When the World Shook | Page 5

cracked it and set his teeth in
the kernel which alone can feed our souls. His keen intellect, to take an
example, recognised every one of the difficulties of our faith and
flashed hither and thither in the darkness, seeking explanation, seeking
light, trying to reconcile, to explain. He was not great enough to put all
this aside and go straight to the informing Soul beneath that strives to
express itself everywhere, even through those husks which are called
the World, the Flesh and the Devil, and as yet does not always quite
succeed.
It is this boggling over exteriors, this peering into pitfalls, this desire to
prove that what such senses as we have tell us is impossible, is in fact
possible, which causes the overthrow of many an earnest, seeking heart
and renders its work, conducted on false lines, quite nugatory. These
will trust to themselves and their own intelligence and not be content to
spring from the cliffs of human experience into the everlasting arms of
that Infinite which are stretched out to receive them and to give them
rest and the keys of knowledge. When will man learn what was taught
to him of old, that faith is the only plank wherewith he can float upon
this sea and that his miserable works avail him nothing; also that it is a
plank made of many sorts of wood, perhaps to suit our different
weights?
So to be honest, in a sense I believe myself to be my father's superior,
and I know that he agreed with me. Perhaps this is owing to the blood
of my Scotch mother which mixed well with his own; perhaps because
the essential spirit given to me, though cast in his mould, was in fact
quite different--or of another alloy. Do we, I wonder, really understand
that there are millions and billions of these alloys, so many indeed that
Nature, or whatever is behind Nature, never uses the same twice over?
That is why no two human beings are or ever will be quite identical.

Their flesh, the body of their humiliation, is identical in all, any
chemist will prove it to you, but that which animates the flesh is
distinct and different because it comes from the home of that infinite
variety which is necessary to the ultimate evolution of the good and bad
that we symbolise as heaven and hell.
Further, I had and to a certain extent still have another advantage over
my father, which certainly came to me from my mother, who was, as I
judge from all descriptions and such likenesses as remain of her, an
extremely handsome woman. I was born much better looking. He was
small and dark, a little man with deep-set eyes and beetling brows. I am
also dark, but tall above the average, and well made. I do not know that
I need say more about my personal appearance, to me not a very
attractive subject, but the fact remains that they called me "handsome
Humphrey" at the University, and I was the captain of my college boat
and won many prizes at athletic sports when I had time to train for
them.
Until I went up to Oxford my father educated me, partly because he
knew that he could do it better than anyone else, and partly to save
school expenses. The experiment was very successful, as my love of all
outdoor sports and of any small hazardous adventure that came to my
hand, also of associating with fisherfolk whom the dangers of the deep
make men among men, saved me from becoming a milksop. For the
rest I learned more from my father, whom I always desired to please
because I loved him, than I should have done at the best and most
costly of schools. This was shown when at last I went to college with a
scholarship, for there I did very well indeed, as search would still
reveal.
Here I had better set out some of my shortcomings, which in their sum
have made a failure of me. Yes, a failure in the highest sense, though I
trust what Stevenson calls "a faithful failure." These have their root in
fastidiousness and that lack of perseverance, which really means a lack
of faith, again using the word in its higher and wider sense. For if one
had real faith one would always persevere, knowing that in every work
undertaken with high aim, there is an element of nobility, however

humble and unrecognised that work may seem to be. God after all is the
God of Work, it is written large upon the face of the Universe. I will
not expand upon the thought; it would lead me too far afield, but those
who have understanding will know what I