Soul of a Bishop | Page 4

But was that disputation about the Trinity at all? Wasn't
it rather about a chalice and a dove? Of course it was a chalice and a
dove! Then where did one see the triangle and the eye? And men
disputing? Some such picture there was....
What a lot of disputing there had been! What endless disputing! Which
had gone on. Until last night. When this very disagreeable young man
with the hawk nose and the pointing finger had tackled one when one
was sorely fagged, and disputed; disputed. Rebuked and disputed.
"Answer me this," he had said.... And still one's poor brains disputed
and would not rest.... About the Trinity....
The brain upon the pillow was now wearily awake. It was at once
hopelessly awake and active and hopelessly unprogressive. It was like

some floating stick that had got caught in an eddy in a river, going
round and round and round. And round. Eternally-- eternally--eternally
begotten.
"But what possible meaning do you attach then to such a phrase as
eternally begotten?"
The brain upon the pillow stared hopelessly at this question, without an
answer, without an escape. The three repetitions spun round and round,
became a swiftly revolving triangle, like some electric sign that had got
beyond control, in the midst of which stared an unwinking and
resentful eye.
(2)
Every one knows that expedient of the sleepless, the counting of sheep.
You lie quite still, you breathe regularly, you imagine sheep jumping
over a gate, one after another, you count them quietly and slowly until
you count yourself off through a fading string of phantom numbers to
number Nod....
But sheep, alas! suggest an episcopal crook.
And presently a black sheep had got into the succession and was
struggling violently with the crook about its leg, a hawk-nosed black
sheep full of reproof, with disordered hair and a pointing finger. A
young man with a most disagreeable voice.
At which the other sheep took heart and, deserting the numbered
succession, came and sat about the fire in a big drawing-room and
argued also. In particular there was Lady Sunderbund, a pretty fragile
tall woman in the corner, richly jewelled, who sat with her pretty eyes
watching and her lips compressed. What had she thought of it? She had
said very little.
It is an unusual thing for a mixed gathering of this sort to argue about
the Trinity. Simply because a tired bishop had fallen into their party. It
was not fair to him to pretend that the atmosphere was a liberal and
inquiring one, when the young man who had sat still and dormant by
the table was in reality a keen and bitter Irish Roman Catholic. Then
the question, a question-begging question, was put quite suddenly,
without preparation or prelude, by surprise. "Why, Bishop, was the
Spermaticos Logos identified with the Second and not the Third Person
of the Trinity?"
It was indiscreet, it was silly, to turn upon the speaker and affect an air

of disengagement and modernity and to say: "Ah, that indeed is the
unfortunate aspect of the whole affair."
Whereupon the fierce young man had exploded with: "To that, is it, that
you Anglicans have come?"
The whole gathering had given itself up to the disputation, Lady
Sunderbund, an actress, a dancer--though she, it is true, did not say
very much--a novelist, a mechanical expert of some sort, a railway peer,
geniuses, hairy and Celtic, people of no clearly definable position, but
all quite unequal to the task of maintaining that air of reverent
vagueness, that tenderness of touch, which is by all Anglican standards
imperative in so deep, so mysterious, and, nowadays, in mixed society
at least, so infrequent a discussion.
It was like animals breaking down a fence about some sacred spot.
Within a couple of minutes the affair had become highly improper.
They had raised their voices, they had spoken with the utmost
familiarity of almost unspeakable things. There had been even attempts
at epigram. Athanasian epigrams. Bent the novelist had doubted if
originally there had been a Third Person in the Trinity at all. He
suggested a reaction from a too-Manichaean dualism at some date after
the time of St. John's Gospel. He maintained obstinately that that
Gospel was dualistic.
The unpleasant quality of the talk was far more manifest in the
retrospect than it had been at the time. It had seemed then bold and
strange, but not impossible; now in the cold darkness it seemed
sacrilegious. And the bishop's share, which was indeed only the weak
yielding of a tired man to an atmosphere he had misjudged, became a
disgraceful display of levity and bad faith. They had baited him. Some
one had said that nowadays every one was an Arian, knowingly or
unknowingly. They had not concealed