Charles Franks, Charles Aldarondo and the Online Distributed Proofreading
Team.
By George MacDonald, LL.D.
As the sermon drew to a close, and the mist of his emotion began todisperse, individual faces of his audience again dawned out on thepreacher's ken. Mr. Drew's head was down. As I have always said,certain things he had been taught in his youth, and had practised inhis manhood, certain mean ways counted honest enough in the trade,had become to him, regarded from the ideal point of the divine inmerchandize—such a merchandize, namely, as the share the son of manmight have taken in buying and selling, had his reputed father beena shop-keeper instead of a carpenter—absolutely hateful, and thememory of them intolerable. Nor did it relieve him much to remindhimself of the fact, that he knew not to the full the nature of theadvantages he took, for he knew that he had known them such asshrunk from the light, not coming thereto to be made manifest. Hewas now doing his best to banish them from his business, and yetthey were a painful presence to his spirit—so grievous to be borne,that the prospect held out by the preacher of an absolute and finaldeliverance from them by the indwelling presence of the God of allliving men and true merchants, was a blessedness unspeakable. Smallwas the suspicion in the Abbey Church of Olaston that morning, thatthe well-known successful man of business was weeping. Who couldonce have imagined another reason for the laying of that round,good-humoured, contented face down on the book-board, than puredrowsiness from lack of work-day interest! Yet there was a humansoul crying out after its birthright. Oh, to be clean as amountain-river! clean as the air above the clouds, or on the middleseas! as the throbbing aether that fills the gulf betwixt star andstar!—nay, as the thought of the Son of Man himself, who, to makeall things new and clean, stood up against the old battery ofsin-sprung suffering, withstanding and enduring and stilling therecoil of the awful force wherewith his Father had launched theworlds, and given birth to human souls with wills that might becomefree as his own!
While Wingfold had been speaking in general terms, with the race inhis mind's, and the congregation in his body's eye, he had yetthought more of one soul, with its one crime and its intolerableburden, than all the rest: Leopold was ever present to him, andwhile he strove to avoid absorption in a personal interest howeverjustifiable, it was of necessity that the thought of the mostburdened sinner he knew should colour the whole of his utterance. Attimes indeed he felt as if he were speaking to him immediately—andto him only; at others, although then he saw her no more than him,that he was comforting the sister individually, in holding out toher brother the mighty hope of a restored purity. And when once morehis mind could receive the messages brought home by his eyes, he sawupon Helen's face the red sunset of a rapt listening. True it wasalready fading away, but the eyes had wept, the glow yet hung aboutcheek and forehead, and the firm mouth had forgotten itself into atremulous form, which the stillness of absorption had there for themoment fixed.
But even already, although he could not yet read it upon hercountenance, a snake had begun to lift its head from the chaoticswamp which runs a creek at least into every soul, the rudimentarydesolation, a remnant of the time when the world was without formand voi