The Message

Excerpt

"Such as I am, sir—no great subject for a boaster, I admit—you see in me a product of my time, sir, and of very worthy parents, I assure you."—Ezekiel Joy.

As a very small lad, at home in Tarn Regis, I had but one close chum, George Stairs, and he went off with his father to Canada, while I was away for my first term at Elstree School. Then came Rugby, where I had several friends, but the chief of them was Leslie Wheeler. Just why we should have been close friends I cannot say, but I fancy it was mainly because Leslie was such a handsome fellow, and always seemed to cut a good figure in everything he did; while I, on the other hand, excelled in nothing, and was not brilliant even in the expression of my discontent, which was tolerably comprehensive. Withal, in other matters beside discontent, I was a good deal of an extremist, and by no means lacking in enthusiasm.

My father, too, was an enthusiast in his quiet way. His was the enthusiasm of the student, and his work as historian and archæologist absorbed, I must suppose, a great deal more of his interest and energy than was ever given to his cure of souls. He was rector of Tarn Regis, in Dorset, before I was born, and at the time of his death, to be present at which I was called away in the middle of the last term of my third year at Cambridge. I was to have spent four years at the University; but, as the event proved, I never returned there after my hurried departure, three days prior to my father's death.

The personal tie between my father and those among whom he lived and worked was not a very close or intimate bond. His contribution to the Cambridge History was greatly appreciated by scholars, and his archæological research won him the respect and esteem of his peers in that branch of study. But I cannot pretend that his loss was keenly felt by his parishioners, with most of whom his relations had been strictly professional rather than personal. A good man and true, without a trace of anything sordid or self-seeking in his nature, my father was yet singularly indifferent to everything connected with the daily lives and welfare of his fellow creatures.

In this he was typical of a considerable section of the country clergy of the time. I knew colleagues of his who were more pronounced examples of the type. One in particular I call to mind (whose living was in the gift of a Cambridge college, like my father's), who, though a good fellow and a clean-lived gentleman, was no more a Christian than he was a Buddhist—less, upon the whole. Among scholarly folk he made not the slightest pretence of regarding the fundamental tenets of the Christian faith in the light of anything more serious than interesting historical myths, notable sections in the mosaic of folk-lore, which it was his pride and delight to study and understand.

Such men as A—— R—— and my father (and there were many like them, and more who shared their aloofness while lacking half their virtues) lived hard-working, studious lives, in which the common kinds of self-indulgence played but a very small part....