'Scholarship! learning!' Eyes and lips flashed into a vehement scorn. 'You allow them a value in themselves, apart from the Christian's test. It is the modern canker, the modern curse! Thank God, my years in London burnt it out of me! Oh, my friend, what have you and I to do with all these curious triflings, which lead men oftener to rebellion than to worship? Is this a time for wholesale trust, for a maudlin universal sympathy? Nay, rather a day of suspicion, a day of repression!—a time for trampling on the lusts of the mind no less than the lusts of the body, a time when it is better to believe than to know, to pray than to understand!'
Robert was silent a moment, and they stood together, Newcome's gaze of fiery appeal fixed upon him.
'We are differently made, you and I,' said the young rector at last with difficulty. 'Where you see temptation I see opportunity. I cannot conceive of God as the Arch-plotter against His own creation!'
Newcome dropped his hold abruptly.
'A groundless optimism,' he said with harshness. 'On the track of the soul from birth to death there are two sleuth-hounds—Sin and Satan. Mankind for ever flies them, is for ever vanquished and devoured. I see life always as a thread-like path between abysses along which man creeps'—and his gesture illustrated the words—'with bleeding hands and feet towards one—narrow—solitary outlet. Woe to him if he turn to the right hand or the left—"I will repay, saith the Lord!"'
Elsmere drew himself up suddenly; the words seemed to him a blasphemy. Then something stayed the vehement answer on his lips. It was a sense of profound intolerable pity. What a maimed life! what an indomitable soul! Husbandhood, fatherhood, and all the sacred education that flows from human joy for ever self-forbidden, and this grim creed for recompense!
He caught Newcome's hand with a kind of filial eagerness.
'You are a perpetual lesson to me,' he said, most gently. 'When the world is too much with me, I think of you and am rebuked. God bless you! But I know myself. If I could see life and God as you see them for one hour, I should cease to be a Christian in the next!'
A flush of something like sombre resentment passed over Newcome's face. There is a tyrannical element in all fanaticism, an element which makes opposition a torment. He turned abruptly away, and Robert was left alone.
It was a still clear evening, rich in the languid softness and balm which mark the first approaches of autumn. Elsmere walked back to the house, his head uplifted to the sky which lay beyond the cornfield, his whole being wrought into a passionate protest—a passionate invocation of all things beautiful and strong and free, a clinging to life and nature as to something wronged and outraged.