TO MANY, Father Malachy’s preoccupation with the supernatural will no doubt seem foolish and, in these days when Mr. H.G. Wells and Mr. Arnold Bennett have finally exploded the prophets, unscientific; but it must be urged in his defense that, having lived for nearly fifty years in a monastery, he knew nothing of modern theogeology, contraception, book-keeping by double entry, broadcasting, taking the creed with a pinch of salt, chorus girls, chorus deans, talkies, aëronautics, and all the other without-which-nots which are the pride of our glorious contemporary civilization. For Father Malachy, poor little man, was content to believe that Christ had meant what He said and remained unmoved by the assertions of prominent company promoters that He had meant the exact opposite. And he really imagined, in these wonderful post-war years when every butcher boy is entitled to be his own pope, that Christianity was literally and wholly true and not just a musical way of spending Sunday mornings and evenings. So that the many, no matter how well educated they are or how often they have spoken English to French waiters at Deauville or how much they may disbelieve in the New Testament miracles which they can’t name, must, I am afraid, be indulgent and realize that this chronicle is, in effect, the story of a very mediævally minded man living in modern times and unable to understand, through the blindness which those who are afflicted with it call Faith, that stock exchanges have taken the place of cathedrals and that no rational man can be expected to stomach doctrines acceptable only to prize noodles like Saint Athanasius and Hilaire Belloc.
And what is true of Father Malachy is also, in a lesser degree, true of the clergy of the Church of Saint Margaret of Scotland. For Canon Geoghegan, although he, as he himself would have phrased it, knew a thing or two (some of the more worldly of his cure used to say that they got quite amusing tips from his sermons), believed that birth control was wrong and that divorce was equally wrong and that far-seeing men like Dean Inge and Sir Harry Lauder were talking through their hats when they told their Sunday publics that one religion was as good as another. Indeed, he was most fierce in his condemnation of what the majority of people regarded as sanctified by public approval, and, Sunday after Sunday, he would anathematize with equal zest Presbyterianism, flesh-coloured stockings, pajama parties, and any modern novel in which the characters behaved as though they were really alive. And Fathers Neary and O’Flaherty, two raw bonny priestlets if ever there were two, would consign straight to hell fire anyone who missed Mass on Sundays or caused scandal to the young by reading the pernicious and scabrous works of Joseph Hocking. Still, be they right or be they wrong, the fact remains that the priests and the people of the Church of Saint Margaret of Scotland lived their own peculiar life in a district populated for the most part by loose women and chartered accountants and that, in spite of enlightenment, progress, and motor transport, they confessed and were confessed, distributed and received what they believed to be the Body of their Lord just as though it were the fourteenth century and England still Merrie and Scotland not yet Stern and Wild.
For a few weeks after the events narrated in the previous chapter, things went on very much as usual. That is to say that the loose women continued to be loose and the chartered accountants to imagine that their profession was learned and Canon Geoghegan to hate the Garden of Eden and Anglican bishops in council and Fathers Neary and O’Flaherty to administer the Sacraments with the solid efficiency of chemists selling pills. In other words, Edinburgh continued to be Edinburgh just as London continued to be London and Paris to be Paris. For places and the people in them do not change very much and, although all over the world there are movements to convert the impure to purity and the unbelieving to belief and the stupid to intelligence, the great variety show goes on as ever and men living next door to one another are as far apart as though five oceans lay between them. And, this being as true of the parcel of space occupied by the parish of Saint Margaret of Scotland as of that occupied by the parish of Nuestra Señora del Mar in Barcelona, it is exceedingly improbable that this story would ever have been written had not Father Malachy, one Friday morning, the ninth of December, chanced to rescue the top hat of the Reverend Humphrey Hamilton, rector of the Episcopal church on the other side of the street.
It had been arranged, by agreement between the lord abbot of Fort William and Canon Geoghegan, that Father Malachy should remain with the latter until the end of the month of February, by which time it was hoped that the choir would have learned to chant in the Gregorian tone and Fathers Neary and O’Flaherty to observe the rubrics in a manner pleasing to Almighty God. And so, on this particular Friday, the ninth of December, Father Malachy, having said Mass at nine and breakfasted on a kipper and a boiled egg at ten, was walking past the heretical church of Saint Ninian’s and looking, in his battered black felt hat and shabby coat, as unremarkable and ineffectual a clergyman as you could find in any other town. But, inside, his mind was all rosy and golden, for he was meditating as usual upon the Love of Our Lord, and it remained rosy and golden until, summoned from meditation by the church notice board which obtruded itself upon his gaze, he read:
COME TO EVENSONG.
IT’S CHEAPER
THAN
THE PICTURES.
GOD DOESN’T MIND IF YOU HOLD HER HAND.
At which Father Malachy’s mind became as black as the coat which was flapping about his legs because, being a monk, he was ignorant enough to find something distasteful in advertising divine service as though it were marmalade or a Chrysler Six. And, as he stood there and disapproved, a well-dressed clergyman came out of the church, and the same wind as was responsible for the well-known epigram of Robert Louis Stevenson caught at his hat, raised it from his head, and blew it, tipplety-topplety, to the feet of Father Malachy, who fielded it neatly and returned it politely to the embarrassed ecclesiastic.
“A thousand thanks,” came a well-bred rumble from the clergyman. “A thousand thanks. That wind. Most trying. I’m very much afraid that winds are no respecters of parsons, a-ha.”
Now Father Malachy was not used to meeting nice spruce clergymen of the Anglican dispensation, and so he stood awkwardly and said nothing; but the other, noting that the rescuer of his top hat also wore a Roman collar, became positively hearty and boomed as though he were preaching over the wireless to unseen millions:
“I see that you also are a parson. How very curious.”
“I am a Catholic priest,” said Father Malachy with humble pride.
A cloud, or rather the shadow of a cloud, passed rapidly over the semi-Grecian features of the Reverend Humphrey Hamilton, Master of Arts of the University of Cambridge; but it was gone almost immediately and the clergyman said with a gracious smile:
“I see.” And nodding across to the dark bulk of the presbytery, added: “Then you are from the other side of the road in more senses than one?”
“Yes and no.” Father Malachy smiled. “You see, I am not permanently attached to the parish of Saint Margaret of Scotland. I am a Benedictine monk, and I have been loaned by my abbot to Canon Geoghegan in order to instruct the people in the use of plain chant.”
“Fine-man-Canon-Geoghegan,” the Reverend Humphrey Hamilton said in a quick, slurring voice which seemed to imply that, in his opinion, Canon Geoghegan was seventeen kinds of a congenital idiot. And, indeed, his next remark endorsed this semblance of an implication for, without pausing to nod his head in approval of the merits of the canon, he went on: “But, my dear Father—I may call you ‘Father,’ may I not?—surely in these enlightened days, plain chant and all doesn’t stand much chance against this sort of thing?” He pointed to the notice board which had broken in upon Father Malachy’s meditation. “Surely, my dear Father, in these days when it is so important to get hold of the young people, we must use other and newer methods to compel them to come in? Surely we must bring religion into line with modern thought, must we not?”
It was unfortunate that the Reverend Humphrey Hamilton did not know better the obstinate obscurantism of the monkish mind or he would never, having been educated at Charterhouse and Trinity Hall, have used such an expression as “bring religion into line with modern thought.” For monks think, funnily enough, that the Christian religion was true when it was delivered to the Apostles and that therefore it cannot be improved or made more true since truth, like God, is eternal. But the Reverend Humphrey Hamilton, being a well-read man and, so the ecclesiastical reporters said, in the vanguard of contemporary philosophers, did not know this, and so he was a little pained and quite surprised when Father Malachy said sternly:
“If you will allow me to say so, sir, I think that your notice board is in the worst possible taste. Further, I think that these ‘enlightened’ days—as you call them—are most unenlightened and that to talk about bringing religion into line with modern thought is as sensible as talking about bringing impressionism into line with hydraulics.”
As has already been pointed out and indeed as has already been observed from his forbearance with Canon Geoghegan, Father Malachy was a mild and gentle man and one of those few Christians who really try to practice that most difficult and trying part of Christianity known as Loving Your Neighbour. It is, therefore, all the more extraordinary that he should have lost his temper with a nice man like the Reverend Humphrey Hamilton merely because that clergyman had expressed an opinion which had already been accepted as a dogma by the broadest-minded stockbrokers and the prettiest young girls of the day. But then, as has been indicated at the beginning of this chapter, Father Malachy was only a poor monk and had passed all his life in a Church which was unenterprising enough to ladle out the same doctrinal broth to broad-minded stockbrokers and pretty girls as to crossing-sweepers and policemen.
However, the Reverend Humphrey Hamilton was very much a man of the world (he used to say “damn” when he missed his drive and, when with check-suited and check-minded laymen, to prefix the adjective “bloody” to the adjective “awful”), and so, knowing that he was à la page in theology and that Father Malachy wasn’t, he said, with infinite charity:
“Come, come, my dear Father. Surely your words are rather hard, are they not? I will ask you to believe me when I tell you that I had no intention of offending you. Indeed, speaking personally, I may say that I have the greatest respect and admiration for members of the Western Church—our Roman Catholic friends, as I never fail to style them when publicly touching upon controversial matters. After all, I was merely trying to make clear to you my point of view. And we are, all of us, entitled to our own convictions, aren’t we?”
But Father Malachy, instead of being pacified by the gracious and generous words of the Reverend Humphrey Hamilton, went on being rude:
“Your point of view, sir, reduces to absurdity itself and all other points of view. And when you say that we are, all of us, entitled to our own convictions, you mean that we are entitled to be convinced about anything except that our own conviction is exclusively right. Points of view in theology are as idiotic as points of view in mathematics. I am just as entitled to believe that two and two make five as I am to believe that Our Lord could let the world be deceived in essential matters for nearly sixteen hundred years.”
His sentences went hurtling at the Reverend Humphrey Hamilton, who was standing with one hand on the top of his silk hat for fear that the wind should again remove it from his head; and the wind, seeing that there was nothing further doing as far as the hat was concerned, took the sentences and blew them apart again into words and sent them flying on to the car lines where, since there was no microphone to hand them on to all stations, they were run over and cut to meaningless syllables by the trams.
“A little vieux jeu all that, surely?” said the Reverend Humphrey Hamilton in a less charitable tone than before. “I know that it’s quite a literary fashion these days to be mediæval but mediævalism won’t wash when it is a question of running banks or making young people worthy fathers and mothers of to-morrow.”
Father Malachy was a little taken aback and looked it. He knew nothing about literary fashions and imagined, so ignorant was he in those matters, that Mr. Beverley Nichols was a wholesale dealer in marzipan. He had answered the Reverend Humphrey Hamilton with the arguments he had been taught as a student and he was quite at a loss to understand what the other meant by his talk of running banks and making young people worthy fathers and mothers of to-morrow.
“I was not aware that I was following any fashion, literary or otherwise,” he said. “I was merely giving the answer which the Catholic Church has always given to her critics and to would-be reformers throughout the ages. And, as far as I can see, the answer is distinctly unfashionable.”
“I am glad,” said the Reverend Humphrey Hamilton, with a wispy little smile, “that you are not of those papists who imagine that the novels of Mr. Gilbert Keith Chesterton and the extremely snappy marriages which are celebrated at Brompton Oratory can justify a system of thought and practice which is naturally repugnant to the British mind. No, my dear Father, I am afraid that you and your colleagues will have to think of something better than that.” His smile became a grin as he concluded: “And I am afraid that your worthy Canon Geoghegan is not doing your cause any good by his perpetual fulminations against that excellent little establishment down the road known as the Garden of Eden.”
Father Malachy was at a loss what to reply. He did not, as he had been told, approve of the canon’s attitude toward the Garden of Eden and yet he could not say so to an energetic heretic like the Reverend Humphrey Hamilton for fear that the admission should be misinterpreted as disloyalty.
The Reverend Humphrey Hamilton noted his hesitation and, imagining perhaps that he was on the point of winning a victory for light and reason and common sense, asked:
“Would you care to accompany me for a short way? I have to go and pay a call on the secretary of the Unselfish Society—a most worthy undertaking, I can assure you—and I am afraid that I have not got such a very great deal of time at my disposal. I suggest this because I am finding our discussion quite profitable. Yes, I mean it, quite profitable. These friendly little disagreements do so much to smooth away misunderstanding, do you not think?”
“I will go with you for two short ways,” said Father Malachy, calling to mind what Our Lord had said about walking miles, lending cloaks, and turning the other cheek.
“Very apt,” said the Reverend Humphrey Ham-ilton, partly because he did think it apt, partly to show that he recognized the evangelical counsel which had inspired the remark.
So they set off down the street, the Reverend Humphrey Hamilton very tall and grand and Father Malachy very small and humble.
“It has always seemed to me,” the Reverend Humphrey Hamilton boomed to the city and to the world, “it has always seemed to me that Spain and Portugal furnish the final argument.”
“I beg your pardon,” said Father Malachy, who had been trying so hard to keep pace with his companion that he had heard only an impressive sequence of meaningless rumbles.
The Reverend Humphrey Hamilton, who liked the sentence, re-rumbled:
“It has always seemed to me, it has always seemed to me that Spain and Portugal furnish the final argument.”
“You mean?”
“I mean that the bleeding Madonnas, tawdry churches, sanctified amulets, and unshaven clerics to be found in the Iberian Peninsula constitute, to the normal, healthy English mind, the ultimate refutation of the Roman theology.” He paused to decide that the phrase was not bad, considering that it had been hatched against the wind, and that it was worthy of inclusion in the next “living religion” sermon. There would be a silence in the church and, grasping his scarf between thumb and forefinger, he would thunder slowly and powerfully across the that silence: “The bleeding Madonnas, tawdry churches, sanctified amulets, and unshaven clerics to be found in the Iberian Peninsula constitute, to the normal, healthy English mind, the ultimate refutation of the Roman theology.” That “…the ultimate refutation of the Roman theology” was especially good. But what was the poor fish saying? He forced himself to listen.
“I do not see that these things which you men-tion have anything to do with the matter. You are, like most superficial observers, confounding the unessential with the essential. The Catholic religion is an intellectual religion. We are afraid of nobody on that score. Take Saint Thomas Aquinas, for instance. Take his Summa. To anyone who can read Latin, there is in that book an answer to every so-called modern problem. People seem to imagine that difficulties and doubts are the discoveries of to-day. Saint Thomas Aquinas knew them all and answered them all in the twelfth century. As for the exaggerations of the temperamental Latin races, well, they simply don’t matter. The true, cold Catholic reality is the thing which matters.”
“What about Sint Januarius?” the Reverend Humphrey Hamilton asked gleefully. “What about Sint Januarius? Is that the true, cold Catholic reality? Tell me that. Or is it one of the exaggerations of the temperamental Latin races? Eh, tell me that.”
“I do not see why you should deny to Almighty God the power of liquefying at certain seasons the blood of one of His saints. And you must admit that He has been wise enough to locate the miracle in Italy, where Latin logic at once interprets such manifestations as a pulling apart of the curtain to show that the Catholic religion is true. In these islands, such an occurrence would be at once taken as a proof that the Catholic religion was false. The British, for some reason or other, can only accept as true a religion which shows every sign of being false.”
“Very clever.” The Reverend Humphrey Hamil-ton dragged out the adverb as though it were a piece of elastic. “I must admit that you express yourself well. But why all this insistence on miracles? They are really so very unnecessary and so very impossible. I hope, my dear Father, that you will not think that I am trying to be unkind when I say that the balance of opinion among our most representative scientists is entirely against the possibility of miracles occurring or ever having occurred. Natural laws, my dear Father, are simply not broken.”
For fully a minute, Father Malachy did not speak, and when he did, his voice was trembling with unhappiness.
“And Our Lord’s miracles, sir? What about them? Do you believe in them? Do you believe that Our Lord turned water into wine at the marriage feast in Cana of Galilee? Do you believe that He raised up Lazarus from the dead? Do you believe that He Himself rose from the dead and ascended into heaven? Do you believe that He was the Son of God?”
The Reverend Humphrey Hamilton was not an unkind man. He had, it is true, read volumes of anthropology and comparative religion and metaphysics and had quite honestly arrived at the conclusion that the Old and New Testaments were greatly exaggerated accounts of the spiritual history of an obscure and over-imaginative nomadic tribe. But he knew that there were still large numbers of people, less well-read than himself, who believed with all their heart and soul that the traditional Christianity was really and wholly true. So he answered gently:
“My dear Father, you must remember that the Bible narrative has been largely coloured by the Eastern imaginations of those who wrote it and that consequently words and actions which were not His have been attributed to Our Saviour.”
Poor Father Malachy became unhappier than ever. Not having read Bertrand Russell and Freud, the Reverend Humphrey Hamilton’s words sounded to him blasphemous and sinful, and, driven to futility by his spiritual pain, he said weakly:
“I am afraid, sir, that you are not a Christian.”
“Not as you interpret the word, perhaps. But if by being a Christian is meant serving others and not self, then I think I may humbly claim the distinction. I do not think that if I say to a mountain ‘Be thou removed into the middle of the sea,’ the mountain will budge an inch. I do not think so for the very simple reason that it is against the natural law that mountains should, to use the Psalmist’s phrase, skip like rams.”
Then Father Malachy, in his misery, said a very unkind thing.
“I have always noticed,” he said, “that heretics and unbelievers are the first to take credit for observing a commandment so difficult that even the saints of God boggled over it. And, as for what you say about mountains, I am quite convinced that, if God willed, He could cause your church or the Garden of Eden to be transferred into the middle of the Sahara.”
The Reverend Humphrey Hamilton was chari-table enough to overlook Father Malchy’s first sentence and human enough to understand that it had been prompted by great mental agony; but, looking round, he saw that, in the heat of their discussion and in order to let their arms wave support and encouragement to their tongues, they had stopped bang outside the front door of the Garden of Eden, so, confining his charity to Father Malachy’s first sentence, he pitched into his second:
“Do you honestly mean to stand there and tell me that in this twentieth century and in this metropolis of learning, God could perform the miracle of transporting this home of light and healthy amusement through the ether? My dear Father, please reflect upon what you are saying.”
Father Malachy turned to gaze upon the insti-tution which had caused Canon Geoghegan such uneasiness. Through a coloured glass door, an electric light burned mysteriously, like the far-away sanctuary lamp of an eclectic religion. Perhaps modern young women were even now giving instruction to would-be initiates. Perhaps even at this moment, the Bee Bee Bee was having his five shillings’ worth. Perhaps anything. And on the outside, there was a huge notice, printed in blue and red and, indeed, not unlike the outside of the Reverend Humphrey Hamilton’s church, which announced that to-morrow night, Saturday, the tenth December, was what was technically known as a LATE NIGHT and that the ladies of the chorus of the Whose Baby Are You? company, now playing to crowded houses at the Empire, had, of their graciousness, condescended to be present. Saturday, tenth December. The date, for some reason or other, kept repeating itself in his mind. Tenth December, tenth December, tenth December. And then, in an instant, he remembered. The tenth of December was the feast of the Translation of the Holy House of Loretto. “Deus, qui Beatae Mariae Virginis Domum per Incarnate Verbi mysteries misericorditer consecrati, eamque in sin Ecclesiae to mirabiliter ollocasti…” the collect began. “O God, who by the mystery of the Word, therein become Incarnate, didst, in Thy mercy, consecrate the House of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and wondrously did translate it into the bosom of thy Church…” It was an amazing coincidence that he should be discussing with a heretic the miracle of transportation on the very eve of the festival of the translation of the dwelling place of Our Lady.
And suddenly, sure that it was more than a co-incidence, he was saying:
“To-morrow is the anniversary of the translation from Nazareth to Loretto of the house in which Our Blessed Lord became incarnate by Our Lady. It is a miracle in which, no doubt, you find yourself unable to believe. But if you will meet me here to-morrow night at half-past eleven o’clock, I will, by the help of God, cause to be transported to any place you may mention the Garden of Eden, its late night, and the ladies of the chorus of Whose Baby Are You? company. At eleven-thirty sharp. Don’t be late.”
And, without another word, he crossed the road and, a huddled little figure in huddled black clothes, disappeared into the presbytery of the Church of Saint Margaret of Scotland.
2
The remainder of the morning passed dismally for Father Malachy. He took up the day’s issue of a prominent daily, read in gigantic headlines: FIVE NATIONS ARE STRAINING THEIR EVERY NERVE TO WREST FROM BRITAIN HER SPEED SUPREMACY BY LAND, AIR, AND WATER, put it down again and let his cry go up: “How long?” He had just, you see, obtained a glimpse of that darling modern world which delights us all so much, and, not understanding the nature of a progress which seemed to lead nowhere, he felt wounded, lonely, and miserable. He himself believed so strongly in Christ and in this life being but the prelude to another and fuller life that his soul was lacerated by the realization that there were others to whom Christ was only rather an uncomfortable Confucius and life but being able to lunch in London and dine and wine in Berlin on the same evening. He had not been educated, as we have been educated, to regard religion as being rather a bad guess at a riddle which nobody can solve, and he was mediæval enough to regard people who disbelieved in the guess as traitors to Our Lord. Poor little Father Malachy. He sat in his very uncomfortable room with the one million nine hundred and seventy-second copy of a hustling and bustling up-to-date newspaper on his knee and wondered what his holy father Saint Benedict must think about it all.
At lunch, he was still wretched, and, as he sat down to table with Canon Geoghegan and Fathers Neary and O’Flaherty, he felt that life was indeed a sorry business. Here they were, four papist clergymen in bulging, slovenly, ill-fitting black clothes, sitting down to eat some very assertive haddock, four ecclesiastical knockabouts with the mark of the Holy Ghost upon their souls, four clumping, lumping ineffectives as direct successors of the Apostles in a city which didn’t care two straws about their mission. And all around them was unbelief, in the next house, in the next street, unbelief or that dreadful, ill-mannered heresy which had reduced fair Scotland to the level of a second-rate Lancashire. “O dear Jesus,” he prayed silently, “You who have been silent so long, give the people a sign that they may know that all this modern intelligence is bunkum.”
Father Neary, a small, fair-haired priest with mischievous blue eyes, shouted across the table to Father O’Flaherty, who had red hair and rode a motor bicycle:
“Say, Mike, and phwat will ye be thinking o’ the Hibs now?”
And Father O’Flaherty shouted back:
“Faith, Tommy, and I’m thinking that the Hearts will be after beating them.”
Canon Geoghegan said nothing, but went on picking at his fish, methodically, earnestly, as though he were disembowelling Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. To tell the truth, he did not approve of association football any more than he approved of modern dancing; but he realized that, under the existing rules, it was less likely to give rise to immorality, and so he wisely tolerated what he could not suppress. A curious priest, Canon Geoghegan, and one whose mentality differed strangely from that of Father Malachy. Father Malachy accepted revelation as a beautiful poem which was, by the grace of God, true; Canon Geoghegan accepted revelation as a set of facts, as unæsthetic in themselves as Covent Garden in the early morning, which was unfortunately true. Perhaps this little difference of interpretation may account for their not being able to see eye to eye in the matter of the Garden of Eden.
But at the present moment, Father Malachy was more in sympathy with the canon than he had ever been before for he felt that it was most unseemly to talk of football at a moment when Scotland and the world were careering off to eternal damnation through heresy and unbelief.
“I met the clergyman of the church opposite while I was out this morning,” he began by way of bringing conversation round to the heavenly athletics.
“Sure and ye nivver did,” said Father Neary through a mouth crammed with potatoes, bread, and fish. “Not ould Humphles, the ould Judas. Sure and ye nivver did.”
“The dirty, lying, ould scallywaganorum,” said Father O’Flaherty. “And if I was his mother, I’d be after taking down his holy pants, that I’d be, him and his disbelieving in Jaysus Christ.”
Canon Geoghegan munched on for a few sec-onds in silence. He disliked what he described to other Irish ecclesiastics born in Midlothian as “the loathsome effervescences of the untutored Erse” and had had more than once to reprove his curates for using uncouth language from the pulpit. For sometimes a real Rolls-Royce would pull up outside the Church of Saint Margaret of Scotland and some bewhiskered and bespatter duke, accompanied by daughters well dressed enough to look sinful, would ascend the long flight of steps and penetrate into what was, for nine dukes out of ten, the House of Rimmon. And on such occasions, it was unfortunate if the Reverend Michael O’Flaherty, priest for ever after the Order of Melchisedech, were to take the opportunity of telling the congregation that they were a “lot of lazy, half-baked spalpeens with divil a thought for the darlin’ Lord Jaysus in the Most Holy Sacrament in the Altar, begob.” That sort of thing didn’t go down with dukes who, between a flutter at Deauville and a win at Newmarket, carried the canopy when archbishops were consecrated. And Benedictine monks, pest take them, were almost as always as grand gentlemen as the most worldly dukes and could discuss, with equal ease, fishing in the Hebrides or the invalidity of the Anglican Orders. He munched on, therefore, just to show these two young scallywags from County Down that he, Shamus Canon Geoghegan, was annoyed with them.
And when at last he spoke, he did so in a thin trickle of quasi-donnish sarcasm.
“You are referring, I presume, to the incumbent of the pagoda on the other side of the road?”
“Precisely.” Father Malachy began to speak quickly because he wanted to lighten his trouble by passing part of it on to others. “I was walking outside his pagoda, as you so aptly put it, when he came out of the west door and a gust of wind blew his hat from his head and rolled it along to my feet. I picked it up, naturally, and handed it to him. He thanked me and we began to talk theology. In the course of our conversation, I learned that he did not believe in miracles or in such well-established doctrines as the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ.”
“The blasphemious bletherskite!” said the Rev-erend Father Neary.
“The holy, stinkin’ heretic!” said the Reverend Father O’Flaherty.
Canon Geoghegan, who was sitting at the top of the table, inclined his head to left and to right just as though he were in the middle of the confiteor.
“Please,” he said in a tone which completely turned his request into a command and, addressing himself to Father Malachy, continued: “The phenomenon, my dear Father, is by no means so unusual as you seem to imagine. The pernicious work begun at the Reformation bears fruit ever more and more abundantly. Heresy always breeds heresy. Protestants began by denying Purgatory and the Mass and they are finishing by denying the Virgin Birth, the Divinity of Our Lord, and everything which makes Christianity a religion. Yes, I think that we may fairly say that they have reduced Christianity from the level of a supernatural religion to that of a philosophical opinion which, like opinions on all other matters from toffee-making to road-mending, may be right and may be wrong.” He paused to allow his phrase to sink into the minds of his hearers. “Mr. Humphrey Hamilton is only one of many, my dear Father, and his convictions, or rather his unconvictions, are shared by all clergymen popular and prominent enough to be asked to write for the Sunday newspapers on Mixed Bathing, Marriage, or the Spiritual Aspect of Face Cream.” The canon snorted. “And yet some people wonder why monks and nuns shut themselves off from the world.”
“But how very terrible,” said Father Malachy, whose misery had been increased rather than decreased by the canon’s words. “And Mr. Hamilton told me that he was of the opinion that the Scriptures were in many respects inaccurate.”
“Shakes,” said Father Neary, “but foine I’d loike to dot him one on the boko.”
The canon again inclined his head disap-provingly in the direction of Father Neary.
“I presume,” he said dryly, “that he told you that they had been largely coloured by the hyper-Orientalism of the writers.”
“Curiously enough, such were almost his very words.”
“It is not so very curious, my dear Father, when one reflects that for the past ten years leading novelists, who have never read the Bible since they were expelled from one of those Public Schools which have made England What She Is, have been telling us Sunday by Sunday that anthropology and geology have clearly shown that the Bible is a sentimental best-seller which contrived to get itself written only because the Children of Israel never played rugby football.” He glanced at both his curates as though to say: “There is not, my friends, any difference, sub specie æternitatis, between association and rugby,” and wound up: “The phenomenon of disbelief, my dear Father, may be described as a sort of intellectual German measles from which it takes three centuries, instead of three weeks, to recover.”
One part of Father Malachy’s soul felt happier, and one part felt more wretched. He was happy to hear Canon Geoghegan dispose of heresy in such quick, competent phrases, and he was shocked because the fact that it could be so easily disposed of seemed to argue that he had been somewhat rash in undertaking to transport, by his volition and the help of the Trinity, the Garden of Eden to any place which the Reverend Humphrey Hamilton should name.
“I am afraid that I have been rather rash,” he said slyly. “You see, I was so shocked and pained to discover that the truths of our holy religion were regarded with such contempt by professedly intelligent men.”
The canon looked inquiringly at Father Mala-chy.
“I do hope that you weren’t rude to him, Fa-ther,” he said. “Mr. Hamilton can be rather an awkward neighbour when he likes.”
“Rude?” Father Malachy shook his head. “No, Canon, I wasn’t rude. We got on to talking about the blood of Saint Januarius and moving mountains into the middle of the sea, and he was so emphatic in his assertion that miracles were, and had always been, impossible that I undertook, with the help of God and His holy Mother, to transport, to-morrow night at half-past eleven o’clock, the Garden of Eden to any part of the universe which the reverend gentleman should name.”
At this statement, even the Reverend Fathers Neary and O’Flaherty became solemn, and Canon Geoghegan left off altogether picking at his fish and, placing his knife and fork with French irregularity upon his plate, said quietly:
“I am afraid, Father, that I don’t quite under-stand. Would you mind repeating the last part of your sentence?”
Father Malachy repeated:
“I undertook, with the help of God and His holy Mother, to transport, to-morrow night at half-past eleven o’clock, the Garden of Eden to any part of the universe which the reverend gentleman should name.”
“My dear Father! Do I understand you to say that you have entered into a wager with this very unreasonable schismatic and heretic to duplicate the miracle of the Flying House of Loretto? Do I understand you to say that?”
Father Malachy nodded.
“You’ve got the idea,” he said. “Only the con-tract is in no sense of the word a wager, as no money is to change hands. I merely wish to vindicate the miracles of antiquity by performing, through God, another one on Saturday night. And it was precisely the fact that to-morrow, the tenth of December, is the Commemoration of the Translation of the Holy House of Loretto which inspired me to challenge him.”
“Inspired,’ my dear Father, is a strong word, and, in this instance, I fear that it is also a wrong word.” The canon’s face, ordinarily a hearty crimson, was a pale and disapproving purple. “If you will pardon my saying so, I think that you have been most foolhardy and have exposed to considerable ridicule the cause which we all have so much at heart.”
“Sure,” said Father Neary, “and miracles are intoirely out of fashion these days. If one were to take place in his lordship the bishop’s bedroom, the right reverend ould gint would be after hushing the indaicency up.”
“I agree,” said Canon Geoghegan. “And what is more, I am sure that the united hierarchies of Scotland, Ireland, England, and Wales would be of the same opinion.”
But the disapproval of Canon Geoghegan and Father Neary had only the effect of making Father Malachy more determined than ever to carry out his project. Gone were the wretchedness and the hesitation of a few minutes ago, and in their place came a firm purpose to carry out the undertaking and, with the supernatural to crown the natural, to succeed. If good, sound priests like Canon Geoghegan were against miracles, then there was more need than ever to vindicate them.
“Perhaps,” he said gently, “you had better send a telegram to His Holiness informing him that Father Malachy Murdoch, of the Order of Saint Benedict, intends, with God’s grace, to confound unbelievers by publicly performing a miracle at half-past eleven on Saturday night.” Perceiving that his word had gone home, he continued, still more gently: “If you will examine the secret places of your hearts, reverend Fathers, I think you will find that it is a lack of faith which is at the root of your objection to my proposed course of action. In other words, you are afraid that I won’t bring the trick off and that my failure will confound the believers and not the unbelievers. And yet, reverend Fathers, morning after morning, each of you stands at God’s altar and, by virtue of the priesthood in him, performs the most wonderful marvel of all: the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. That marvel, I admit, cannot, by its very nature, be exposed to crude physical tests; but it is none the less a marvel for all that, and it is performed three hundred thousand times each day, in obscure Spanish village churches just as certainly as in metropolitan cathedrals. Surely, in view of the wonderful way in which that marvel never fails, it is not too much to hope that Almighty God will enable me to perform the very much less striking miracle of transporting through the air a dancing hall which, on your own authority, Canon, has caused a great deal of scandal in this parish?”
A silence fell over the room, a silence through which the clanging of the trams outside was heard and was not heard. The three secular priests looked at one another uncomfortably and looked away again as soon as their eyes met. Each recognized the logic in Father Malachy’s argument, and yet each felt that the transportation through the air of the Garden of Eden was a miracle which not even the Pope and all his College of Cardinals could perform.
“My dear Father Malachy,” the canon began slowly, “I should be the last to deny the existence of the supernatural. I am a Catholic priest, and I know my theology too well to be guilty of any leanings toward modernism. But the marvel of Our Lord’s birth each day in the Mass, my dear Father, is a marvel which He Himself guaranteed when, in an upper room with His apostles, He Himself said the first Mass and pronounced, for all the centuries to hear, the first ‘HOC EST ENIM CORPUS MEUM.’ We have no such guarantee that your miracle will come off. Indeed, we must take it from the very fact that there are such things as natural laws that Almighty God is very unwilling to break them.”
Father Malachy thought over the canon’s words before he replied to them.
“I quite see the point that you have just made, Canon,” he said. “We have, of course, Our Lord’s promise that He will come and come again amongst us in the Blessed Sacrament of His Love, and we have no promise, not even a hint from a very minor saint, that the Garden of Eden will take the air on Saturday night. The Mass, of course, is what one might call a natural supernatural occurrence. This is to say that Our Lord’s promise has made it quite certain that each time a validly ordained priest pronounces the words of consecration over bread and wine, they will become, transubstantially and in an unseen but real manner, His Body and Blood. The transformation is as inevitable as the law of gravity and so we may say, in very truth, that the Mass is an integral part of the heavenly mechanics. Of course, heretics and unbelievers, who accept only the evidence of their senses, argue that because the Bread still appears to be bread and the Wine to be wine, there has been no marvel. Now, reverend Fathers, the words ‘heretics’ and ‘unbelievers’ are used by us so hardly that we sometimes forget that Almighty God loves them just as much as He loves us and that He wishes to garner them all into that eternal barn which we call heaven. And one of his chief means of converting heretics and unbelievers is by the use of spectacular miracles, the reality of which nobody can deny. Our Lord’s resurrection and ascension and the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the Apostles are among such spectacular miracles as are also the miracles effected by the Apostles and by their successors. Sacred tradition is full of the accounts of such spectacular miracles, about which we may observe two things: firstly, that they were almost invariably used to induce or to strengthen faith; and, secondly, that they occur more and more rarely as time goes on. The second fact we, who are of the household of the faith, may interpret as a sign that, as the Gospel became more widely spread, God considered that there was less need for spectacular miracles. But the Church has never lost the power to ‘do signs and wonders in His Name’ and, as a proof of this, we have the cures at Lourdes and little local miracles like the liquefaction on the nineteenth of September in Naples of the blood pf Saint Januarius. And in countries like China to which the faith has been given only in comparatively recent years, miracles, if we are to believe the missionaries, are of quite frequent occurrence. The position, then, would seem to be this: that God, of His infinite mercy, yields for a short time to the human misstatement that seeing is believing and then, when Faith has been firmly established, gradually turns the tap off, although He always lets fall a dribble or two out of compassion for a wicked and adulterous generation. At least, reverend Fathers, that is the light in which the matter appears to me.”
“Very well put, Father,” said Canon Geoghe-gan. “But we in Scotland have had the Faith for years.”
“My dear Canon Geoghegan,” Father Malachy answered as patiently as the grace of God allowed him to, “I am afraid that you have got things upside down, haven’t you? We in Scotland have not had the faith for years; we have lost it for years, which is a very different thing. A mere handful, it is true, have kept the faith, and there are, thank God, a few places in the Western Highlands where the sanctuary lamp was not extinguished by the Reformation. But what of those who are inoculated with the errors of Knox and Luther and Calvin? What of the millions who have never heard of the Blessed Sacrament? Go along Princes Street and ask the first man you meet what he understands by the term ‘the Catholic Church’ and see what sort of answer you get. And add to these millions in Scotland and those others and many more millions in England and America and then perhaps you will realize that there is quite a need for some supernatural fireworks to bring the English-speaking peoples back to God. You, Canon, are a priest as I am and you must realize just as clearly as I do that the only solution of all our modern problems and difficulties is to be found in the submission of the entire world to Christ’s Holy Catholic Church.”
“Touché,” the canon admitted as gracefully as he could, mangling rather than pronouncing the Gallicism. “We are indeed, as you hint, a benighted country, and we need nothing so much as a thorough dosing with Catholic doctrine. Everywhere men are seeking religion with some authority behind it and a Church which is international rather than national and sound rules by which to conduct their lives, and everywhere they are too blind to see what they seek is seeking them. And so the Church of God is made to seem a sect among the sects and superior persons who inhabit the west end of Edinburgh and the east end of instruction regard us as being a perversion of that which they themselves have perverted. And the intellectuals, the pseudo-psychologists, and the twenty-four handicap metaphysicians! Only this morning I was reading an essay in which a man who ought to know better said that man created God in his own image and that, as there were many kinds of men upon the earth, quot homines, tot dei, Aphodite and Our Blessed Lady were, according to this seer, two different names for two different psychological states. And the harm that such stuff works.” The canon jerked his head backwards towards the window through which the world, a pale, grey, humming reality, could be faintly discerned and more faintly heard. “Indeed, Father, I do not think that it is any exaggeration to say that the predominance of such pernicious philosophies has been responsible for the springing up all over our beloved land of institutions like the Garden of Eden where sin is but a pleasant sensual titivation set to music. You are quite right, my dear Father; we have lost the Faith for years.”
Father Malachy saw his opportunity and snatched at it. He knew, of course, that the Middle Ages, when novelists who thought aloud in Sunday newspapers would have been burned at the stake, had had institutions like the Garden of Eden and some which had been even more startling, but he did not take the trouble to point this out to Canon Geoghegan and prayed that, on the Last Day, Our Lord would overlook His omission in view of the supernatural end for which it was made.
“Therefore, Canon, you are bound to admit that now is the time to strike. One little spectacular miracle and we shall prove to the world, in a manner so sure as to be irrefutable, that we have the Light and the Truth and are divinely appointed guardians of the Way. One little spectacular miracle,” he wheedled, “and we shall be able to go and teach, not only Scotland, but all nations with the certainty that they will listen to us.”
The canon thought away and away behind the ego that was Shamus Canon Geoghegan. He desired, since he was a priest and a good one, the peace of Christ in the reign of Christ just as earnestly as did Father Malachy and he was weary of a city and a world which regarded his religion as a picturesque survival from an uneducated age. Yes, perhaps the time was indeed ripe. Perhaps, too, God was intending to use Father Malachy is a sphere other than that of instructing working men and boys in the glories of plain chant. God had used as many humble, unlikely people that you never knew whom He was going to use next. Bernadette and the pale, sickly Thérèse of Lisieux, Jean Vianney, who had been such a dolt that his bishop wasn’t keen on ordaining him. Why not, then, Father Malachy? And it would be a wonderful thing for the parish to have the Garden of Eden transported to the North Pole.
“Perhaps you are right, Father,” he said uncer-tainly and seemed to be looking for words with which to build and brick a sentence which should adequately express what he was feeling in the privacy of his soul.
“I know I am right,” said Father Malachy. “You see, it wasn’t I who made that contract with Mr. Hamilton; it was the Holy Ghost.”
At these words both Father Neary and Father O’Flaherty became quite white and frightened and Canon Geoghegan, returning to pick at his fish which was now quite cold, could only murmur a half-hearted caution:
“All right. But not a word to the bishop, mind. He mightn’t like it.”
And, feeling that they were nearer to that reality which they preached than they had ever been before, the four priests finished in silence their rather uninteresting Friday luncheon.
Father Malachy's Miracle, Chapter Three
Notes
Joseph Hocking (7 November 1860–4 March 1937): a Cornish novelist and United Methodist Free Church minister.
à la page: up to date; fashionable
vieux jeu: old fashioned
Translation of the Holy House of Loretto: According to legend, the house at Nazareth in which Mary was born, brought up, received the Annunciation, and lived during the Childhood of Christ and after his Ascension. It was converted into a church by the Twelve Apostles. The legend further states that, threatened with destruction by the Turks, the house was carried by angels through the air and initially deposited in 1291 on a hill at Tersatto (now Trsat, a suburb of Rijeka / Fiume, Croatia), where an appearance of the Virgin and numerous miraculous cures attested its sanctity.
sub specie æternitatis: viewed in relation to the eternal
HOC EST ENIM CORPUS MEUM: This is my body.
quot homines, tot dei: how many men, so many gods
Notes
Joseph Hocking (7 November 1860–4 March 1937): a Cornish novelist and United Methodist Free Church minister.
à la page: up to date; fashionable
vieux jeu: old fashioned
John Beverley Nichols (9 September 1898–15 September 1983): an English author, playwright, journalist, composer, and public speaker who wrote more than 60 books and plays.
Translation of the Holy House of Loretto: According to legend, the house at Nazareth in which Mary was born, brought up, received the Annunciation, and lived during the Childhood of Christ and after his Ascension. It was converted into a church by the Twelve Apostles. The legend further states that, threatened with destruction by the Turks, the house was carried by angels through the air and initially deposited in 1291 on a hill at Tersatto (now Trsat, a suburb of Rijeka / Fiume, Croatia), where an appearance of the Virgin and numerous miraculous cures attested its sanctity.
sub specie æternitatis: viewed in relation to the eternal
HOC EST ENIM CORPUS MEUM: This is my body.
quot homines, tot dei: how many men, so many gods
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