Thomas Wingfold. Volume III by George MacDonald

As the sermon drew to a close, and the mist of his emotion began to / disperse, individual faces of his audience again dawned out on the / preacher's ken. Mr. Drew's head was down. As I have always said, / certain things he had been taught in his youth, and had practised in / his manhood, certain mean ways counted honest enough in the trade, / had become to him, regarded from the ideal point of the divine in / merchandize -- such a merchandize, namely, as the share the son of man / might have taken in buying and selling, had his reputed father been / a shop-keeper instead of a carpenter -- absolutely hateful, and the / memory of them intolerable. Nor did it relieve him much to remind / himself of the fact, that he knew not to the full the nature of the / advantages he took, for he knew that he had known them such as / shrunk from the light, not coming thereto to be made manifest. He / was now doing his best to banish them from his business, and yet / they were a painful presence to his spirit -- so grievous to be borne, / that the prospect held out by the preacher of an absolute and final / deliverance from them by the indwelling presence of the God of all / living men and true merchants, was a blessedness unspeakable.

Small was the suspicion in the Abbey Church of Olaston that morning, that / the well-known successful man of business was weeping. Who could / once have imagined another reason for the laying of that round, / good-humoured, contented face down on the book-board, than pure / drowsiness from lack of work-day interest! Yet there was a human / soul crying out after its birthright. Oh, to be clean as a / mountain-river! clean as the air above the clouds, or on the middle / seas! as the throbbing aether that fills the gulf betwixt star and / star! -- nay, as the thought of the Son of Man himself, who, to make / all things new and clean, stood up against the old battery of / sin-sprung suffering, withstanding and enduring and stilling the / recoil of the awful force wherewith his Father had launched the / worlds, and given birth to human souls with wills that might become / free as his own!