Page:Eliot - Felix Holt, the Radical, vol. II, 1866.djvu/15

Rh the temple of the body. If the Rector had been a less respectable man, Rufus would have more reluctantly made him an object of antagonism; but as an incarnation of soul-destroying error, dissociated from those baser sins which have no good repute even with the worldly, it would be an argumentative luxury to get into close quarters with him, and fight with a dialectic short-sword in the eyes of the Treby world (sending also a written account thereof to the chief organs of Dissenting opinion). Vice was essentially stupid—a deaf and eyeless monster, insusceptible to demonstration: the Spirit might work on it by unseen ways, and the unstudied sallies of sermons were often as the arrows which pierced and awakened the brutified conscience; but illuminated thought, finely-dividing speech, were the choicer weapons of the Divine armoury, which whoso could wield must be, careful not to leave idle.

Here, then, was the longed-for opportunity. Here was an engagement—an expression of a strong wish—on the part of Philip Debarry, if it were in his power, to procure a satisfaction to Rufus Lyon. How had that man of God and exemplary Independent minister, Mr Ainsworth, of persecuted sanctity, conducted himself when a similar occasion had befallen