The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [242]
The Collector had been behaving oddly; moody and expansive by turns, perhaps on account of tiredness or of the claret he had drunk, he now suddenly became expansive again. “My dear friends, there’s no question at all of a division of importance between the spiritual and the practical. It is the one that imbues the other with purpose...It’s the other that provides an indispensable instrument for the one! Mr Rayne, you are perfectly right to mention this increase of revenue from opium but consider for a moment...what is it all for ? It’s not simply to acquire wealth, but to acquire through wealth, that superior way of life which we loosely term civilization and which includes so many things, both spiritual and practical...and of the utmost diversity...a system of administering justice impartially on the one hand, works of art unsurpassed in beauty since antique times on the other. The spreading of the Gospel on the one hand, the spreading of the railways on the other. And yet where shall be placed such a phenomenon as the gigantic iron steamship, the Great Eastern, which our revered compatriot, Mr Brunel, is at this moment building, and which is soon to subdue the seven seas of the world? For is this not at once a prodigious material triumph and an embodiment, by God’s grace, of the spirit of mankind? Mr Rayne, both the poet and the Opium Agent are necessary to our scheme of things. What d’you say, Padre? Am I right?”
Although lightly built, the Reverend Hampton had been a rowing man at Oxford and he retained from those days a healthy and unassuming manner, illuminated by an earnest simplicity of faith which shone through his every word and gesture. In the seething religious atmosphere of Oxford in the Padre’s time a man did well to stick to rowing; the Tractarian onslaughts were enough to shake the strongest constitution; it was said that in Oxford even Dr Whateley, now the Archbishop of Dublin, had preached a sermon with one leg dangling out of the pulpit. All the same, the Padre sometimes had a worried look; this was because he was afraid that the duties to which the Lord had called him might prove too much for his strength.
“Mr Hopkins, as you know, I had the privilege like yourself of attending the Great Exhibition which opened in our homeland six years ago almost to this very day. To wander about in that vast building of glass, so immense that the elms it enclosed looked like Christmas trees, was to walk in a wonderland of beauty and of Man’s ingenuity...But of all the many marvels it contained there was one in the American section which made a particular impression on me because it seemed to combine so happily both the spiritual and the practical. I am referring to the Floating Church for Seamen from Philadelphia. This unusual construction floated on the twin hulls of two New York clipper ships and was entirely in the Gothic style, with a tower surmounted by a spire...inside, it contained a bishop’s chair; outside, it was painted to resemble brown stone. As I looked at it I thought of all the churches built by men throughout the ages and said to myself: ‘There has surely never been a more consummate embodiment of Faith than this.”’
“A splendid example,” agreed the Collector. “A very happy marriage of fact and spirit, of deed and ghost.”
“But no, sir! But no, Padre!” cried Fleury, so vehemently as to startle awake those guests whose minds had wandered during the preceding discussion. All eyes turned towards him and even as he spoke he wondered whether he might not be ever so slightly drunk. “But no, with all respect, that’s not it at all! Please consider, Padre, that a church is no more a church because it floats! Would a church be any more of a church if we could hoist it into the skies with a thousand balloons? Only the person capable of listening to the tenderest echoes of his own heart is capable of making that aerial ascent which will unite him with