The Lady of Situations by Louis Auchincloss Read Free Book Online Page A

dear child, that would be simply divine!"
    ***
    Natica had expected the summer to be dull but tranquil. Its dullness, however, was interrupted by an event that doomed tranquillity, though not as decisively as such an event might have doomed it in a novel by Jane Austen or a Bronte sister. The minister of the Episcopal church in Smithport departed for a two-month leave of absence to visit the Holy Land, and his place was filled for the summer by a thirty-year-old bachelor priest, Thomas Barnes, assistant to the rector of Averhill School, who wanted the experience of administering a parish. Natica, who had now come to romanticize the school, having elected to see it as the shrine of the values of the great world and the training ground for its leaders, was curious to meet a member of its faculty and went with her parents to church on the first Sunday when Barnes was to preach.
    He looked adequately handsome in the pulpit, with long wavy brown hair rising high over what seemed a noble forehead and large earnest eyes. He conveyed a pleasant, an even stimulating sense of masculine vigor not overly repressed by his black robe and shining white cassock. And his voice was rich and warm, his smile almost intimate.
    He invited the congregation to share some of his biography, explaining that he was a pedagogue in a church school for boys. He even allowed himself a discreet joke at the nature of his institution, admitting that a journalist wag had described the student body as "overfed, overhoused and overclad." But he hastened to emphasize the basic idealism of Averhill and then warmed to his theme: how he had discovered, in seeking to make Jesus more human to boys, in likening him to a friendly master who shared the troubles of campus life with his charges, that this was much the same Jesus that adults needed.
    "There are those who claim that he has no merit for the patience and courage with which he bore the agony of his trial and execution. He was God, so how could he have felt pain? Boys, I find, are particularly prone to ask this. But isn't it evident from the Gospels that Christ became so wholly Jesus, the man, that he must have suffered pain even more keenly than we do? He actually subjected himself to such minor human afflictions as irritability, of which we catch a glimpse when he blasted the fig tree that yielded no fruit. Does that not bring him to a level where we feel we can reach out a hand, however timidly, to touch him? Ah, how he welcomes us, how he spreads his arms!"
    Kitty Chauncey, who was very active in parish work, had invited Barnes for lunch after the service, and he beamed at the assembled family. Natica's two younger brothers, who had little interest in church matters, were silently polite and took their leave the moment the meal was over, but she and her mother sat and talked with the voluble young minister on the verandah for an hour afterwards.
    Natica chose to take issue with him over the humanity of Christ.
    "I wonder if it's not a mistake to make him too mortal. Aren't you afraid that people will identify him with themselves? And that you'll have as many Christs as there are worshipers?"
    "Would that be such a bad thing?"
    "Well, wouldn't it tend to proliferate the sects? The Catholics stay united because they have one God figure who's too awesome and distant to be identified with."
    "Why shouldn't each man worship God in his own way?"
    "Because it's not efficient. You get a lot of nutty groups. Look at California. I like a splendid God. Majestic. Terrifying. Only such a one could control the universe. It seems to me Jesus has to be that or nothing."
    "Nothing? Oh, Miss Chauncey, how can you say that?"
    But now she had said it, she rather fancied the idea. "If he's too human he may become all human. And then he becomes fallible. When he talks about the last judgment coming in the lifetime of some now living, you begin to suspect he's talking through his hat. Or his halo."
    "Natica!" exclaimed her mother.