The Unburied by Charles Palliser Read Free Book Online

Christianity.’
    ‘Are you a believer now, Austin? You used not to be.’
    ‘You’re talking of twenty years past,’ he said irritably. ‘Don’t you think some things might have changed in the world outside the confines of a Cambridge college?’
    This was a change indeed. We had both been Shelleyan freethinkers, like the most advanced among the thinking undergraduates of our generation. How passionately we had denounced religion as organized humbug. I had not changed and, in fact, my experience as a historian had deepened my conviction that religion was a conspiracy of the powerful against the rest. But my views had mellowed so that I now pitied rather than raged against those who were believers.
    ‘And anyway, I was a believer when I was at the University,’ he went on bitterly. ‘It was the desire to avoid being mocked by you and your circle that led me to pretend to be an agnostic.’
    Austin had arrived as a Tractarian of a very dandyish kind – I believe he was trying to annoy his father who was a Low Church vicar of modest birth and small fortune – but had quickly announced himself to be an unbeliever. Had I converted him without even realizing it? Had he been so malleable? If I had influenced him, it had not been because I was more intelligent but because I knew more clearly what I believed and wanted. Austin had had a kind of laziness which let him drift, giving in much more readily than I to the temptation to self-indulgence. It was that aspect of his personality that had allowed him to fall under the influence of the man who had done me so much harm.
    ‘As undergraduates we used to talk glibly of Christianity as superstition,’ Austin said. ‘A superstition which had all but evaporated in the light of rationalism and whose final disappearance we confidently predicted. But now I understand that it is the other way around: that without faith, all you have is superstition. Fear of the dark, of ghosts, of the realm of death which continues to frighten us, whatever we believe. We need stories to stop us being frightened. You’ve created your comforting myths and fictions from history – like your idea of King Arthur.’
    ‘King Arthur? What are you talking about?’
    ‘Didn’t you just tell me you are writing about King Arthur?’
    ‘Good heavens, no. I spoke of King Alfred.’
    ‘King Arthur or King Alfred. No matter. I may have confused them but the point is the same. You are creating your own stories to console you.’
    ‘In contradistinction to Arthur, Alfred is a well-attested historical figure,’ I protested indignantly. ‘Unlike your Jesus of Nazareth. Much as I respect the moral system associated with his name.’
    ‘Respect the moral system associated with his name!’ Austin repeated. ‘What I’m talking about is faith, belief, acceptance of the absolute reality of salvation and damnation. You – and others of our generation – lost your faith because you decided that science can explain everything. I believed that myself for a while but I came to understand that reason and faith are not in conflict. They are different orders of reality. Although I understand that now, when I was younger I shared your error. I know now that because there is darkness, there is light. That because there is death, there is life. Because there is evil, there is goodness. Because there is damnation, there is redemption.’
    ‘Because there is bacon there are eggs!’ I could not prevent myself from exclaiming. ‘What poppycock!’
    Austin merely gazed at me coldly with his large black eyes, as if it was not worth the trouble of putting me right.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I should not have spoken like that. But you believe that because you want to think that you are saved. You’ve fallen into the trap we always used to denounce. You’ve been taken in by the lure of eternal life and all that nonsense.’
    ‘What do you know of my beliefs?’ he said softly.
    I realized suddenly something that I