Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 131.djvu/790

784 who had failed in the attempt to preach — and when the presbytery dismissed him on the charge of heresy, there had been many tears on the part of his pupils and much childish defiance of his unenviable successor.

Few words passed between the two men until they had had their tea, and then followed a long talk, Malcolm first explaining his present position, and then answering many questions of the master as to how things had gone since he left. Next followed anxious questions on Malcolm's side as to how his friend found himself in the prison of London.

"I do miss the air, and the laverocks (skylarks), and the gowans," he confessed, "but I have them all in my mind; and at my age a man ought to be able to satisfy himself with the idea of a thing in his soul. Of outer things that have contributed to his inward growth the memory alone may then well be enough. The sights which when I lie down to sleep, rise before that inward eye Wordsworth calls the bliss of solitude have upon me the power almost of a spiritual vision, so purely radiant are they of that which dwells in them, the divine thought which is their substance, their hypostasis. My boy, I doubt if you can yet tell what it is to know the presence of the living God in and about you."

"I houp I hae a bit notion o' 't, sir," said Malcolm.

"But believe me that, in any case, however much a man may have of it, he may have it endlessly more. Since I left the cottage where I hoped to end my days under the shadow of the house of your ancestors, since I came into this region of bricks and smoke and the crowded tokens too plain of want and care, I have found a reality in the things I had been trying to teach you at Portlossie such as I had before imagined only in my best moments. And more still: I am now far better able to understand how it must have been with our Lord when He was trying to teach the men and women in Palestine to have faith in God. Depend upon it, we get our best use of life in learning by the facts of its ebb and flow to understand the Son of man. And again, when we understand him, then only do we understand our life and ourselves. Never can we know the majesty of the will of God concerning us except by understanding Jesus and the work the Father gave him to do. Now, nothing is a more heavenly delight than to enter into a dusky room in the house of your friend, and there, with a blow of the heavenly rod, draw light from the dark wall — open a window, a fountain of the eternal light, and let in the truth which is the life of the world. Joyously would a man spend his life — right joyously, even if the road led to the gallows — in showing the grandest he sees — the splendent purities of the divine region, the mountain-top up to which the voice of God is ever calling his children. Yes, I can understand even how a man might live, like the good hermits of old, in triumphant meditation upon such all-satisfying truths, and let the waves of the world's time wash by him in unheeded flow until his cell changed to his tomb and his spirit soared free. But to spend your time in giving little lessons when you have great ones to give; in teaching the multiplication-table the morning after you made at midnight a grand discovery upon the very summits of the moonlit mountain-range of the mathematics; in enforcing the old law, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, when you know in your own heart that not a soul can ever learn to keep it without first learning to fulfil an infinitely greater one — to love his neighbor even as Christ hath loved him — then indeed one may well grow disheartened, and feel as if he were not in the place prepared for, and at the work required of, him. But it is just then that he must go back to school himself, and learn not only the patience of God, who keeps the whole dull obstinate world alive while generation after generation is born and vanishes — and of the mighty multitude only one here and there rises up from the fetters of humanity into the freedom of the sons of God — and yet goes on teaching the whole, and bringing every man who will but turn his ear a little towards the voice that calls him nearer and nearer to the second birth of sonship and liberty; not only this divine patience must he learn, but the divine insight as well, which in every form spies the reflex of the truth it cannot contain, and in every lowliest lesson sees the highest drawn nearer and the soul growing alive unto God."

 

next day at noon, mounted on Kelpie, Malcolm was in attendance upon his mistress, who was eager after a gallop in Richmond Park. Lord Liftore, who had intended to accompany her, had not made his appearance yet, but Florimel did not seem the less desirous of setting 