His friend sat silent still; Sidney looked at him almost pleadingly, and saw that his eyes were blurred by tears.
“Listen,” he said to Sidney. “Give it up. You don’t know what you are doing. It will kill you. I know you so well. You are salving your conscience now by good resolutions. When you see the fruitlessness of it all you will torture yourself with thoughts of your responsibility and what not, and the end will be chaos.”
“Do you think I have not nearly gone mad already?” said Sidney, growing very white. “Surely you must guess how I have questioned my ability to do them good. But I think the worst of that is past now. I shall have a stay, a support, an inspiration which will never flag. The most beautiful and best woman in the world has promised to marry me the day I become minister of Dole.”
“I’ve heard of the devil baiting his line with a woman,” said the workman contemptuously, but yet in such a manner that Sidney could not take offence. Then he went on:—
“You say you’ll do your duty by these people, but it’s not that I’m thinking about. It’s you. Remember this, you are to work in the vineyard of human nature, its soil is the shifting quicksand of human weakness. When you feel that sucking you down, to what will you turn? Upon what secret source of strength can you draw? Do you think the men who preach the Christ word in the slums could live and eat and continue their work unless they drew strength from some unseen reservoir? No, a thousand times no. Of course, I think their belief a delusion, but it is real to them, as real as the Divinity of Truth, and Truth alone, is to me. To preach a personal God without belief in one is to court destruction; at any moment, by disappointment or self-reproach, you may be thrown back upon your own beliefs. Shall the mother whom you have denied open her arms to you? Or shall the personal God in whom you do not believe sustain you? No, you will fall into the void. Sidney, give it up.”
There was a pause.
“I will never give it up,” he said. “I have promised that I shall devote myself to the work, and I will. You speak as if I had denied Nature and spat upon Truth. I have done neither. These two things will bear me through. There was one night in the fields—there was a new moon, and the young grain was springing. I saw things very clearly just then. I felt I could do good, and that it was my bounden duty to try. Bid me good-speed.”
The workman rose. He took Sidney’s hand and pressed it in both of his.
“I think,” he said, “no human being ever began a hopeless course with more sincere and honest good wishes.” As he held Sidney’s hands and looked into the grey eyes of the younger man his own keen eyes dimmed and grew seerlike. The look of the visionary illumined his face.
“You will toil and strive and suffer,” he said. “You will spend and be spent for others. You will have griefs, but you will never realise them, for you will be too absorbed in the sorrows of others to feel your own. You have bound yourself to a wheel, and until you are broken upon it, and your spirit spilt into the bosom of the Eternal, you will never know you have been tortured.”