The native activity of his intellect prevented a prolonged abidance on the mere threshold of opinion: a few months rolled over, and Joe's convictions took a current which they kept for some years. In truth, the formation of his conclusions was hastened by the very circumstance of his being compelled to pursue his doubts and inquiries in silence. No one around him understood the questions with which his mind was grappling; and the answers which his own judgment gradually gave them, would, he was sensible, create a general horror if broadly proclaimed in the hearing of the simple people by whom he was surrounded.
His faith once shaken in the rules of practice prescribed by the sectarian teachers, since he knew no other way of interpreting the experimental doctrines of the Scriptures than that they pursued,—his reason became gradually distasted with the Scriptures themselves,—and he easily adopted the arguments against the Bible contained in his favourite volume of French philosophy. He began to suspect, and, at length, boldly concluded, that the Jehovah of the Hebrews was, indeed, the mere mythological fiction of a rude and barbarous age,—a Deity scarcely more godlike in his character and attributes than the savage Moloch of the Ammonites. To class the garden of primeval innocence, and the forbidden fruit, and the tempting serpent, and the lapse of the first human pair, among the allegories which, he now learned, the ancient nations were wont to adopt in order to embody their conceptions of things otherwise difficult of narration, was a still easier step. The Prophecies, he thought, were evidently attributable to that prolific Oriental faculty which gave birth and authority to the pagan oracles; and the Miracles, as events opposed to general experience, were to be at once discarded from the catalogue of historic facts, by every true philosopher.
Amid these rapid and decided changes of sentiment, Joe sometimes wondered that he felt none of the inward terror and the "stings of conscience," which he had so perpetually been taught to regard as the sure avenging vicegerents of a Deity, in the breasts of those who dared to doubt revealed truth. That he was tormented by none of these appalling visitings, was another proof to his mind of the fallacy of his rejected teachers. He was conscious that, in his conclusions, whether right or wrong, he was sincere: he was satisfied that his new mental condition was far preferable to the spirit-degrading and wearisome slavery he had so recently shaken off; and he had not, yet, sufficiently probed the depths of his own heart to know that his self-gratulation was also aided by the pride of thinking diversely from the mass of his fellows. The ghost story at the market, and its accompanying circumstances, often ran through his memory, and served, not a little, to enforce his persuasion that the mass of mankind were the dupes of superstition; and, at the close of every similar train of reflection, he could not refrain from indulging a self-complacent feeling on his having, himself, thrown off what he gradually deemed to be a blind and implicit trust in fables under the delusive guise of Divine inspiration.
Glowing with the conception that he had hitherto been living in a dream of multiform illusions, but had now broken it, Joe resolved to "gird up the loins of his mind" for the laborious and persevering pursuit of solid knowledge; and said within himself,—"I will henceforth converse with experience, and not with imagination: I will cleave to fact and not to phantasy." The weekly journies to Gainsborough with his aged mistress, which were uninterruptedly kept up from their commencement, afforded him what he conceived to be ample means for carrying this resolve into successful practice. And so, in some measure, it proved; for, by an exchange of volumes with the travelling bookseller, and the casual assistance of a few shillings from his indulgent godmother, he reaped an unremitting supply for his intellectual appetite,—a faculty which rapidly "grew with what it fed on." He eagerly devoured whatever came within his reach in the shape of history or chronicle;—he sought industriously to acquire the rudiments of real science;—and strove to sharpen and fortify his reason by the perusal of ancient tomes of logic and philosophy. For records of travel he craved with an incontrollable passion: a feeling which was, in reality, but a revivification of the ardour awakened in his boyish mind by the adventures of the shipwrecked Crusoe. But the fervid desire he once cherished, to penetrate vast deserts and visit unknown realms, was now transmuted, by the influence of his more sober associations and habits of reflection, into a prevalent wish to see the world of men; and the prospect of a new and wider field of observation to be entered upon at the close of his humble servitude began thenceforth to pervade his daily musings, and, eventually, to take a shape in his purposes.
The secrecy which Joe was compelled to observe on religious subjects was a restraint through which he would gladly have broken; but there was not one to whom he could communicate his sceptical views without fear of an explosion of alarm. Observance of caution being repulsive to his feelings, it was, therefore, natural that his real sentiments should occasionally escape. Only, however, when the gross superstitions of his daily associates excited very strong disgust within him, did Joe utterly forget his rules of caution. His fellow-apprentices were in little danger of imbibing heretical opinions, from the fact of their understandings being too uninformed to apprehend the real drift of his thinkings when expressed. But Dame Deborah pondered on some of these hasty expressions of opinion, until her aged heart often ached with the suspicion that all was not right in the new religious state of her foster-son. Yet, when she marked the tenour of his daily conduct,—his inviolable regard for truth,—his steady rebuke of every thing coarse and unfeeling,—when she listened to the language in which his conceptions, even on ordinary subjects, were uttered,—and when she contrasted his manly cheerfulness with his former gloom and despondency, a confidence arose that dispelled her temporary doubts of the correctness of his heart, and her bosom glowed with pride at the remembrance that she had adopted him for her own.
During the concluding five years of his apprenticeship, Joe had piled together in his mind, though after no prescribed rule, much knowledge of a multifarious character. The acquirement of one of the noble languages of antiquity was his severest unassisted struggle during this probationary course; but it was a strife from which he reaped the richest after-pleasures. The facts he gleaned from history were stored up faithfully in his memory, not merely as chronological items, but as texts for fertile and profitable reflection; while he assiduously strove to catch the rays of such new truths as were perceptible in his more limited reading of ethics, and to evince their spirit in his thoughts and actions. Thus, without written pattern or oral instructor, the orphan apprentice endeavoured, by the selection of such materials as lay within his grasp, to build up, within himself, a mental fabric of seemly architecture. But, to cut short observations that are already too protracted,—Joe, with all his efforts after mental discipline, was, at twenty-one, what all the lonely self-educated must be at that age, often the slave of his own hypothesis when he believed himself to be following the most legitimate deductions from an authenticated fact,—oftener a visionary than a true philosopher.
On the evening preceding the day of Joe's freedom, the good old Deborah, sitting at her own door, presented a picture almost identical with the sketch attempted at the opening of this brief recital. Except the deeper furrows on her face, there was no token that age had strengthened its empire over her. The fine old woman sat as erect in her arm-chair as she had sat there sixteen years before. Her eyes also beamed with the same wakefulness and kindliness on her neighbours, as they passed by, from their labour, and tendered her a respectful recognition,—for she was at peace with all, and beloved by all; and while the light vapour curled and wreathed, as it floated slowly upward from her pipe, and then melted, above her head, into the invisibility of space, it seemed a type of the serene and healthful course she had trod in her uprightness, that was, in due time, to receive its quiet change into the unseen but felicitous future. The solicitude she had, for seventeen years, increasingly felt respecting the welfare of her foster-son,—now the youth was within a few hours of being at age,—filled her heart so completely, that she could do nothing as she sat in her customary seat, that evening, but con over the probable consequences of Joe's emancipation from the thraldom of apprenticeship, which was to take place the following noon.
"Well, I'm truly thankful," soliloquised the peaceful septuagenarian, puffing away the clouds from her pipe with growing energy, and now and then ending her sentences in an audible tone, through the strength of earnestness,—"that the Lord moved my heart to take care of this poor motherless and faytherless bairn. It's Him, I'm sensible, that inclines us to do any good,—for there's little that's good in us by natur'. I've no reason to repent what I did; for though the dear lad has a few whirligig notions, yet I'm sure there's a vast deal o' good in him. He doesn't like church over well,—but then the parson grows old and stupid, like me; and it's not likely that a young fellow that's grown so very book-larnt as our Joe, should be fond o' spending his time in listening to an old toothless parson's dull drawling. Neighbour Toby Lackpenny says that the lad's ower nat'ral; and not abstrac' enough, in his way o' thinking; but, for my part, I think he's far ower abstrac' already! At least, I hope he'll grow wiser, in a few years, than to say that the dead never appear to the living. He may talk in that way to green geese like himself, but not to me. Didn't I see my own dear Barachiah, for three nights together, stand in the moonlight, at the foot of my bed, while I was weeping sore for the loss of him?—The Lord forgive me, that I should have grieved so sinfully as to have disturbed his rest! But that's past and gone, and many a deep trouble besides, thank Heaven above! And now, here's this lad. I wished, often, that I had one o' my own;—but it was not God's will so to bless my poor Barachiah and me,—and how could I have loved a child of my own better than I do love this poor bairn? But I was thinking about what I must do for him before he leaves me,—for he's long talked o' seeing the world when he was out of his time;—and, I make no doubt, he'll want to be off to-morrow, as soon as noontide makes him free. I must say a few words to him about it, to-night,—and yet, I feel so chicken-hearted about his going, that I hardly know how to speak to him."
The good dame's irregular soliloquy was put an end to by the voices of her younger apprentices, who were drawing homewards for the night. Her foster-son soon afterwards made his appearance,—book in hand, as usual, at the end of his evening's walk at the conclusion of labour. The supper-table was spread,—the meal ended,—and Joe and the aged dame were speedily left the sole occupants of the little kitchen. Joe had retaken up his book, and had been buried for more than half-an-hour in deep attention to its contents,—the hour was growing late;—and Dame Deborah, after many inward struggles, began, in a very tremulous tone, to address her foster-child on the most important theme in her recent soliloquy.
"Joe," said she, "I was thinking, since you will be of age, and a freeman, to-morrow——" and there her emotion compelled her to hesitate; but although Joe had laid down his book to attend to his aged protectress, he felt too much agitated to take up the observation where the dame had left it.