'What is precious in Quakerism is not so much the doctrine of the
Divine voice as that of the preliminary stillness, the closure
against other voices and the reduction of the mind to a condition in
which it can LISTEN, in which it can discern the merest whisper,
inaudible when the world, or interest, or passion, are permitted to
speak.' 'The acutest syllogiser can never develop the actual consequences of
any system of policy, or, indeed, of any change in human
relationship, man being so infinitely complex, and the interaction of
human forces so incalculable.'
'Many of our speculative difficulties arise from the unauthorised
conception of an OMNIPOTENT God, a conception entirely of our own
creation, and one which, if we look at it closely, has no meaning.
It is because God COULD have done otherwise, and did not, that we are
confounded. It may be distressing to think that God cannot do any
better, but it is not so distressing as to believe that He might have
done better had He so willed.'
Although these passages were disconnected, each of them seemed to
Clara to be written in a measure for herself, and her curiosity was
excited about the author. Perhaps the man who called would say
something about him.
Baruch Cohen was now a little over forty. He was half a Jew, for his
father was a Jew and his mother a Gentile. The father had broken
with Judaism, but had not been converted to any Christian church or
sect. He was a diamond-cutter, originally from Holland, came over to
England and married the daughter of a mathematical instrument maker,
at whose house he lodged in Clerkenwell. The son was apprenticed to
his maternal grandfather's trade, became very skilful at it, worked
at it himself, employed a man and a boy, and supplied London shops,
which sold his instruments at about three times the price he obtained
for them. Baruch, when he was very young, married Marshall's elder
sister, but she died at the birth of her first child and he had been
a widower now for nineteen years. He had often thought of taking
another wife, and had seen, during these nineteen years, two or three
women with whom he had imagined himself to be really in love, and to
whom he had been on the verge of making proposals, but in each case
he had hung back, and when he found that a second and a third had
awakened the same ardour for a time as the first, he distrusted its
genuineness. He was now, too, at a time of life when a man has to
make the unpleasant discovery that he is beginning to lose the right
to expect what he still eagerly desires, and that he must beware of
being ridiculous. It is indeed a very unpleasant discovery. If he
has done anything well which was worth doing, or has made himself a
name, he may be treated by women with respect or adulation, but any
passable boy of twenty is really more interesting to them, and,
unhappily, there is perhaps so much of the man left in him that he
would rather see the eyes of a girl melt when she looked at him than
be adored by all the drawing-rooms in London as the author of the
greatest poem since Paradise Lost, or as the conqueror of half a
continent. Baruch's life during the last nineteen years had been
such that he was still young, and he desired more than ever, because
not so blindly as he desired it when he was a youth, the tender,
intimate sympathy of a woman's love. It was singular that, during
all those nineteen years, he should not once have been overcome. It
seemed to him as if he had been held back, not by himself, but by
some external power, which refused to give any reasons for so doing.
There was now less chance of yielding than ever; he was reserved and
self-respectful, and his manner towards women distinctly announced to
them that he knew what he was and that he had no claims whatever upon
them. He was something of a philosopher, too; he accepted,
therefore, as well as he could, without complaint, the inevitable
order of nature, and he tried to acquire, although often he failed,
that blessed art of taking up lightly and even with a smile whatever
he was compelled to handle. 'It is possible,' he said once, 'to
consider death too seriously.' He was naturally more than half a
Jew; his features were Jewish, his thinking was Jewish, and he
believed after a fashion in the Jewish sacred books, or, at anyrate,
read them continuously, although he had added to his armoury
defensive weapons of another type. In nothing was he more Jewish
than in a tendency to dwell upon the One, or what he called God,
clinging still to the expression of his forefathers although
departing so widely from them. In his ethics and system of life, as
well as in his religion, there was the same intolerance of a
multiplicity which was not reducible to unity. He seldom explained
his theory, but everybody who knew him recognised the difference
which it wrought between him and other men. There was a certain
concord in everything he said and did, as if it were directed by some
enthroned but secret principle.