Only the acrid spirit of the times, Corroded this true steel.
Longfellow.
Not Thine the bigot's partial plea, Not Thine the zealot's ban;Thou well canst spare a love of Thee Which ends in hate of man.
Whittier.
Luke Raeburn was the son of a Scotch clergyman of the Episcopal Church.His history, though familiar to his own followers and to them more powerfully convincing than many arguments against modern Christianity, was not generally known.The orthodox were apt to content themselves with shuddering at the mention of his name; very few troubled themselves to think or inquire how this man had been driven into atheism.Had they done so they might, perhaps, have treated him more considerately, at any rate they must have learned that the much-disliked prophet of atheism was the most disinterested of men, one who had the courage of his opinions, a man of fearless honesty.
Raeburn had lost his mother very early; his father, a well-to-do man, had held for many years a small living in the west of Scotland.He was rather a clever man, but one-sided and bigoted;cold-hearted, too, and caring very little for his children.Of Luke, however, he was, in his peculiar fashion, very proud, for at an early age the boy showed signs of genius.The father was no great worker; though shrewd and clever, he had no ambition, and was quietly content to live out his life in the retired little parsonage where, with no parish to trouble him, and a small and unexacting congregation on Sundays, he could do pretty much as he pleased.But for his son he was ambitious.Ever since his sixteenth year--when, at a public meeting the boy had, to the astonishment of every one, suddenly sprung to his feet and contradicted a false statement made by a great landowner as to the condition of the cottages on his estate--the father had foreseen future triumphs for his son.For the speech, though unpremeditated, was marvelously clever, and there was a power in it not to be accounted for by a certain ring of indignation; it was the speech of a future orator.
Then, too, Luke had by this time shown signs of religious zeal, a zeal which his father, though far from attempting to copy, could not but admire.His Sunday services over, he relapsed into the comfortable, easy-going life of a country gentleman for the rest of the week; but his son was indefatigable, and, though little more than a boy himself, gathered round him the roughest lads of the village, and by his eloquence, and a certain peculiar personal fascination which he retained all his life, absolutely forced them to listen to him.The father augured great things for him, and invariably prophesied that he would "live to see him a bishop yet."It was a settled thing that he should take Holy Orders, and for some time Raeburn was only too happy to carry out his father's plans.In his very first term at Cambridge, however, he began to feel doubts, and, becoming convinced that he could never again accept the doctrines in which he had been educated, he told his father that he must give up all thought of taking Orders.
Now, unfortunately, Mr.Raeburn was the very last man to understand or sympathize with any phase of life through which he had not himself passed.He had never been troubled with religious doubts;skepticism seemed to him monstrous and unnatural.He met the confession, which his son had made in pain and diffidence, with a most deplorable want of tact.In answer to the perplexing questions which were put to him, he merely replied testily that Luke had been overworking himself, and that he had no business to trouble his head with matters which were beyond him, and would fain have dismissed the whole affair at once.
"But," urged the son, "how is it possible for me to turn my back on these matters when I am preparing to teach them?""Nonsense," replied the father, angrily."Have not I taught all my life, preached twice a Sunday these thirty years without perplexing myself with your questionings? Be off to your shooting, and your golf, and let me have no more of this morbid fuss."No more was said; but Luke Raeburn, with his doubts and questions shut thus into himself, drifted rapidly from skepticism to the most positive form of unbelief.When he next came home for the long vacation, his father was at length awakened to the fact that the son, upon whom all his ambition was set, was hopelessly lost to the Church; and with this consciousness a most bitter sense of disappointment rose in his heart.His pride, the only side of fatherhood which he possessed, was deeply wounded, and his dreams of honorable distinction were laid low.His wrath was great.Luke found the home made almost unbearable to him.His college career was of course at an end, for his father would not hear of providing him with the necessary funds now that he had actually confessed his atheism.He was hardly allowed to speak to his sisters, every request for money to start him in some profession met with a sharp refusal, and matters were becoming so desperate that he would probably have left the place of his own accord before long, had not Mr.Raeburn himself put an end to a state of things which had grown insufferable.
With some lurking hope, perhaps, of convincing his son, he resolved upon trying a course of argument.To do him justice he really tried to prepare himself for it, dragged down volumes of dusty divines, and got up with much pains Paley's "watch" argument.
There was some honesty, even perhaps a very little love, in his mistaken endeavors; but he did not recognize that while he himself was unforgiving, unloving, harsh, and self-indulgent, all his arguments for Christianity were of necessity null and void.He argued for the existence of a perfectly loving, good God, all the while treating his son with injustice and tyranny.Of course there could be only one result from a debate between the two.Luke Raeburn with his honesty, his great abilities, his gift of reasoning, above all his thorough earnestness, had the best of it.
