Father Payne | Page 7

are you sure you don't want simply to
make a bit of a name--to be known as a clever man? It's very
convenient, you know, in England, to have a label. Because I want you
clearly to understand that this place of mine has nothing whatever to do
with that. I take no stock in what is called success. This is a sort of
monastery, you know; and the worst of some monasteries is that they
cultivate dreams. That's a beautiful thing in its way, but it isn't what I
aim at. I don't want men to drug themselves with dreams. The great
dreamers don't do that. Shelley, for instance--his dreams were all made
out of real feeling, real beauty. He wanted to put things right in his own
way. He was enraged with life because he was fine, while Byron was
enraged with life because he was vulgar. Vulgarity--that's the one fatal
complaint; it goes down deep to the bottom of the mind. And I may as
well say plainly that that is what I fight against here."
"I don't honestly think I am vulgar," I said.
"Not on the surface, perhaps," he said, "but present-day education is a
snare. We are a vulgar nation, you know. That is what is really the
matter with us--our ambitions are vulgar, our pride is vulgar. We want

to fit into the world and get the most we can out of it; we don't, most of
us, just want to give it our best. That's what I mean by vulgarity,
wanting to take and not wanting to give."
He was silent for a minute, and then he said: "Do you believe in God?"
"I hardly know," I said. "Not very much, I am afraid, in the kind of God
that I have heard preached about."
"What do you mean?" he said.
"Well," I said, "it's rather a large question--but I used to think, both at
school and at Oxford, that many of the men who were rather
disapproved of, that did quite bad things, and tried experiments, and
knocked up against nastiness of various kinds, but who were brave in
their way and kind, and not mean or spiteful or fault-finding, were
more the sort of people that the force--or whatever it is, behind the
world--was trying to produce than many of the virtuous people. What
was called virtue and piety had something stifling and choking about it,
I used to think. I had a tutor at school who was a parson, and he was a
good sort of man, too, in a way. But I used to feel suddenly dreary with
him, as if there were a whole lot of real things and interesting things
which he was afraid of. I couldn't say what I thought to him--only what
I felt he wanted me to think. That's a bad answer," I went on, "but I
haven't really considered it."
"No, it isn't a bad answer," he said, "It's all right! The moment you feel
stifled with anyone, whatever the subject is--art, books, religion,
life--there is something wrong. Do you say any prayers?"
"No," I said, "to be honest, I don't."
"You must take to it again," he said. "You can't get on without prayer.
And if you come here," he said, "you may expect to hear about God. I
talk a good deal about God. I don't believe in things being too sacred to
talk about--it's the bad things that ought not to be mentioned. I am
interested in God, more than I am interested in anything else. I can't
make Him out--and yet I believe that He needs me, in a way, as much
as I need Him. Does that sound profane to you?"
"No," I said, "it's new to me. No one ever spoke about God to me like
that before."
"We have to suffer with Him!" he said in a curious tone, his face
lighting up. "That is the point of Christianity, that God suffers, because
He wants to remake the world, and cannot do it all at once. That is the

secret of all life and hope, that if we believe in God, we must suffer
with Him. It's a fight, a hard fight; and He needs us on His side: But I
won't talk about that now; yet if you don't want to believe in God, and
to be friends with Him, and to fight and suffer with Him, you needn't
think of coming here. That's behind all I do. And to come here is
simply that you may find out where He needs you. Why writing is
important is, because the world needs freer and plainer talk about
God--about beauty and health and happiness and energy, and all the
things which He stands for. Half the evil