The Fall of Doctor Onslow

by Frances Vernon

  ‘But I don’t believe in its creator,’ said Anstey-Ward, and his voice was suddenly very low and serious. It was extremely rarely he had a chance to talk about his views and beliefs, and he was delighted to have found a topic of conversation which would keep them away from the subject of the letters in his desk drawer, but which was not merely polite. ‘I am a materialist, effectively an atheist, if that word does not shock you too much. Come, let us sit down!’

  Onslow felt as though he had received a blow in the stomach. To him, the word ‘atheist’ meant a ragged, radical and violent working man, a revolutionary bent on destroying all the order and security and beauty in the world. It was a word with far more dreadful connotations than ‘unbeliever’, or even than ‘infidel’, and there was no one in his whole acquaintance who applied those words to himself. He had thought it was Low Church rectitude which made Anstey-Ward decide to bring him down, but now his conduct was far better explained. Anstey-Ward, bent on striking a blow against the Church, would be impervious to all considerations of mercy towards one who had repented. It was only astonishing that he had not decided to make a public spectacle of his Christian opponent.

  ‘Pray sit down, Dr Onslow,’ said Anstey-Ward, indicating a great wing-chair in which Onslow would be like a horse in blinkers, unable to see what was on either side of him, and forced to look ahead. Onslow, seating himself in it, managed to say:

  ‘Am I to suppose it was your scientific researches turned you into an atheist? I have heard of such things happening.’

  ‘Oh, no, I could not say that. It started when I was a child – I remember being punished for asking repeatedly who was Cain’s wife.’

  Onslow blinked. He too could remember being punished by his mother for asking exactly that – not repeatedly, but only once. ‘Please tell me more,’ he said.

  ‘Well,’ said Anstey-Ward, swinging the brandy in his glass, ‘I was never much of a hand at my lessons, but as I grew up I went on asking questions of the like kind. And in the end I came to question the First Cause. I did not see that it was necessary to postulate a First Cause outside the universe, for why should the universe not be its own First Cause? God is not a necessary hypothesis. Do you know, it was a parson taught me that. He mentioned some old divine who said something, how was it – it is vain to do with more things what can be done with fewer.’

  Onslow began to realise that Anstey-Ward was enjoying himself. For the first time, he felt active hatred of him, and wished he could think of some crushing but highly civilised remark. But Anstey-Ward, watching him all the time, went on uninterrupted.

  ‘Still, though I say it was not my scientific studies caused my loss of faith, I am perfectly certain that one day science will disprove the existence of God,’ he continued cheerfully. ‘Two hundred years ago the Church was forced to accept that the earth moves. Now it is being gradually forced to accept that it was not created six thousand years ago.’ He spoke with confident optimism, for he considered that given time and the advance of knowledge, all things could be proved or disproved. He looked forward not to an open and fluid intellectual universe, but to a dogmatic world in which the dogmas were true, instead of false. ‘I take pleasure in being ahead of my time. I don’t believe there will be such a thing as a Christian scientist to be found a hundred years from now.’

  ‘The existence of God,’ said Onslow, ‘is not something which can be proved or disproved according to scientific notions of proof. It can only be known by faith.’

  ‘Ay, in other words not known at all – but as for proof and disproof, we shall see,’ said Anstey-Ward.

  ‘In consequence,’ said Onslow, pleased that Anstey-Ward had not followed his argument, ‘there may well continue to be Christian scientists.’

  ‘But it is already impossible for a man to be a good speculative scientist and a wholly orthodox believer so far at least as the Old Testament is concerned. Consider the fool poor Mr Gosse made of himself when he published his Omphalos– even some churchmen I could mention were embarrassed – I knew not whether to laugh or cry when I read it, and considered all the excellent work he has done in the past. Allow me to give you a little more brandy, Dr Onslow.’

  Onslow did not like to accept a gift at the hands of an atheist, but he needed another drink, and so he handed over his glass and thanked him. When Anstey-Ward came back, Onslow said:

  ‘I have not read the book to which you refer, but I have heard it described.

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘I can only say that it did not sound half so ridiculous as Vestiges of Creation.’

  This very popular book had argued in favour of an immeasurably ancient earth and the transmutation of species. Louisa, influenced by Primrose, had been greatly taken with it just before she married Onslow, who had gently persuaded her that it was nonsense. To Onslow now, the mention of Vestiges brought back sharp memories of the days of his courtship, the early days of his headmastership. He looked at Anstey-Ward and went on:

  ‘You, I suppose, have respect for that work? You believe that clover springs up spontaneously where lime is spread? Oh, and that oats can grow where rye has been spread, or was it the other way about?’

  Anstey-Ward’s eyebrows drew together over his nose.

  ‘No, I don’t, and neither do I believe in dogs playing dominoes. Your sarcasm is misplaced, sir. I thought that book as foolish as you did, and so did every man with the least scientific knowledge.’

  ‘Nonetheless I was informed by an acquaintance of mine, a clergyman but a scientist, sir, that it was written not by Lord Byron’s daughter or the Prince Consort but by a Mr Darwin, an eminent naturalist so I am told.’

  ‘Mr Darwin is indeed an eminent naturalist, and he is not the author of any such piece of trash,’ said Anstey-Ward. He had heard from a fellow member of the British Association that Mr Darwin was at work on a serious theory of transmutation, but he did not consider Onslow the scoffer to be worthy of being told this.

  ‘I am not a man of science,’ said Onslow, ‘and I know only that the greater number of scientists are persuaded that their investigations present no lasting threat to revealed truth. Why, the greater number of them believe that our world had a catastrophic origin – the idea that it had not is merely a passing scientific fad, like, like the theory of phlogiston. For my part I am persuaded that the day will come when the earth is proved to be little older than was thought by Archbishop Ussher.’

  By this he meant two or three million years – infinitely more than the Church had once insisted and infinitely less than most geologists supposed. Looking at Anstey-Ward’s face, which seemed to him smugly contemptuous, he went on:

  ‘It is my belief that one day all the incompatibilities between doctrine and the seeming results of scientific investigations will be smoothed out. Even the difference between what we are now said to know of the earth’s origin, and what we are told in Genesis, will be as nothing once we know more. A little learning is a dangerous thing, Dr Anstey-Ward, and it is a little, a very little learning that our geologists and naturalists possess.’ He finished: ‘I shall wait until it is at last discovered that revelation was never wrong.’

  ‘You’ll wait a long time, Dr Onslow. Are you indeed telling me that you hold by every belief I had thought all intelligent Christians jettisoned more than twenty years ago – the universal flood, the creation of 4004 BC? Surely not!’

  ‘Not precisely,’ said Onslow, ‘I will own that I do not believe the flood was universal, but as to the age of the earth, yes, I cannot believe it is anything like so old as you geologists maintain. It is inconceivable that our Lord created the world hundreds of millions of years before he created man, for whose sake it was made. In short, while I reject Archbishop Ussher’s calculation in detail, I accept its spirit.’ Onslow was expressing himself so firmly because in Anstey-Ward’s company, his need to hold on to the old Christian certainties was intense. He almost wished he had said that he did simply accept that the world had been created in 4004 BC.
It seemed almost like toadying to meet Anstey-Ward half way, and he would rather anything, in the circumstances, than be thought a toady.

  ‘You shock me,’ said Anstey-Ward, very gravely. ‘I had not thought it possible.’ He believed that Onslow was probably modifying his real views because he did not want a quarrel, and thus he thought that Onslow was as much an intellectual monster as a sensual monster: doubly unfit to be either a headmaster or a bishop.

  ‘Yes, for you see, I am not one to reject the traditional teaching of the church lightly, no matter what havoc the hammers of the geologists may wreak. I will not replace the wisdom of two thousand years with the wisdom, if one can call it that, of less than a hundred.’ In asserting this, Onslow was asserting his moral worth, which existed in spite of everything.

  ‘And do you reverence the Bible as you reverence the traditions of the Church?’ said Anstey-Ward. ‘I’m aware that not all clergymen do so.’

  ‘Most certainly I do.’

  ‘Then I’ll quote the Bible to you – “all the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full. Unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again. The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done, is that which shall be done, and there is no new thing under the sun”. As neat a statement of the uniformitarian and gradualist position as you could find.’

  Onslow was horrified to hear an infidel quote his favourite Ecclesiastes, which in secret he loved because it was not specifically Christian. He could only think to say:

  ‘You forget that other parts of the Bible are equally true.’

  Anstey-Ward’s moment of frivolity was past. He said:

  ‘Well Dr Onslow, all I can say is that so far from living to see reconciliation between Genesis and geology, you will very likely live to see all manner of scientific revelations which to your mind will be blasphemous. Science and religion are growing further apart day by day. I know the kind of scientists you mean, who pooh-pooh any little difficulty, but they are wrong.’

  ‘Are they indeed?’

  Anstey-Ward got up and fetched himself a third brandy, forgetting to offer one to Onslow. ‘I tell you sir,’ he said while he was pouring it out, and Onslow could not see him, ‘the day is not far off when you will be forced to acknowledge not only what men less – sure of themselves have acknowledged for years, but that your first ancestor was very likely an orang-outan.’

  It was dislike of Onslow which made Anstey-Ward take up this extreme position. In reality, he believed Lamarck’s speculation about the origin of the human race to be a somewhat wild one, and was rarely prepared to say unequivocally that he believed in the transmutation of species. Theories of transmutation and theories of immutability seemed to him equally difficult, and though he inclined towards the transmutationists, he had his doubts. For one thing, it seemed unlikely that the three great races of mankind could have descended from a common ancestor in the comparatively short time since humanity appeared on earth, as Onslow would have maintained they had: they must have arisen separately, for the cunning and idiocy of the Mongolian and Negroid races placed them so very far below the White.

  ‘I never,’ said Onslow gently, ‘in all my life heard any suggestion so absurd. The immeasurable gulf between ourselves and the beasts is alone proof of a divine and special creation of man, and so, I know, would any scientist not blinded by infidelity agree.’ The suggestion that he might be descended from an ape would have sickened him had he not thought it altogether ludicrous.

  ‘Not any scientist,’ said Anstey-Ward, feeling himself to be on insecure ground. ‘There are certainly many who reject the idea of transmutation, but if ever they accept it they will none of them dream of exempting man from its workings.’ He doubted this, but was not going to admit to Onslow that scientists could balk at facts they considered unpleasant. ‘Are your own certainties not in the least disturbed by the great resemblance there is between apes and men? especially between apes and black men?’

  ‘Great resemblance! What resemblance? Do you call a hideous parody of the physical man a resemblance? It is the mind, the spirit, the soul that signifies, and even black men have a soul.’

  ‘I don’t think it is that which signifies at all,’ said Anstey-Ward. ‘Do you know, the older I grow, the less respect I have for the mind and spirit and soul of man. The animals manage their lives with a good deal less trouble. Has it never occurred to you that beasts never sin?’

  ‘Naturally it has occurred to me – you forget I am a Christian, Dr Anstey-Ward. The capacity to sin is proof of our superiority, proof that God gave us free will and the knowledge of good and evil, as he did not to the beasts.’

  Suddenly they both remembered Onslow’s capacity to sin.

  ‘Allow me to give you a little more brandy,’ said Anstey-Ward. ‘I see your glass is empty.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Onslow closed his eyes and bit his lip when Anstey-Ward could no longer see him. He was sure that his opponent would produce the ‘documents’ as soon as he had given him his brandy, and he waited wretchedly.

  Anstey-Ward did consider at last bringing up the matter which Onslow had come down to Wiltshire to discuss, but he shrank from the thought, for he felt both too tired and too close to being drunk to be as dignified as the occasion required. An idea came to him, and he seized it. Instead of mentioning the letters, he said in a voice which was almost cheerful:

  ‘Would you object to telling me what you thought of Mr Mansel’s Bampton Lectures, Dr Onslow? I think we can discuss those rather more profitably than we can transmutation, and the age of the earth.’

  It was so unexpected that Onslow nearly laughed.

  ‘I can’t conceive why you should wish to know, sir, and I am surprised that a man of your opinions should have taken any interest in them, but I can only tell you that I thought them the most impressive piece of theological argument since Paley – words for our time.’

  These sermon-lectures, recently published, had been the intellectual sensation of the previous year. Mr Mansel was a philosopher and clergyman who had used eloquence and logic to show that it was not so much impious as nonsensical, essentially irrational, to attempt to make limited human reason comprehend the Infinite. It was therefore irrational to doubt the morality of God’s ordering Abraham to kill his son, on the grounds that such an action appeared wicked to the human mind. The goodness of God must necessarily be too high and remote for human understanding; mere rational understanding, he confessed at one point, made the atheist position the most plausible. But it was not so, and the wise who used their reason well would inevitably end in bowing down before the revelations provided by God, no matter how difficult they seemed.

  Anstey-Ward had been pleased, and some simple Christians worried, by the remarks about atheism, but many of the intellectual orthodox considered that Mansel had coldly and brilliantly vanquished such nervous Broad Churchmen as Martin Primrose and Frederick Denison Maurice.

  ‘I thought you might,’ said Anstey-Ward. ‘For my part I agree with whoever it was said he is like the man sitting on an inn-sign, sawing busily. So you think, sir, that there is a morality high above what we consider to be moral – which allows what we consider to be wicked to be in fact good?’

  After a moment, Onslow saw where the conversation was tending, understood why Anstey-Ward had raised this unexpected topic. Yet he was astonished by an atheist’s seeming to be concerned by what was moral. Straightening his shoulders and controlling his voice, he defended himself against the hint that he thought fit to ignore common morality, and fancied himself to be obeying a higher law when he sinned. He said:

  ‘I will not dispute with you about the nature and the actions of a God in Whom you do not believe, sir. He has made us know how it is we are to act through His Son and His New Testament. What He demands of man is what man must deliver.’

  ‘I see,’ said Anstey-Ward. ‘Yet you must be bound to consider God’s actions better than man’s, for all that, must you not? And I
don’t know that a man who thinks the hewing of Agag in pieces to be far from a crime can be said to possess anything but a twisted morality.’

  ‘Forgive me for saying that you are blinded by your prejudices,’ said Onslow.

  ‘I forgive you that,’ said Anstey-Ward, and looked at him.

  19

  Louisa lay awake in bed, waiting for her husband and thinking of how passionately she wanted him to become a bishop: not merely any bishop, but Bishop of Ipswich. She had almost rather that than see him Archbishop of Canterbury, for Ipswich was her father’s old see, and she had spent a happy childhood in the palace there. This childhood home she wanted to recreate largely because she still missed her father, though it was eleven years since his death. It was a continuing grief to her that she could not visit his grave, which was in Palestine – he had died of cholera on a trip to the Holy Land in 1848, a year after her own marriage, and had been succeeded at Ipswich by an old man who might at any moment die and give Onslow his opportunity, were it not for Anstey-Ward.

  To help keep her mind off the immediate issue, about which she could do nothing till Onslow came upstairs, Louisa began to think about her marriage, and to compare her husband with her father, something she had not done directly before.

  Louisa remembered how when she was a small child her father used to throw her up in the air and catch her, making her laugh at being safe again after an adventure. And when she grew to adulthood, she saw in George Onslow a man who would be able to take care of her as her father had: an older husband, best friend of her best-loved brother, destined for a high place in the church. He was kind and indulgent except when he was in a very bad humour, and just like her father, he tried to shelter her from all that was unpleasant, to which she had no objection. But she could not imagine her father being angry when she turned out not to have been successfully sheltered, as Onslow had been when she revealed that she knew. Yet perhaps, she thought, her father too would have been rather shocked to learn that she was able to look on unpleasantness with cool and open eyes when she could not avoid it.