mind with its "reconciliation." The fact that science could make a wire which was able to transmit thought with the rapidity of lightning could not obscure from him that other fact that, so far at least, this lightning thought-conductor had been used more to disseminate lies and foster gambling in stocks or horses than to spread truth or increase the store of human knowledge; and he knew, too, that while science might cast a cannon big enough or make a powder strong enough to knock down or blow up an entire nation, it was as powerless to make a grain of wheat as it was to produce a Charles Gordon. Neither did he enter into the disputes of creeds. Bigotry, that common weakness of even great minds, he was absolutely devoid of. What was the particular creed to which he belonged may well even be matter of dispute. A While in Jerusalem in 1883 he frequently received the Sacrament of Holy Communion in the Greek Church. A year later, on his last journey to Khartoum, he meets the Roman Catholic Bishop, Monseigneur Sogaro, and says to him, "Do not forget me in your prayers." few days afterwards, writing from Korosko, he uses these words: "I shall have no eating (Holy Communion) in the Soudan. The Roman Catholic priests have all left (Khartoum), and are at Assouan." In the scant baggage which he is to get together when leaving England, he will bring only a few books, but among them will be Cardinal Newman's Dream of Gerontius, which, curiously enough, is to be the sole possession destined to come out from the great catastrophe, and to come out too, bearing in its worn pages many evidences of the deep, pure, humble faith of the man whose hand had t VII THOUGHTS IN PALESTINE 189 traced in marginal note and interlineation the tokens of his admiration. Underneath the following lines in this little book deep pencil marks are drawn : "Now that the hour is come my fear is fled." Pray for me, oh my friends!" ""Tis death, oh loving friends, your prayers, 'tis he." 66 So pray for me, my friends, who have not strength to pray!" "Use well the interval!" Gordon gave this book to Mr. Frank Power, after his arrival in Khartoum, underlining these last lines, which now, read in the mournful light of the fate of the Abbas at Hebbeh, have a strange significance : 66 : Farewell, but not for ever, brother dear." "Be brave and patient on thy bed of sorrow." "A man in close communion with God," the greatest English statesman of his day, speaking to our most celebrated soldier, had defined Gordon. Perhaps this definition explains a good deal of the power exercised by Charles Gordon over the masses of the world, and a great deal also of the antagonism that existed between him and those who are called "Men of the World." Out in the wild spaces of the earth he had long ago realised the immense secret which the wonderful mind of Pascal had evolved from profound inquiry. "If there were no darkness," had said the great Frenchman, man would not feel his corruption; if there were no light, man would have no hope of salvation. Thus it is not only quite right but necessary that God should be concealed in part and revealed in part, since it is equally dangerous for man to know God without knowing his own misery, and to know his own misery without knowing God." Never had the necessity of this dual knowledge of God and man, of majesty and misery, of light and shade, of good and evil, been better understood than it was by Gordon. He had caught more than a glimpse of the real truth that lies beneath the modern craze of evolution, as often in the desert is found, deep beneath some nauseous or poisonous gourd which grows on the sand, a root leading to where, far down under the arid surface, lies a hidden spring of pure, clear water. The thoughts which came to Gordon in Palestine, written though they are in disconnected form and without any subsequent attempt to revise or classify them, are most unmistakable evidences that the true evolution, the evolution of good through faith, was fully understood by him. He sees that this enormous process, carried on from the first fall to this day, has had human faith as the central point of its system. A repetition, he calls it, of four great facts ever recurring a state of darkness, a light breaking through the darkness, a division of light from darkness, a culmination or gathering up of light, and a casting back into chaos of the darkness-and the repetition is always made on some higher level of good, some broader horizon from which the light is to break upon the human soul. Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Job, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Zachariah-through all the long procession of leaders, shepherds, rulers, kings, and prophets the central point of the vast revelation is Faith. Dim at first, much mixed up with human longing, and sometimes with human weakness, but still kept clear and visible even in these, is this central fact; until at last the old CHAPTER VIII KHARTOUM FOUR years had passed away since that evening in November 1879 when Gordon looked his last upon the great plains of the Soudan, as they lay like a mighty map unrolled beneath his standpoint at Char-Amba in the Abyssinian mountains. All the long-gathering forces whose approach he had so often watched in the preceding years had since broken upon Egypt. The expression of the national wishes had been sternly suppressed; the bombardment of Alexandria by the English fleet had been followed by the invasion of Egypt by the British army, the attack on the lines of Tel-el-Kebir, and the break up of the Egyptian forces. In two months from the date of the first shot at Alexandria all resistance was at an end in the Delta. But the Soudan, that vast region of unrest, had still to be reckoned with. A rebellion, which began at the Island of Abba in 1881, had gradually spread over seven-eighths of the immense region. A new spirit seemed to have entered these hitherto despised tribes. Two things had in truth come to them a leader to give unity to their efforts, and a knowledge that they were in every way better men and braver soldiers than the race which had so long ill-treated |