And yet the clumsy fumblings of uninstructed people among things of the spirit might, one imagines, be just such stuff as a skilled teacher and leader in this field might have delighted to come upon and to inspirit and marshal. With tongues unwontedly loosened men would set to and dig out of themselves, not knowing what it was, the clay of which the bricks are made with which religions are built. One man, with infinite exertions of disentanglement, would struggle up to some expression of the fugitive trance of realization into which he had found he could throw himself by letting his mind go, for all it was worth, on the thought of his own self, his “I-ness” until for some few seconds of poised exaltation he had thought self clean away and was free. “It first came by a fluke when I was a kiddy. If I’d lie in my cot, very still, and look hard a long time at the candle, and think very hard—‘I,’ ‘I,’ ‘I,’ what’s ‘I?’ I could work myself up to that state I’d be right outside o’ myself, and seeing the queer little body I’d been, with my thought about ‘I’ doing this and ‘I’ getting that, and the way that I’d thought it was natural I should, and no such a thing as any ‘I’ there all the time, or only one to the whole set of us. Hard I’d try, every time, to hold the thing on. Seemed as if there was no end to what I might get to know if I could make it last out, that sort of rum start. But the thing went to bits every time, next moment after I’d got it worked up, and there I’d be left on the mat like, and thinking ‘Gosh! what a pitch I got up to that time!’ and how I’d screw it up higher, next go.”
Then somebody else would bring up the way he had been taken by that queer little rent in the veil of common experience—the sudden rush of certainty that something which is happening now has all happened before, or that some place, when first we see it, has really been known to us of old and is only being revisited now, not discovered. You know how you seem, when that sudden light comes, to escape for a while from your common thoughts about time, as if out of a prison in which you have been shut up so long that you had almost forgotten what it is to be free: it flashes into your mind that immortality, for all you know, may exist within one moment; that life, for all you know, may draw out into state after state, and that all that you are conscious of at common times might be merely a drop or two lipping over the edge of the full vessel of some vast consciousness animating the whole world.
Another man would bring into the common stock a recollection of the kind of poignant portrait dream that sometimes comes: not a dream of any incident, but only the face of a friend, more living than life, with all the secret kindness and loneliness of his mind suddenly visible in the face, so that you think of him as you think of your mother when she is dead and the stabbing insight of remorse begins.
Thus would these inexpert people hang unconsciously about the uncrossed threshold of religion. With minds which had recovered in some degree the penetrative simplicity of a child’s, they disinterred this or that unidentified bone of the buried God from under the monumental piles of debris which the learned, the cunning, and the proud, priests and kings, churches and chapels, had heaped up over the ideas of perfect love, of faith that would leave all to follow that love, and of the faithful spirit’s release from mean fears of extinction. In talk they could bring each other up to the point of feeling that little rifts had opened here and there in the screens which are hung round the life of man on the earth, and that they had peeped through into some large outer world that was strange only because they were used to a small and dim one. They were prepared and expectant. If any official religion could ever refine the gold out of all that rich alluvial drift of “obstinate questionings of sense and outward things,” now was its time. No figure of speech, among all these that I have mixed, can give the measure of the greatness of that opportunity.
V
Nobody used it: the tide in the affairs of churches flowed its best, but no church came to take it. Instead, as if chance had planned a kind of satiric practical epigram, came the brigade chaplain. As soon as his genial bulk hove in sight, and his cheery robustious chaff began blowing about, the shy and uncouth muse of our savage theology unfolded her wings and flew away. Once more the talk was all footer and rations and scragging the Kaiser, and how “the Hun” would walk a bit lame after the last knock he had got. Very nice, too, in its way. And yet there had been a kind of a savour about the themes that had now shambled back in confusion, before the clerical onset, into their twilight lairs in the souls of individual laymen.
When you want to catch the Thames gudgeon you first
