Let a vast assembly be,
And with great solemnity
Declare with measured words that ye
Are, as God has made ye, free.
Be your strong and simple words
Keen to wound as sharpened swords,
And wide as targes let them be,
With their shade to cover ye.
And if then the tyrants dare,
Let them ride among you there,
Slash, and stab, and maim, and hew—
What they like, that let them do.
With folded arms and steady eyes,
And little fear, and less surprise,
Look upon them as they slay,
Till their rage has died away.
And that slaughter to the Nation
Shall steam up like inspiration,
Eloquent, oracular—
A volcano heard afar.
Ending, the reader turned to the listener. But the listener had understood little of the meaning, and less of the spirit. He hated opposition to the powers on the part of any below himself, yet scorned the idea of submitting to persecution.
“What think you of that, sir?” asked Donal.
“Sheer nonsense!” answered the minister. “Where would Scotland be now but for resistance?”
“There’s more than one way of resisting, though,” returned Donal. “Enduring evil was the Lord’s way. I don’t know about Scotland, but I fancy there would be more Christians, and of a better stamp, in the world, if that had been the mode of resistance always adopted by those that called themselves such. Anyhow it was his way.”
“Shelley’s, you mean!”
“I don’t mean Shelley’s, I mean Christ’s. In spirit Shelley was far nearer the truth than those who made him despise the very name of Christianity without knowing what it really was. But God will give every man fair play.”
“Young man!” said the minister, with an assumption of great solemnity and no less authority, “I am bound to warn you that you are in a state of rebellion against God, and he will not be mocked. Good morning!”
Donal sat down on the roadside—he would let the minister have a good start of him—took again his shabby little volume, held more talk with the book-embodied spirit of Shelley, and saw more and more clearly how he was misled in his every notion of Christianity, and how different those who gave him his notions must have been from the evangelists and apostles. He saw in the poet a boyish nature striving after liberty, with scarce a notion of what liberty really was: he knew nothing of the law of liberty—oneness with the will of our existence, which would have us free with its own freedom.
When the clergyman was long out of sight, he rose and went on, and soon came to a bridge by which he crossed the river. Then on he went through the cultivated plain, his spirits never flagging. He was a pilgrim on his way to his divine fate!