"I don't mean Shelley's, I mean Christ's. In spirit Shelley was far
nearer the truth than those who made him despise the very name of
Christianity without knowing what it really was. But God will give
every man fair play."

"Young man!" said the minister, with an assumption of great
solemnity and no less authority, "I am bound to warn you that you
are in a state of rebellion against God, and he will not be mocked.
Good morning!"

Donal sat down on the roadside--he would let the minister have a
good start of him--took again his shabby little volume, held more
talk with the book-embodied spirit of Shelley, and saw more and more
clearly how he was misled in his every notion of Christianity, and
how different those who gave him his notions must have been from the
evangelists and apostles. He saw in the poet a boyish nature
striving after liberty, with scarce a notion of what liberty really
was: he knew nothing of the law of liberty--oneness with the will of
our existence, which would have us free with its own freedom.

When the clergyman was long out of sight he rose and went on, and
soon came to a bridge by which he crossed the river. Then on he
went through the cultivated plain, his spirits never flagging. He
was a pilgrim on his way to his divine fate!




CHAPTER III.