ヘンリー・ライダー・ハガード「自叙伝」（23章・宗教上の注意）の原文(1)

 ヘンリー・ライダー・ハガード自叙伝 - 機械翻訳　目次

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この記事、および（続きの）ヘンリー・ライダー・ハガード「自叙伝」（23章・宗教上の注意）の原文(2)は、下記（機械翻訳）に対応の原文です。

第23章・宗教上の注意 機械翻訳（1） （2） （3） 

「自叙伝」 - The Days Of My Life. An Autobiography (Vol.Ⅰ)(Vol.Ⅱ)には、ハガードの生い立ちからの記録があり、ルーズベルト大統領からの手紙なども、読むことが出来ます。

Vol.Ⅰ・・・http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300131.txt
Vol.Ⅱ・・・http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300141.txt

しかし、英文読解力および作文能力に弱い私には、困ります。

そこで機械翻訳をしたのですが、ますます分らなくなってしまいました。

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CHAPTER XXIII　第23章

                          A NOTE ON RELIGION　宗教上の注意

　　　　機械翻訳→第23章・宗教上の注意 機械翻訳（1） （2） （3）

                      S.S. Arcadia, December 16, 1912. (Off Aden.)

It has occurred to me that the views on the matter of religion of a
person of my day with such experiences as this work records may prove
of interest to some of those who come after me, and possibly, here and
there, of help. So I add them to this book as a footnote which none
need read unless they wish.

First I should state that I am not a theologian. Theology is a science
that has no attraction for me. In this great question of our future
life or death I find no place for subtleties in which many take so
much delight. Such is the constitution of my mind. The fine divisions
of a creed, the bitterness that rages between High Church and Low, for
instance, awake in my heart neither sympathy nor echo. What are
vestments or ritual when eternal life or death and salvation are at
stake? Even the great gulf fixed between Anglican and Roman Catholic
is to me narrow. I was bred, and doubtless shall to the end remain, a
member of the Church of England. But, on the other hand, I have a
great admiration for many parts of the Roman precept and practice. Its
discipline seems to me beyond praise; the support it gives to the
individual struggling and affrighted soul shows deep understanding of
the eternal needs of human nature; while who can be blind to the
abnegation of self evinced in the practice of celibacy by its devoted
priesthood, resulting, as it does, in an enormous gain to its
efficiency as a Church?

Further, within limits that I need not discuss, personally I think the
virtue of Confession which it inculcates great, since thereby is
brought the whole weight, wisdom and merit of the Church to the aid of
the particular case. I am aware that Confession is allowed to
Anglicans and even, in a sense, enjoined upon them. But by how many is
the rite employed? And why is it not employed? The question may be
answered by another. Who wishes to make confessions of his failings--
to lay bare that wonderful and sometimes awful thing, the secret soul
of man, to Mrs. Rector or Mrs. Archdeacon, or even to a selection of
the father confessor's brothers and priests? It may be retorted, not
without indignation, that such a thing would not happen. Perhaps. Yet
the average man feels a risk which he will not face. Many of us have
known worthy but much married clergymen whose conjugal confidences are
famous. In consequence, rightly or wrongly, other confidences are
withheld from them, and with the abolition of a one-doctrined,
properly controlled, responsible and non-amateur celibate priesthood,
Confession has gone out of fashion. This, however, is by the way.

The trouble about the Roman Church is not only its notorious
intolerance and bigotry, of which history tells, but the fact that
some of the doctrines, as I understand them, are not to be found in
the New Testament, which after all is the Christian's only charter.
Since the Scriptures are of no private interpretation what is not
written there is, so far as they are concerned, presumably non-
existent. It is this truth that keeps so many from the gates of Rome.
Perhaps in some day to come she will modify her attitude in certain
directions, as we may modify ours, and the two greatest divisions of
the Church of Christ will draw together again. I trust and pray that
this may be so and that thus an united front may be presented to the
evil that is in the world, which lessens little, if at all, with the
passage of the ages.

In the same way that I admire and respect the Roman Church do I admire
and respect a Body which stands at the other religious pole--I refer
to the Salvation Army. But this Body, splendid as is its work, makes
what I consider the mistake of omitting the use of the Sacraments
which seem to me to be clearly enjoined by the New Testament. As the
Roman Church elaborates the sum total of the corpus of our faith, so
the Salvation Army deducts from that sum. But it has been explained to
me that the late General Booth did this of set purpose, because he did
not think that the people with whom he had to deal understood the
Sacraments.

I do but quote these two extremes, however, each of which I think so
admirable in its own fashion, as evidence of the statement with which
I opened these remarks, to the effect that whatever I may or may not
be, I am no bigot. Now I will try to show why I believe in the simple
and unadulterated doctrines of Christianity as these appear within the
four corners of the New Testament and are preached by the Church to
which I belong.

There are, of course, many varieties of what is known as Faith. There
is, for instance, the unquestioning Faith which many profess because
it is /there/, because they inherited or were taught it in childhood.
Such persons have looked and need to look no further. Theirs not to
reason why, and they are fortunate and happy in this attitude.

Others have a more difficult experience. When the intellect awakes it
begins to question, and often enough finds no satisfactory answer. It
becomes aware that all these divine events happened a long while ago,
also that the evidence for them is not of a nature that forces
conviction /per se/, at any rate at first sight. For instance, no
judge would send an accused person to gaol on the testimony which, for
some purpose beyond our ken, has been considered sufficiently strong
to enable mankind to accept a very wonderful story and to build
thereon the hope or rather the certainties of redemption and eternal
life beyond the chances and changes of this mortality. Some are
thereby entirely discouraged and, rejecting what they conclude must be
a fable, set themselves sadly to make the best of things as they are,
awaiting the end with resignation, with terror, or with the callous
indifference of despair, according to their individual temperaments.
Others start out on wild searches of their own. They examine the
remaining religions, they try spiritualism, they bring themselves, or
so imagine, into some faint and uncertain touch with the dead, the
Unseen and the Powers that dwell therein, only after all to return
unsatisfied, unsettled, hungry--frightened also at times--and doubtful
of the true source of their vision. For in all these far seas they can
find no sure, anchored rock on which to stand and defy the storms of
Fate. Those alien religions may suit and even be sufficient to the
salvation of their born votaries, but to these philosophical inquirers
they are not sufficient. Moreover, they find that Christianity
embodies whatever is true and good in every one of them, rejecting
only the false and evil. To take but one example, all, or very nearly
all, of the beautiful rules and maxims of Buddha are to be found in
the teaching of our Lord. but there is this difference between the
faiths they preached. Whereas that of Buddha, as I understand it, is a
religion of Death, holding up cessation of mundane lives and ultimate
extinction as the great reward of virtue, Christianity is a religion
of Life, of continued individual being, full, glorious, sinless and
eternal, to be won by those who choose to accept the revelation of its
Founder. Who then can hesitate between the two? Who wishes to be
absorbed into the awful peace of Nothingness? Why, such, without its
precedent preparation, was the refuge of the Roman who opened his
veins when things went wrong or Caesar frowned!

Thus it comes about that these seekers after spiritual truth remain
drifting to and fro in their little boats of hope, that grow at length
so frail and old, and mayhap in the end founder altogether.

Or perhaps they turn in despair and, aware of the overwhelming
importance, of the awfulness of the issue indeed, to which all other
things are as naught, face the situation afresh, study afresh, think
afresh, pray afresh, perchance for years and years. If so, there is
really only one work with which they need trouble themselves, the New
Testament, and parts of the Old such as the Psalms. At least that is
my experience--the experience of a plain man in search of truth.

I suppose that for the last fifteen or twenty years, except very
occasionally through accident or a sense of unworthiness, scarcely a
day has gone over my head on which I have not once (the last thing at
night) and often more than once, read a portion of the Bible. The
result is that now I find it fresher, stronger, more convincing, more
full of hidden meaning than I did when I began this exercise. "Search
the Scriptures" was a very great and potent saying, for in them I
think is life.

What, it may be asked, do you find there, beyond picturesque narrative
and the expression of hopes natural to the hearts of members of a race
that in a few short years must throb itself to silence? I answer that
in all their /main/ facts they are /true/. I have been accustomed to
write fiction for a space of nearly a whole generation, and I know
something of the business. Having this experience at my back I declare
earnestly that, with a single exception, I do not think it possible
that the gospels and the rest can be the work of man's imagination.
That exception is the Book of Revelation, which might possibly have
been conceived by some noble human mind in a wonderful period of
spiritual exaltation. I hasten to add that I am certain this was not
the case; that on the contrary it was divinely inspired, whatever the
actual meaning of parts of it may be. All I say is that, in my view,
it alone of the books of the New Testament /might/ perhaps be a fruit
of human powers of creation.

With the remainder of them it is different. These, I am sure, are
records of things that were said or happened very much as they are
written down. Who, for instance, could have invented the account of
the Last Supper in St. John? A thousand touches, patent enough to the
eye of one who composes romance, show that this view is true; the very
inconsistencies or variations in the different accounts of certain
incidents, due for the most part to the varying temperaments of the
recorders that cause them to dwell upon that aspect of the matter in
hand which appealed to them, rejecting or slurring over the others,
suggest that it is true. Any person who has been accustomed to hear
evidence knows that such evidence is most suspicious when a number of
witnesses tell /exactly/ the same story, especially as to events that
happened a while before, and most credible when that story comes from
sundry mouths with differences of detail.

So, the critic will say, you are prepared to swallow the miracles at a
gulp? Yes, I am--or most of them. I do not see how they are to be
explained away; moreover, I have known so many miracles to occur in my
own time and experience that a few more or less make no difference to
me. To state that miracles, which after all may be but the partial
manifestation of some secret law veiled from us as yet, have ceased
is, in my opinion, a profound mistake; they happen often, especially
in the heart of man. Moreover, the whole circumstances of life are a
miracle; the wireless instrument that at this moment I hear doing its
work is a miracle; we are surrounded by miracles, unappreciated,
unvalued, because so common. This, though a truism, is one from which
we may argue.

I believe, therefore, that these things took place substantially as
they are recorded; that a God-endowed Being of supernatural strength
did show signs and wonders before the eyes of His generation, and for
the subsequent instruction of mankind. If this is not true, or rather,
if the greatest of these signs is not true, then Christianity falls to
the ground; it is a well dug in sand that will hold no water, and what
tens of millions have believed and believe to be a gateway to a better
and enduring world is but a glorious morning cloud which melts away
and is lost in the vastness of the ether. Then, as St. Paul says, we
are of all men the most miserable; then let us eat and drink for
to-morrow we die; then let us see to it, so far as is possible, that
we bring none here to bear the burden of the years and know the
despairing bitterness of death.

Needless to say, I refer to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. If He
never rose from the grave, then, so far as I can see, there is no hope
for Christian man, and we trust in a vain thing. I say, so far as I
can see, for there may exist other roads of salvation with which we
are unacquainted. For my part, I believe, however, that He did rise,
as firmly as I believe that at this moment of writing I am sitting on
the deck of a ship called the /Arcadia/, and that what He, born of
woman, did, we shall do also.

Indeed this may be a convenient place to state my private opinion (it
is no more, though I cannot find that it conflicts with the doctrines
of Christianity; see, for instance, the passage in which our Lord
refers to Elijah as having returned to Earth in the person of John the
Baptist), to the effect that we, or at any rate that some of us,
already have individually gone through this process of coming into
active Being and departing out of Being more than once--perhaps very
often indeed--though not necessarily in this world with which we are
acquainted. In short, like the Buddhists, I am strongly inclined to
believe that the Personality which animates each of us is immeasurably
ancient, having been forged in so many fires, and that, as its past is
immeasurable, so will its future be. This is in some ways an
uncomfortable faith or instinct; thus I, for one, have no wish to live
again upon our earth. Moreover, it is utterly insusceptible of proof--
like everything else that has to do with the spirit--for vague
memories, affinities with certain lands and races, irresistible
attractions and repulsions, at times amounting in the former case to
intimacies of the soul (among members of the same sex, for in
discussing such matters it is perhaps better to exclude the other) so
strong that they appear to be already well established, such as have
drawn me so close to certain friends, and notably to one friend
recently departed, are none of them proof. Nor are the revelations of
persons who seem to have access to certain stores of knowledge denied
to most men, for these may be anything or nothing. Nor is that strong
conviction of immemorial age which haunts the hearts of some of us.

No, there is no proof, and yet reason comes to the support of these
imaginings. Unless we have lived before, or the grotesque
incongruities of life are to be explained in some way unknown to us,
our present existence, to my mind, resembles nothing so much as a
handful of what is known as "printer's pie" cast together at hazard
and struck off for the reader to interpret as he will or can. Or
perhaps in this case a better example would be to compare the world to
a great ball-room wherein a Puck-like Death acts as Master of
Ceremonies. Here the highly born, the gifted and the successful are
welcomed with shouts of praise, while the plain, the poorly dressed,
the halt, are trodden underfoot; here partners, chosen at hazard,
often enough seem to be dancing to a different time and step, till
they are snatched asunder to meet no more; here one by one the
revellers of all degrees are touched upon the shoulder by the Puck-
like Death who calls the tune, and drop down, down into an
impenetrable darkness, while others who knew them not are called to
take their places.

But if we admit that every one of these has lived before and danced in
other rooms, and will live again and dance in other rooms, then
meaning informs the meaningless. Then those casual meetings and swift
farewells, those loves and hatings, are not of chance; then those
partners are /not/ chosen at hazard after all. Then the dancers who in
turn must swoon away beneath that awful, mocking touch, do not drop
into darkness but into some new well of the water of Life. Then what
we behold is but a few threads, apparently so tangled, that go to
weave the Sphinx's seamless veil, or some stupendous tapestry that
enwraps the whole Universe of Creation which, when seen at last, will
picture forth the Truth in all its splendour, and with it the wondrous
story and the meaning of our lives.

Such, put shortly and figuratively, seems to me one of the strongest
arguments for the continuity of our personal existence through various
phases. It may be, however, that it is no argument at all--that there
is some other explanation (beyond that of blind, black, brutal
chance), perhaps so simple that we cannot grasp it, which accounts for
everything.

One contention, however, I find it hard to accept--namely, that man
appearing here for the first time through an accident of the flesh is
placed and judged eternally in accordance with his deeds of at most
about thirty waking, conscious years (even if his life be long), for
childhood and the time spent in sleep must be excluded. To me such a
thing is almost incredible. Final judgment I can understand after many
lives of growing towards the good or towards the ill--and, indeed, the
faith I follow declares it--but not an eternity of anything decreed on
the deeds of ten or twenty or thirty years passed among the
surroundings in which we happened to be born, weighted with the
infirmities and inherited tendencies of a flesh and nature that we did
not choose. Over a great period of many different existences, selected
according to the elective fitness of the /ego/, matters and
opportunities would equalise themselves, and that /ego/ would follow
the path it selected to its inevitable end. But one life of a maximum
of thirty years full-stopped with doom . . . !

All this, however, is a digression from my arguments to which I now
return.

I have said that I believe in the truth of the New Testament story,
and that to my mind everything hinges upon the fact of the
Resurrection, although I am aware that many who call themselves
Christians, and expect, apparently, to receive whatever benefits
Christianity can bring, give no credence to this or any other miracle.
Surely these might as well expect to inherit salvation by virtue of a
study of the doctrines of Confucius. I hope that they will inherit it
all the same, since God, who knows what is in man and the clay whereof
we are fashioned, is merciful, and there may be, and probably are,
many roads to the gate of Life; but in this case it can scarcely be
reached by the faint and wandering path of a materialised and
eviscerated Christianity. Christianity as an effective creed depends,
and always must depend, upon the Resurrection of its Founder while He
dwelt on earth. Or so I hold.

自叙伝（宗教上の注意）の原文(2)に続く