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Thomas Wingfold, Curate V2 by George MacDonald
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
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