“What do you say?” he asked with a little interest.
Agnes’s voice was low, and trembled with reverence and with emotion. She was not thinking of him, in his maze of intellectual trifling—she was thinking of that Other, whom she knew so much better, and whose name she spoke. She answered with an involuntary bending of her head—“Our Lord.”
It was no conviction that struck the mind of the young man—conviction was not like to come readily to him—and he was far too familiar with all the formal arguments, to be moved by the reasonings of a polemic, or the fervour of an enthusiast. But he who professed so much anxiety about truth, and contemplated himself as a moral martyr, woefully following his principles, though they led him to ever so dark a desolation, had lived all his life among an infinite number of shams, and willingly enough had yielded to many of them. Perhaps this was the first time in his life in which he had been brought into immediate contact with people who were simply true in their feelings and their actions—whose opinions were without controversy—whose settled place in life, humble as it was, shut them out from secondary emulations and ambitions—and who were swayed by the primitive rule of human existence—the labour and the rest, the affliction and the prosperity, which were real things, and not creations of the brain. He paused a little over the words of Agnes Atheling. He did not want her to think as he did: he was content to believe that the old boundaries were suitable and seemly for a woman; and he was rather pleased than otherwise, by the horror, interest, and regret which such opinions as his generally met with. He paused upon her words, with the air of a spectator, and said in a meditative fashion, “It is a glorious faith.”
Now Agnes, who was not at all satisfied with this contemplative approval, was entirely ready and eager for controversy; prepared to plunge into it with the utmost rashness, utterly unaccoutred and ignorant as she was. She trembled with suppressed fervour and excitement over all her frame. She was as little a match for the Rector in the argument which she would fain have entered into, as any child in the village; but she was far too strong in the truth of her cause to feel any fear.
“Do you ever meet with great trouble?” said Agnes.
It was quite an unexpected question. The Rector looked at her inquiringly, without the least perception what she meant.
“And when you meet with it,” continued the eager young champion, “what do you say?”
Now this was rather a difficult point with the Rector; it was not naturally his vocation to administer comfort to “great trouble”—in reality, when he was brought face to face with it, he had nothing to say. He paused a little, really embarrassed—that was the curate’s share of the business. Mr Rivers was very sorry for the poor people, but had, in fact, no consolation to give, and thought it much more important to play with his own mind and faculties in this solemn and conscientious trifling of his, than to attend to the griefs of others. He answered, after some hesitation: “There are different minds, of course, and different influences applicable to them. Every man consoles himself after his own fashion; for some there are the sublime consolations of Philosophy, for others the rites of the Church.”
“Some time,” said Agnes suddenly, turning upon him with earnest eyes,—“some time, when you come upon great sorrow, will you try the name of our Lord?”
The young man was startled again, and made no answer. He was struck by the singular conviction that this girl, inferior to himself in every point, had a certain real and sublime acquaintance with that wonderful Person of whom she spoke; that this was by no means belief in a doctrine, but knowledge of a glorious and extraordinary Individual, whose history no unbeliever in the world has been able to divest of its original majesty. The idea was altogether new to him; it found an unaccustomed way to the heart of the speculatist—that dormant power which scarcely any one all his life had tried to reach to. “I do not quite understand you,” he said somewhat moodily; but he did not attend to what she said afterwards. He pondered upon the problem by himself, and could not make anything of it. Arguments about doctrines and beliefs were patent enough to the young man. He was quite at home among dogmas and opinions—but, somehow, this personal view of the question had a strange advantage over him. He was not prepared for it; its entire and obvious simplicity took away the ground from under his feet. It might be easy enough to persuade a man out of conviction of a doctrine which he believed, but it was a different matter to disturb the identity of a person whom he knew.