In Hazard by Richard Hughes

Author:Richard Hughes
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59017-533-0
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2012-08-28T16:00:00+00:00

III

The promise he had given seemed simple enough to keep, to a child of ten. But the trouble was that Dick did not remain always a child of ten: he grew. It seems that as you grow, God must grow too. Of this of course he was not forewarned: that the God he had promised to believe in for ever was a child’s God.

When he was fifteen, and being prepared for Confirmation, the idea of God which was presented to him for belief was very different: a sort of impersonal Omnipotence Who never interfered with Science (not that He could not, but simply because He was above that sort of thing, and meant us to learn Boyle’s Law and so on): a vague, limitless Holiness, Who really preferred the Church of England to anything else but Who failing that was also the Best Elements in all religions (especially Buddhism and Islam). In short, not at all the sort of God you asked for small material benefits, like looking after your watch for you, or helping you to win a football match. In fact, surely a different sort of God altogether. And—here was the difficulty—not the God he was pledged to believe in, because not the God which the evidence, still vividly remembered, had once so clearly affirmed.

What was he to do? Everyone assumed that he could no longer, at his age, believe in the God of his childhood. Such faith was all very well for a child, but not for an intelligent, educated lad. In fact, if he tried to carry such a belief through life all the most religious people—beginning with the good old man whose classes he was attending— would seriously disapprove. They would call it the crudest sort of bigotry, if not downright wicked, if he continued to believe that God was on his side. God, they said, was on nobody’s side.

Well, he supposed they knew: and he conscientiously tried to believe as they taught him, against his instinct. In this new God. It seemed, the only proper thing to pray for, to this God, was Grace: i.e. to be made gooder. So he only prayed for Grace. But he could see little result. And in this he was not greatly surprised: for the one prayer of his childhood which had never been answered was the formal prayer he prayed every night, “Make me a good boy.” He had never found that his behaviour next day was a whit the better for it.

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