The way of all flesh - Samuel Butler [128]
Ernest expressed his readiness to be questioned.
“Then,” said the tinker, “give me the story of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as told in St John’s gospel.”
I am sorry to say that Ernest mixed up the four accounts in a deplorable manner; he even made the angel come down and roll away the stone and sit upon it. He was covered with confusion when the tinker first told him without the book of some of his many inaccuracies, and then verified his criticisms by referring to the New Testament itself.
“Now,” said Mr Shaw good naturedly, “I am an old man and you are a young one, so perhaps you’ll not mind my giving you a piece of advice. I like you, for I believe you mean well, but you’ve been real bad brought up, and I don’t think you have ever had so much as a chance yet. You know nothing of our side of the question, and I have just shown you that you do not know much more of your own, but I think you will make a kind of Carlyle sort of a man some day. Now go upstairs and read the accounts of the Resurrection correctly without mixing them up, and have a clear idea of what it is that each writer tells us, then if you feel inclined to pay me another visit I shall be glad to see you, for I shall know you have made a good beginning and mean business. Till then, Sir, I must wish you a very good morning.”
Ernest retreated abashed. An hour sufficed him to perform the task enjoined upon him by Mr Shaw; and at the end of that hour the “No, no, no,” which still sounded in his ears as he heard it from Towneley, came ringing up more loudly still from the very pages of the Bible itself, and in respect of the most important of all the events which are recorded in it. Surely Ernest’s first day’s attempt at more promiscuous visiting, and at carrying out his principles more thoroughly, had not been unfruitful. But he must go and have a talk with Pryer. He therefore got his lunch and went to Pryer’s lodgings. Pryer not being at home, he lounged to the British Museum Reading Room, then recently opened, sent for the “Vestiges of Creation,” which he had never yet seen, and spent the rest of the afternoon in reading it.
Ernest did not see Pryer on the day of his conversation with Mr Shaw, but he did so next morning and found him in a good temper, which of late he had rarely been. Sometimes, indeed, he had behaved to Ernest in a way which did not bode well for the harmony with which the College of Spiritual Pathology would work when it had once been founded. It almost seemed as though he were trying to get a complete moral ascendency over him, so as to make him a creature of his own.
He did not think it possible that he could go too far, and indeed, when I reflect upon my hero’s folly and inexperience, there is much to be said in excuse for the conclusion which Pryer came to.
As a matter of fact, however, it was not so. Ernest’s faith in Pryer had been too great to be shaken down all in a moment, but it had been weakened lately more than once. Ernest had fought hard against allowing himself to see this, nevertheless any third person who knew the pair would have been able to see that the connection between the two might end at any moment, for when the time for one of Ernest’s snipe-like changes of flight came, he was quick in making it; the time, however, was not yet come, and the intimacy between the two was apparently all that it had ever been. It was only that horrid money business (so said Ernest to himself) that caused any unpleasantness between them, and no doubt Pryer was right, and he, Ernest, much too nervous. However, that might stand over for the present.
In like manner, though he had received a shock by reason of his conversation with Mr Shaw, and by looking at the “Vestiges,” he was as yet too much stunned to realise the change which was coming over him. In each case the momentum of old habits carried him forward in the old direction. He therefore called on Pryer, and spent an hour and more with him.
He did not say that he had been visiting among his neighbours; this to Pryer would have been like a red rag to a bull. He only talked in much his usual vein about the proposed College, the lamentable want of interest in spiritual things which was characteristic of modern society, and other kindred matters; he concluded by saying that for the present he feared Pryer was indeed right, and that nothing could be done.