Thomas Wingfold, Curate V2 by George MacDonald
page 14 of 210 (06%)
page 14 of 210 (06%)
|
them they recognize him at once and go after him; while the others
examine him from head to foot, and, finding him not sufficiently like the Jesus of their conception, turn their backs, and go to church, or chapel, or chamber, to kneel before a vague form mingled of tradition and fancy. But the first shall be last, and the last first; and there are from whom, be it penny or be it pound, what they have must be taken away because with them it lies useless. For Wingfold, he soon found that his nature was being stirred to depths unsuspected before. Hitherto nothing had ever roused him to genuine activity: his history not very happy; his life not very interesting, his work not congenial, and paying itself in no satisfaction, his pleasures of a cold and common intellectual sort,--he had dragged along, sustained, without the sense of its sustentation, by the germ within him of a slowly developing honesty. But now that Conscience had got up into the guard's seat, and Will had taken the reins, he found all his intellectual faculties in full play, keeping well together, heads up and traces tight, while the outrider Imagination, with his spotted dog Fancy, was always far ahead, but never beyond the sound of the guard's horn; and ever as they went, object after object hitherto beyond the radius of his interest, rose on the horizon of question, and began to glimmer in the dawn of human relation. His first sermon is enough to show that he had begun to have thoughts of his own--a very different thing from the entertaining of the thoughts of others, however well we may feed and lodge them--thoughts which came to him not as things which sought an entrance, but as things that sought an exit--cried for forms of embodiment that they might pass out of the infinite, and by |
|