—“It will be the last,” said others, “if the rector hear in time how you have been disgracing yourself and profaning his pulpit.”
“And,” the curate went on, “it would be as a fire in my bones did I attempt to keep it back.
“In my room, three days ago, I was reading the strange story of the man who appeared in Palestine saying that he was the Son of God, and came upon those words of his which I have now read in your hearing. At their sound the accuser, Conscience, awoke in my bosom, and asked, ‘Doest thou the things he saith to thee?’ And I thought with myself,—‘Have I this day done anything he says to me?—when did I do anything I had heard of him? Did I ever’—to this it came at last—‘Did I ever, in all my life, do one thing because he said to me DO THIS?’ And the answer was NO, NEVER. Yet there I was, not only calling myself a Christian, but on the strength of my Christianity, it was to be presumed, living amongst you, and received by you, as your helper on the way to the heavenly kingdom—a living falsehood, walking and talking amongst you!”
“What a wretch!” said one man to himself, who made a large part of his living by the sale of under-garments whose every stitch was an untacking of the body from the soul of a seamstress. “Bah!” said some. “A hypocrite, by his own confession!” said others. “Exceedingly improper!” said Mrs. Ramshorn. “Unheard-of and most unclerical behaviour! And actually to confess such paganism!” For Helen, she waked up a little, began to listen, and wondered what he had been saying that a wind seemed to have blown rustling among the heads of the congregation.
“Having made this confession,” Wingfold proceeded, “you will understand that whatever I now say, I say to and of myself as much as to and of any other to whom it may apply.”
He then proceeded to show that faith and obedience are one and the same spirit, passing as it were from room to room in the same heart: what in the heart we call faith, in the will we call obedience. He showed that the Lord refused absolutely the faith that found its vent at the lips in the worshipping words, and not at the limbs in obedient action—which some present pronounced bad theology, while others said to themselves surely that at least was common sense. For Helen, what she heard might be interesting to clergymen, or people like her aunt who had to do with such matters, but to her it was less than nothing and vanity, whose brother lay at home “sick in heart and sick in head.”
But hard thoughts of him could not stay the fountain of Wingfold’s utterance, which filled as it flowed. Eager after a right presentation of what truth he saw, he dwelt on the mockery it would be of any man to call him the wisest, the best, the kindest, yea and the dearest of men, yet never heed either the smallest request or the most urgent entreaty he made.
“A Socinian!” said Mrs. Ramshorn.
“There’s stuff in the fellow!” said the rector’s churchwarden, who had been brought up a Wesleyan.
“He’d make a fellow fancy he did believe all his grandmother told him!” thought Bascombe.