unreceptive nature, and they hear, as it were, their own voice
reflected in a poor, dull, inharmonious echo, and are disgusted?

But, on the other hand, ever in the pauses of the rushing, ever in
the watery gleams of life that broke through the clouds and drifts
of the fever, Leopold sought his friend, and, finding him, shone
into a brief radiance, or, missing him, gloomed back into the land
of visions. The tenderness of the curate's service, the heart that
showed itself in everything he did, even in the turn and expression
of the ministering hand, was a kind of revelation to Helen. For
while his intellect was hanging about the door, asking questions,
and uneasily shifting hither and thither in its unloved
perplexities, the spirit of the master had gone by it unseen, and
entered into the chamber of his heart.

After preaching the sermon last recorded, there came a reaction of
doubt and depression on the mind of the curate, greater than usual.
Had he not gone farther than his right? Had he not implied more
conviction than was his? Words could not go beyond his satisfaction
with what he found in the gospel, or the hopes for the range of his
conscious life springing therefrom; but was he not now making people
suppose him more certain of the FACT of these things than he was? He
was driven to console himself with the reflection that so long as he
had had no such intention, even if he had been so carried away by
the delight of his heart as to give such an impression, it mattered
little: what was it to other people what he believed or how he
believed? If he had not been untrue to himself, no harm would
follow. Was a man never to talk from the highest in him to the
forgetting of the lower? Was a man never to be carried beyond
himself and the regions of his knowledge? If so, then farewell