Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [19]
Roosevelt’s reaction was a half-humorous, half-resigned willingness to do what diplomacy required—as long as his schedule permitted, and he was treated as a private American citizen. He prepared himself for the coming ordeal in typical fashion. Around sunset, Abbott became concerned by his absence from the family car.
I searched the train for him and finally discovered him in one of the white enameled lavatories with its door half open.… He was busily engaged in reading, while he braced himself in the angle of the two walls against the swaying motion of the train, oblivious to time and surroundings. The book in which he was absorbed was Lecky’s History of Rationalism in Europe. He had chosen this peculiar reading room both because the white enamel reflected a brilliant light and he was pretty sure of uninterrupted quiet.
ROOSEVELT WAS NOT new to the scholarship of William Edward Lecky (1838–1903). In his youth, he had found the great historian too Old World, too Olympian. Now he was mesmerized by an intellect that encompassed, and gave universal dimensions to, the odyssey he had embarked on. Lecky showed how Europe had passed, age by age, from heathenism through paganism, early Christianity, Islamic infiltration, totalitarian Catholicism, Reformation, and Renaissance—arriving finally at an Enlightenment based on scientific discovery, materialistic philosophy, and the secularization of government. Roosevelt’s present passage out of the Pleistocene into lands still medieval-Muslim in atmosphere duplicated this vast arc of human progress.
Right now, he had to deal diplomatically with two clerical provocations that suggested that rationalism still had a way to go before the twentieth century could consider itself emancipated from the intolerances that Lecky chronicled. The head of an American missionary school in Asyūt wrote to say that if he did not come to visit, Presbyterians everywhere would be “very seriously” offended. The Vatican advised that Pope Pius X would grant him an audience on the fifth of April, providing that he did not embarrass His Holiness by associating with any Methodists in Rome.
Roosevelt was prepared to stop by the mission. But he could not permit Vatican officials to tell him whom he might see or not see, as a private traveler en route through the Eternal City. To him, no faith was superior to another, and none to the dignity of individual will. “Moi-même, je suis libre-penseur,” he confided to a French diplomat.*
He had done his Sunday school bit as a teenager, teaching children the rudiments of Christianity, more out of duty than conviction. Throughout adulthood he had been a regular worshipper, gradually switching from the Dutch Reformed Church of his forefathers to Edith’s Episcopalian Church—though without her piety. He had no capacity for devotion, unless his love of nature qualified as that. He scoffed at theories that could not be proved, sentimentalities that put a false face on reality, and extremes of religious belief, whether morbid or mystical. As President, he had tried to remove the phrase “In God We Trust” from the national coinage. When consoling bereaved people, he would awkwardly invoke “unseen and unknown powers.” Aside from a few clichés of Protestant rhetoric, the gospel he preached had always been political and pragmatic. He was inspired less by the Passion of Christ than by the Golden Rule—that appeal to reason amounting, in his mind, to a worldly rather than heavenly law.
Much as Roosevelt admired the contributions of medieval Islam to the development of European civilization, he had no patience with the interfaith squabble now going on in Egypt between Muslims and Coptic Christians. Their inability to tolerate each other proved the necessity of condominium with the British, who at least had advanced far enough into the modern age to know there were more important things than dogma.
Public works, for example. His dinner guest this evening was Sir William Garstin, the builder of