"You don't know," replied Ursula, superior. Nevertheless, she
wavered. And her song faded down before she came to the end.
Because, though she did not know it, her Sunday was very
precious to her. She found herself in a strange, undefined
place, where her spirit could wander in dreams, unassailed.
The white-robed spirit of Christ passed between olive trees.
It was a vision, not a reality. And she herself partook of the
visionary being. There was the voice in the night calling,
"Samuel, Samuel!" And still the voice called in the night. But
not this night, nor last night, but in the unfathomed night of
Sunday, of the Sabbath silence.
There was Sin, the serpent, in whom was also wisdom. There
was Judas with the money and the kiss.
But there was no actual Sin. If Ursula slapped Theresa
across the face, even on a Sunday, that was not Sin, the
everlasting. It was misbehaviour. If Billy played truant from
Sunday school, he was bad, he was wicked, but he was not a
Sinner.
Sin was absolute and everlasting: wickedness and badness were
temporary and relative. When Billy, catching up the local
jargon, called Cassie a "sinner", everybody detested him. Yet
when there came to the Marsh a flippetty-floppetty foxhound
puppy, he was mischievously christened "Sinner".
The Brangwens shrank from applying their religion to their
own immediate actions. They wanted the sense of the eternal and
immortal, not a list of rules for everyday conduct. Therefore
they were badly-behaved children, headstrong and arrogant,
though their feelings were generous. They had,
moreover--intolerable to their ordinary neighbours--a
proud gesture, that did not fit with the jealous idea of the
democratic Christian. So that they were always extraordinary,
outside of the ordinary.
How bitterly Ursula resented her first acquaintance with
evangelical teachings. She got a peculiar thrill from the
application of salvation to her own personal case. "Jesus died
for me, He suffered for me." There was a pride and a thrill in
it, followed almost immediately by a sense of dreariness. Jesus
with holes in His hands and feet: it was distasteful to her. The
shadowy Jesus with the Stigmata: that was her own vision. But
Jesus the actual man, talking with teeth and lips, telling one
to put one's finger into His wounds, like a villager gloating in
his sores, repelled her. She was enemy of those who insisted on
the humanity of Christ. If He were just a man, living in
ordinary human life, then she was indifferent.
But it was the jealousy of vulgar people which must insist on
the humanity of Christ. It was the vulgar mind which would allow
nothing extra-human, nothing beyond itself to exist. It was the
dirty, desecrating hands of the revivalists which wanted to drag
Jesus into this everyday life, to dress Jesus up in trousers and
frock-coat, to compel Him to a vulgar equality of footing. It
was the impudent suburban soul which would ask, "What would
Jesus do, if he were in my shoes?"