JANEWAY INTERVIEWS THE BISHOP

The following week Janeway spent an evening with Bishop Marion. “I’ve felt some responsibility in unloading this arbitration work on an overburdened man,” remarked the visitor blandly. “I’ve come to ask how you’re getting on.”

There was no complaint on the Bishop’s part. His talk drifted from his difficulties with Simms and the obstacles Simms continually put in the way of the committee’s investigations, to the strike itself.

Janeway brought up the letter of the American bishops on the duties and rights of labor and capital. “I was surprised,” he remarked, “to find it so closely in touch, on a very vital subject, with modern thought. Democracy, to-day, is as badly abused a word as liberty used to be. And we’ve heard so much hollow prating about making the world safe for democracy, that it’s refreshing to find something suggesting a real democracy instead of a sham autocracy to parade ourselves in. Your bishops seem to have caught the idea.”

“There is really but one perfect democracy,” said Bishop Marion, “the democracy of sacrifice. Its effective expression is a collective expression--just as the word itself is collective. And the most nearly perfect example of it is in the religious communities of the Church. It is rather odd that none of our dazzling lights of communistic thought has ever noticed that practically the only permanently successful communistic venture is a religious community. I always hesitate,” continued the Bishop, “when I hear that phrase--‘modern thought.’”

Janeway manifested impatience. “And yet,” he interrupted, “why intelligent men--and you represent intelligent men--should shrink from modern thought is one of the repellent things about your Church.”

Bishop Marion spoke on. “It’s not precisely that we shrink from the thing itself--we shrink rather from mere unquestioning approval of it--an approval that seems to connote commendation of a specified line of thought because it _is_ modern--which is obviously foolish. All lines of thought, good or bad, were once unimpeachably modern. The principles you approve, set forth by the bishops, are as old as the first necessity that ever arose for formulating them. If the thought you refer to as ‘modern’ agrees with these, so much the better for it; if it doesn’t, so much the worse for modern thought.

“The appeal that men unwittingly make to ‘modern’ thought always reminds me that the Church is the very fortress and citadel of thought, if by thought be meant clear thinking. It is seemingly the only institution that preserves in this dark age of loose thinking the art of reasoning. When one nowadays appeals to reason, he appeals inevitably to Catholic thought; all other schools have apparently become too lazy to think seriously or well.

“I’ve heard you say, Mr. Janeway, that the reason lawyers fail is because they don’t work hard enough to get up their cases. If you ever got up the case against ‘modern’ thought, you’d scourge it out of court. The very essence of your own success is your devotion to tireless thinking and close, hard reasoning--yet modern thought abhors logic, the basis of all reasoning; it is patient neither of history nor of fact; yet history and fact are the very shield and armor of the good lawyer.”

Janeway brushed the ashes from his cigar. “That may be the reason why good lawyers are afraid to quarrel with you,” he suggested.

“I remember my father’s telling me,” continued the Bishop, “of some negro sailors, mutineers, shipwrecked on our shores, who were apprehended, tried, and convicted of murder on the high seas. The case was appealed. John Quincy Adams appeared before the Supreme Court of the United States to defend the rights of the friendless negroes. You may imagine it was not a million-dollar case----”

“Don’t take a shot at me, Bishop.”

“My father heard Adams make his argument. It was an occasion. Adams must have been a very old man then; his eyes bothered him greatly and he wiped them continually with a handkerchief. Aside from the technicalities of the case, his plea was on the rights growing out of the duties of hospitality to the miserable men cast, thus, starving upon a foreign shore. It was a plea so masterly, as I heard it described, that it might well have served for all time as a classic on the obligations of hospitality. Adams had ransacked history for his precedents, and so marshalled them that he carried the court with him; his shipwrecked clients were freed. But how many men, as eminent to-day as Adams was in those days, and in old age, would undertake to get up a case for naked mariners as Adams got up his case, and to win it on an appeal to the obligations of hospitality?

“You spoke of the bishops’ letter. The encyclical of Leo XIII on labor, written a generation ago, is the classical presentation of the enlightened Christian view on that subject; this letter is based on his encyclical.”

“Whichever way you put it,” observed Janeway lazily, “I wish your view-point on other problems were as much in harmony with the modern view-point--less reactionary, Bishop.”

Both men were smoking peacefully. The discussion was academic. “It’s odd we should be called reactionary,” replied the Bishop. “It isn’t the rock that’s reactionary--only the waves that dash against it--the tides that rise and fall at its feet.”

“Put it as you will,” persisted Janeway, “men and women of to-day--as of many another day--are enmeshed in the conventions of a current civilization--it is a condition, Bishop, not a theory, that confronts men and women”--Janeway was gathering steam--“and if your Church stands apart from such conventions, shipwreck ensues.”

“Civilization,” commented the Bishop, “is properly only the leisure moment of Christianity. When the world holds up a mirror to Christianity, civilization is the image it reflects. If Christianity be fresh, vigorous, and beautiful, the image will be such. If it be weak and weary, corrupt in high places, or if, as to-day, its voice is despised, the image will reflect the evil results.”

“Bishop Marion, are you proud of civilization as we see it in the world to-day?”

“Are you?”

“No.”

“No. But the root of the trouble is that civilization to-day won’t listen to Christianity; baptism as a social prophylactic has fallen to a plane of importance far below that of vaccination. Yet Christianity offers to a world, distracted as ours is, a trained and world-wide army of soldiers strengthened by the victories and defeats of twenty centuries. Its forces have never been possessed of more élan than to-day--a great trained engine at the command of human nature against its besetting weaknesses. And all it asks of its recruits is that which real intelligence always suggests--humility.

“Yet, curiously enough,” continued the Bishop, “we, ourselves, are blamed for the ills of the day--the war and all else! Few, indeed, understand us; few fail to condemn us. The modern wits--grasshopper philosophers like Wells, who jump, with the confidence of a locust, from ‘_It may have been_’ to ‘_It was_’; our own apostates, like Moore and Ibañez, mere calumniators--these men lie about us and defame us with the sangfroid of the Roman wits of eighteen hundred years ago. Calumny, I suppose, like flattery, should be well laid on. Among the enemies of God, there’s no such word as honor.”

“It’s the stubbornness of your position,” objected Janeway, “that excites the opposition. I feel it at times strongly myself,” he said with emphasis.

“There is inevitably a fundamental difference in your view-point and mine,” returned Bishop Marion. “You, like most Americans, think in decades; the Church thinks in centuries.

“Naturally,” he continued, “I hold no brief for any mutilated form of Christian faith. I defend only that which, being whole, is equal to meeting every menace that threatens society. Religion is humanity in account with God. The accounting must be clear and simple. The religion that can direct this accounting must speak with a definite authority and be possessed of a delegated power to enforce its mandates. Christianity, as I know it, and as the world despises it, has lost none of its early characteristics. It is as vital, as aggressive, as uncompromising to-day as it was then. It still excites the contempt and hatred it has always excited--the scorn of the dilettante, the rage of the brutal, the resentment of the refined. It is sanely intolerant, profoundly indifferent, supernaturally patient.

“Yet men may find in it to-day all that St. Augustine found in it fifteen hundred years ago. Nor does ‘modern’ thought offer to-day to thinking men any more than Augustine tasted and cast from him in the husks of the Manicheans.”

Janeway was silent for a moment. “I came to you to-night, in reality,” he said at length, “on anything but an academic errand.” He lighted his small bomb under the Bishop with perfect poise. “You know enough of me, I think, to realize that in laying a case with difficult aspects before you, I should not be anything less than perfectly frank. And in the solution of its difficulties lies, perhaps, the future happiness of a woman, and, of a certainty, my own future happiness. I speak of Louise Durand and myself: and I shall tell you the whole story.

“I came back to Fond du Lac a few years ago, you remember, as counsellor for the Durand Steel Corporation. Durand often invited me to his house; I became acquainted with his wife. Almost the first time I met her I saw the unhappiness of her position, and I realized as quickly the fine simplicity of her nature. I saw her aversion to the license of her husband--the fight, practically hopeless, that she made as he tried to drag her down to the level of his own circle of disreputable men and women. And watching her intolerable situation, first with curiosity, then with respect for the way in which she bore the indignities Durand heaped on her before his low companions, my admiration deepened into something more. There was nothing to keep me from telling her all this except--herself. And when I was resolved--come what would--to free my mind, he had driven her abroad to clear the way for marrying this Montgomery woman. Can you understand it all?”

“I know something of it,” replied the Bishop.

“She came back. I told her everything. And when I had wrung from her the admission that under happier circumstances she might have listened, I fancied the last obstacle to a new life for both of us was removed. Imagine my consternation when she told me she had become a Catholic, and that for her remarriage was impossible. I refused to believe it. She begged me to wait, in any event, before we should even discuss remarriage. When I had reduced her objections to the last--her religion--I asked her, if it stood between us, to give it up--you see, I am keeping nothing back.”

“Did she consent to this?”

“She refused.”

Bishop Marion drew a breath. “How well you served Satan,” he murmured, “when you put _that_ temptation before her!”

“Do you blame me for doing what any man with red blood would do to win the woman he loves?” demanded Janeway, with indignant emphasis. “You call me a fighter. If a man will fight for money, power, justice, won’t he fight for his life and what is dearer than life? Shouldn’t you do it?”

Both men spoke under perfect control; both were practised duellists. It could only be said that underlying their measured exchanges there was an element of mutual forbearance, especially on the part of the Bishop--and a mutual respect. But there was likewise, on the one hand, the keenness of resolve, and on the other a firmness of principle that rendered the discussion grave.

Bishop Marion paused an instant before answering Janeway’s importunate question. “I should not, in any event,” he said carefully, “dwell on ‘red’ blood. Leave that for men like Durand. The red-blood appeal has been used to justify everything man has ever done to break a woman’s heart. You and I must meet without surrendering our convictions.”

“We do so meet at this moment,” interposed Janeway firmly. “The civil decree is about to free her. I must know where she and I stand before your Church. And I need your help.”

“All the help I can give you I will give.”

“You mean,” commented Janeway, instinctively alert, “there is no relief for us?”

“I mean,” returned the Bishop, “that I myself do not know until I learn fully the circumstances surrounding her marriage to Mr. Durand.”

Janeway felt his way forward with care. “That marriage,” he began, “took place wholly, of course, outside the jurisdiction of your Church. Neither of the parties were of your communion--never had been. In those circumstances, Bishop Marion,” he asked slowly, “what would be the presumption of your Church as to the validity of such a marriage?”

“Marriage,” observed the Bishop, with equal care, “is a natural contract. In the circumstances you relate the presumption of the Church would be that the marriage is valid.”

Janeway’s crushing disappointment was well concealed. “Does that mean,” he asked, engaged with his thoughts, “that the remarriage of the wife during the life of her former husband would not be recognized by the Church?”

“Not quite that. You asked what the presumption would be. But nullifying impediments, diriment impediments, as we call them, that might invalidate the first marriage, may exist, and such must be reckoned with. Presumption, I need hardly say, is not proof. You merely presume a man innocent until proved guilty; our presumption is the same concerning a natural contract. But bring Mrs. Durand to me; let me examine into her case and weigh the circumstances.”

“If she comes she will probably come alone,” continued Janeway, relaxing, but not less serious. “And her sensitiveness is very great. I am only sorry, so far as the presenting of her cause goes, that it is not hers alone--I mean, that I had no personal interest in it. No man can plead his case as well as another can plead it for him. And my concern in this matter is so vital that it really becomes my own case when I plead it. But I bespeak, Bishop, for Louise Durand, every consideration it is in your power to give her.

“You spoke a few moments ago of an American, once a President of the United States and the son of a President of the United States, a diplomat of distinction, among the first of our statesmen, and, in addition to all this, an eminent jurist. You told me of a moving incident in that man’s extraordinary career; how he thought it no derogation of his dignity, not too great a tax on his years, to appear before our most august tribunal to plead the cause of a crew of friendless, shipwrecked negroes, accused of mutiny on the high seas, and to urge in their abandoned behalf the hospitality of our shores.

“If this woman, who is very dear to me, comes before you as a judge, she will come friendless and unknown among those of your great communion; she will come, not as a criminal, but as a victim, shipwrecked on the shores of a detestable and corrupt society. I ask you to remember that she is very new in your Faith. And to weigh in her behalf the responsibility that hospitality may rightly impose on you and your Church toward an innocent woman who appeals in misfortune to its mercy; I ask you to remember John Quincy Adams and his negroes.”

Janeway was taking his leave.

“I shall try,” said the Bishop simply, “to measure up to my responsibilities. Let Mrs. Durand come, either with you or alone, as she prefers--and the sooner the better.”

“She is at Turtle Island with Mrs. Harrison just now,” said Janeway.

“When she returns, of course. We shall all,” added Bishop Marion gravely, but with sympathetic kindliness, “experience anxieties until we know just where we stand.”