of it. Her dogmas do not seem to me 
 dogmas at all, but the most obvious statements 
 of the inevitable. Take one such, and we will 
 take one of the most disputed the Immaculate 
 Conception. Good heavens! Could I believe 
 Almighty God to design to be born of a woman, 
 and to think nothing before or after, of the 
 woman? Would He not have prepared His 
 mother like "a garden enclosed"? And as to 
 the method, why it is so natural, so simple, so 
 beautiful, that it appeals to me, again, as the 
 flower appeals, and requires exactly the same 
 "proof"! 
 
 "Go humbly ... it has hailed and snowed . . . 
 
 With voices low and lanterns lit; 
 So very simple is the road, 
 That we may stray from it." 
 
 I can see, then, with what authority such a 
 vision ought to speak in the affairs of men. The 
 Catholic Church might well dictate a marriage 
 and sexual law, based not on man as an animal 
 and Nature, but on man as a soul and Grace. 
 And if Parliaments of States sat truly beneath 
 the symbol of the Incarnation, of Bethlehem, 
 
OF CONCLUSIONS 227 
 
 their duty would be simple enough, and their 
 authority real. Man might listen if their laws 
 were based on this. 
 
 But I told you my second problem. I see a 
 Catholic Vision, but has it existence in fact? 
 St. John saw the New Jerusalem descending to 
 earth as a bride adorned for her husband, but 
 is the New Jerusalem still in the clouds? 
 Plainly enough do I see the Vision; plainly 
 enough do I see the ornaments of the bride; 
 plainly do I see that she is fit for her Husband ; 
 plainly, to leave parables, do I see that 
 Catholicity might make Man ready for God. 
 But, I ask myself doubtfully, has that Vision 
 substance on earth? Have our dreams come 
 true? 
 
 I was born, as you know, in the Protestant 
 religion. It is a hateful thing to write anything 
 against what others hold dear, but all I can say 
 is that in Protestantism I see no possible real- 
 isation of this Vision. In its many forms I see 
 only human ideas, full of the faults of the cen- 
 turies that gave them birth, irrational, illogical, 
 and often unnatural. No form of Protestantism 
 can hold me any longer. If that were all, I 
 should write to you as a reverent agnostic, and 
 I would fling myself and such energies as I pos- 
 sess into such social schemes as it seems to me 
 are best in our human conflict with Nature. On 
 such schemes I have already touched. I should 
 be one of those on account of whose doings one 
 
228 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 might well conceive our good fathers to turn in 
 their graves. And so far as I am concerned, 
 they may turn yet. 
 
 But not just yet. I passed, as a result of en- 
 vironment, from Protestantism pure and simple 
 to that very perplexing form of religion known 
 popularly as High Church Anglicanism. As a 
 minister of that religion I came to the Berg, and 
 most of my letters have been concerned with my 
 doings in connection with it. And what shall I 
 say of it? Nothing harsh, hope, for the faith 
 of Pusey and Keble has given me great 
 moments, and in their company at times I had 
 all but thought that I saw the city of God on 
 earth. Even now, it is hard to turn away from 
 the hope they held out. With all its difficulties 
 and anachronisms and unrealities, there is a 
 life, it seems to me, in this form of religion, and 
 a beauty that shall ever, I pray God, make me 
 tender towards the friends of the past years. 
 But I have made up my mind on the Berg that 
 it is not the true Vision that floats before our 
 eyes, but a mirage, only to be glimpsed at times 
 and never to be reached. To have stumbled 
 towards it across the arid sands is all part of 
 the discipline of life, but there is only one thing 
 for a traveller to do when he realizes that a 
 mirage is but a mirage, if he would have hope of 
 life. He must turn his back upon it. 
 
 To you, friend and more than friend, I have 
 written of these things. It helps to write to a 
 
OF CONCLUSIONS 229 
 
 friend. To yon, who say that you have learned 
 of me, and who therefore have a right to it, I 
 have made this apologia, poor thing though it 
 be. What it may mean to us both, who can say? 
 It is a hard and cruel old world, as a friend of 
 mine says, half in ridicule, but we have to live 
 in it. It may hold nothing for either of us, but 
 I love its many beauties, its tangled problems, 
 and its bewildered children, and am very con- 
 scious that, whatever God there be, a sword is 
 set in the hand of each of us. To keep the blade 
 untarnished and to do some work with it is the 
 most that any man can hope for. Nor do I 
 think that that Vision is ever likely to fade 
 from my eyes, or you from my thoughts, and, 
 for weal or woe, I ain very glad of both. 
 
26. OF, THE KAINBOWS END 
 
 I THOUGHT that I had written my last 
 letter to you from the Berg, my dear, but so 
 lovely and wonderful a thing happened this 
 morning that I must write again, even although 
 I am not now upon the Berg at all. It came 
 about in this way. 
 
 You will remember that I have written to you 
 several times of the wonderful cloud scenery 
 along the border, how one is often above the 
 clouds in the sun while they wash around the 
 mighty summits of this huge and rocky barrier. 
 Well, last night I slept for the last time up here. 
 I should have liked that my last night had been 
 spent under the stars round a camp fire and far 
 from any one, but that could not be, and I slept 
 at the store that stands just at this "gate" 
 down to the plains below. From the stoep one 
 could shoot an arrow across the border and out 
 into the void, where it would fall several thou- 
 sand feet, most likely, before it struck the lower 
 and more gradually sloping face of the Berg. 
 In the morning I woke early and got up at 
 once for a last early morning up here. I went 
 out, and then I stood transfixed. Often as I 
 have seen it, the beauty of the mist to-day 
 
OF THE RAINBOW'S END 231 
 
 almost made me hold my breath. The still 
 white sea rolled up nearly to my feet; indeed, 
 in a little I walked to where it did lap my feet. 
 To the horizon ahead it stretched, a tossed, 
 tumbled, breaking, but all unmoving ocean of 
 cloud. As I had seen before, so now it gathered 
 about the krantzes like foam on the edge of the 
 ocean ; cloud spray dashed up against the rocks, 
 cloud spume running up the fissures. You 
 really cannot picture its beauty. For the glori- 
 ous sun shone on it all, warm and bright in the 
 early morning, and about me birds twittered, 
 and the green lands on our side rolled down to 
 a little stream and up beyond to the still higher 
 peaks. 
 
 So much I had seen before, but this morning 
 I did a new thing. I stepped down into the sea. 
 Very cautiously I climbed down the steep, pre- 
 cipitous descent, until, in a few moments, I was 
 submerged. I felt like a sea-king in the 
 "Arabian Nights " returning to his home. 
 Literally, one moment my head was out of the 
 4 ' water, " and the next I could not see a dozen 
 yards for clinging, wet, vapoury cloud. But I 
 climbed on down, and then, after a very few 
 minutes as it seemed to me, I emerged below 
 that ocean. And I just sat down and gasped 
 with astonishment. 
 
 Far, far below lay another world. It was 
 dullish and grey, but I could see stunted trees 
 and huts and cattle and even tiny tots of horse- 
 
232 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 men. Just above my head, so near that I could 
 lift my hand and touch it, was the sky of that 
 world. It stretched to the horizon before me, a 
 proper cloudy sky, but it reached to my hand 
 where I sat. I stood up, held up my hands, and 
 leaned a little forward over the world below. I 
 was Atlas, holding up the sky. 
 
 I remember I laughed, and my laugh seemed 
 to be blanketed in the sky that I was touch- 
 ing. I laughed because it was a fairy story 
 come quite true. Why, as a child, how often I 
 have wanted to go far, far out and touch the 
 sky, and how often to find the rainbow's end! 
 As I grew up they told me it could not be done. 
 I suppose they thought it could not quite hon- 
 estly. But I had done it ; I had wandered many 
 years and very far first; but I had done it at 
 last. I felt like a god; I really did. 
 
 Then I sat down again and thought. Down 
 below the folk were getting up. Women were 
 coming to their doors, and looking up at the sky 
 far above them, and grumbling a bit because 
 there was no sun again. Little children were 
 waking up, and staring at the sky, and wonder- 
 ing what in the world was beyond it, and asking 
 questions, and being told maddening things that 
 they really could not believe. And there was I, 
 sitting in their sky, looking down upon them. 
 
 I grew afraid as I looked at that dull world. 
 It seemed so complete, so shut in, so normal, as 
 I stared out at it, that I began really to wonder 
 
OP THE RAINBOW'S END 233 
 
 if I was shut down there for ever, and if I 
 should never see the smiling sun and my horses 
 and Cyril and the good pasture lands again. So 
 I turned and climbed quickly up and poked my 
 head out once more. 
 
 Coming back like that, the world above looked 
 more beautiful than ever, and so shining and 
 warm. I stretched my hands out to the sun, and 
 grasped it. I picked a bunch of little wild 
 flowers. 
 
 You will not think me foolish, dear, will you? 
 It did happen just exactly like that; I have not 
 exaggerated one bit. It is all over and past 
 now, that wonderful morning hour, but I think 
 God must have given me such a last vision out 
 of the very bottom of His kind Heart. For 
 more is over than the morning, as you will know 
 from my letters, and I am indeed down from the 
 Berg, exiled, a wanderer, in a strange country. 
 But is it not strange? you remember my 
 first letter, a quite honest and frank first letter, 
 in which we talked of travel and I told you that 
 at the journey's end I believed one would 
 always find a friend? Well, of course, I know 
 now. I know what is beyond the lowering grey 
 clouds, and I do not think they will ever daunt 
 me more. The way may be long, and it may be 
 wearisome, but I shall walk as one who has seen. 
 For beyond the sky of our silly human seeing is 
 a fair, smiling land to which we shall come hand 
 in hand one day. You may be surprised, but I 
 
234 PILGRIM PAPERS 
 
 shall not be, when we look round and see how 
 sweet and familiar it all is. Why, you will say, 
 "This is the very land we loved in our dreams 
 when it seemed impossible that the least of 
 them should come true!" And we shall stretch 
 our hands out in the warm sunshine and grasp 
 it and laugh at each other. And we shall wan- 
 der over the green turf towards the clear water, 
 and I promise you we will pick a bunch of the 
 white and blue and gold and crimson flowers at 
 
 the rainbow's end. 
 
 # * * * * 
 
 Down below the folk will be waking, and the 
 children getting out of bed and running to the 
 window, and (just as we used to do) they will 
 ask what is up there. The grown-ups will say, 
 "Heaven, dear!" 
 
 "And what is Heaven like, Mummy?" one 
 will ask, and Mummy will say, you can be very 
 sure, for years and years and years to come, 
 "Oh, I don't know, child Don't ask so many 
 questions!" 
 
14 DAY USE 
 
 RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED 
 
 LOAN DEPT. 
 
 This book is due on the last date stamped below, or 
 
 on the date to which renewed. 
 Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. 
 
 REC'D L.D 
 
 NOV 21957 
 
 = 
 
 REC'D LD 
 
 LD 21-100m-6,'56 
 (B9311slO)476 
 
 General Library 
 
 University of California 
 
 Berkeley 
 
KV 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY