Thomas Wingfold. Volume II by George MacDonald

Outside, the sun rose and set, never a crimson thread the less in / the garment of his glory that the spirit of one of the children of / the earth was stained with blood-guiltiness; the moon came up and / knew nothing of the matter; the stars minded their own business; and / the people of Glaston were talking about their curate's sermons. / Alas, it was about his sermons, and not the subject of them, that / men talked, their interest mainly roused by their PECULIARITY, and / what some called the oddity of the preacher.

What had come to him? He was not in the least like that for months / after his appointment, and the change came all at once! Yes -- it / began with those extravagant notions about honesty in writing his / own sermons! It might have been a sunstroke, but it took him far too / early in the year for that! Softening of the brain it might be, poor / fellow! Was not excessive vanity sometimes a symptom? -- Poor fellow!

So said some. But others said he was a clever fellow, and / long-headed enough to know that that sort of thing attracted / attention, and might open the way to a benefice, or at least an / engagement in London, where eloquence was of more account than in a / dead-and-alive country place like Glaston, from which the tide of / grace had ebbed, leaving that great ship of the church, the Abbey, / high and dry on the shore.

Others again judged him a fanatic -- a dangerous man. Such did not all / venture to assert that he had erred from the way, but what man was / more dangerous than he who went too far? Possibly these forgot that / the narrow way can hardly be one to sit down in comfortably, or / indeed to be entered at all save by him who tries the gate with the / intent of going all the way -- even should it lead up to the / perfection of the Father in heaven. "But," they would in effect have / argued, "is not a fanatic dangerous? and is not an enthusiast always / in peril of becoming a fanatic? -- Be his enthusiasm for what it / may -- for Jesus Christ, for God himself, such a man is dangerous -- / most dangerous! There are so many things, comfortably settled like / Presumption's tubs upon their own bottoms, which such men would, if / they could, at once upset and empty!"

Others suspected a Romanizing drift in the whole affair. "Wait until / he gathers influence," they said, "and a handful of followers, and / then you'll see! They'll be all back to Rome together in a month!"

As the wind took by the tail St. Peter's cock on the church spire / and whirled it about, so did the wind of words in Glaston rudely / seize and flack hither and thither the spiritual reputation of / Thomas Wingfold, curate. And all the time, the young man was / wrestling, his life in his hand, with his own unbelief; while upon / his horizon ever and anon rose the glimmer of a great aurora, or the / glimpse of a boundless main -- if only he could have been sure they / were no mirage of his own parched heart and hungry eye -- that they / were thoughts in the mind of the Eternal, and THRERFORE had appeared / in his, even as the Word was said to have become flesh and dwelt / with men! The next moment he would be gasping in that malarious / exhalation from the marshes of his neglected heart -- the / counter-fear, namely, that the word under whose potent radiance the / world seemed on the verge of budding forth and blossoming as the / rose, was TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE.

"Yes, much too good, if there be no living, self-willing Good," said / Polwarth one evening, in answer to the phrase just dropped from his / lips. "But if there be such a God as alone could be God, can / anything be too good to be true? -- too good for such a God as / contented Jesus Christ?"

At one moment he was ready to believe everything, even to that / strangest, yet to me right credible miracle of the fish and the / piece of money, and the next to doubt whether man had ever dared / utter the words, "I and the Father are one. " Tossed he was and / tormented in spirit, calling even aloud sometimes to know if there / was a God anywhere hearing his prayer, sure only of this, that / whatever else any being might be, if he heard not prayer, he could / not be the God for whom his soul cried and fainted. Sometimes there / came to him, it is true, what he would gladly have taken for an / answer, but it was nothing more than the sudden descent of a kind of / calmness on his spirit, which, for aught he could tell, might be but / the calm of exhaustion. His knees were sore with kneeling, his face / white with thinking, his eyes dim with trouble; for when once a man / has set out to find God, he must find him or die. This was the / inside reality whose outcome set the public of Glaston babbling. It / was from this that George Bascombe magisterially pronounced him a / hypochondriac, worrying his brain about things that had no / existence -- as George himself could with confidence testify, not once / having seen the sight of them, heard the sound of them, or imagined / in his heart that they ought to be, or even that they might possibly / be. He pronounced indeed their existence inconsistent with his own.