The Rainbow

"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?"