He was almost apologetic about his suggestion that his wealth might be useful. ‘‘Don’t despise money,” he said. “Your ideas are all right, but without money you can do nothing.” “The twelve apostles did not find it so,” I said; and so the talk went on. He expounded to me his ideas about underpinning the Empire by a Society which would be to the Empire what the Society of Jesus was to the Papacy, and we talked on and on, upon very deep things indeed.
Before we parted we had struck up a firm friendship which stood the strain even of the Raid and the War on his part and of “Shall I Slay my Brother Boer?” and “Hell Let Loose” on mine. From that moment I felt I understood Rhodes. I, almost alone, had the key to the real Rhodes, and I felt that from that day it was my duty and my privilege to endeavour to the best of my ability to interpret him to the world.
It was in 1889, at our first interview, that he expounded to me the basis of his creed. I did not publish it till November, 1899. Although it was issued during his lifetime, it provoked from him neither publicly nor privately any protest, criticism, or correction.
I therefore think that my readers will be glad to be afforded an opportunity of seeing what I wrote in October, 1899, which I reprint exactly as it was published.
HIS RELIGION.
Mr. Rhodes’s conception of his duties to his fellow-men rests upon a foundation as distinctly ethical and theistic as that of the old Puritans. If you could imagine an emperor of old Rome crossed with one of Cromwell’s Ironsides, and the result brought up at the feet of Ignatius Loyola, you would have an amalgam not unlike that which men call Cecil Rhodes. The idea of the State, the Empire, and the supreme allegiance which it has a right to claim from all its subjects, is as fully developed in him as in Augustus or in Trajan. But deep underlying all this there is the strong, earnest, religious conception of the Puritan. Mr. Rhodes is not, in the ordinary sense of the word, a religious man. He was born in a rectory, and, like many other clergymen’s sons, he is no great Churchman. He has an exaggerated idea of the extent to which modern research has pulverised the authority of the Bible;
