Mr. Yorke went home from that first town-meeting, and opened his Bolingbroke to look for a sedative. He found this: “The incivilities I
meet with from opposite parties have been so far from rendering me violent or sour to any, that I think myself obliged to them all. Some have cured me of fears, by showing me how impotent the world is; others have cured me of hope, by showing how precarious popular friendships are. All have cured me of surprise.”
Mr. Yorke readjusted his glasses, and read the passages a second time; but it was not the sedative he wanted. There was something the matter with Bolingbroke; his was a worldly and selfish philosophy; and it was, moreover, a discouraging one; for the reader wished to believe that it was possible to awaken and keep alive in the popular mind an enthusiasm for justice. Mr. Yorke was not aware that in this warfare he had drawn nearer to God, and that what he missed in his old favorite was that final, heavenly motive which, running like a golden chain through the simplest human actions, strings them into jewels, lacking which the noblest human thoughts and deeds crumble like sand on the sea-shore.
Closing his book with a feeling of disappointment, his thought glanced down to later times, and he remembered a noble sentiment uttered by one whom he admired, indeed, but half-unwillingly—one of the purest and most heroic men of our time, a man who lacks nothing but faith.
“With God, one is a majority!” said Wendell Phillips.
The thought came down on Mr. Yorke’s heart like a hammer upon an anvil, and sent sparks up into his eyes and brain.
“I take back all that I have said against that man,” he exclaimed, starting up and walking to and fro. “A man who has a vision of absolute honesty cannot help being impatient of policy. Strong conviction never is, never can be, tolerant.” He ran
his fingers through his hair as he paced the room, and combed it up on end. He would have liked to go directly back to the town-hall, and perhaps would have done so but for the probability that it was now dark and empty.
“It is not pleasant to be insulted by such people,” he muttered; “but it would be still less pleasant to think that the rascals could silence me. I will be heard at the next meeting,
‘Though hell itself should gape,
And bid me hold my peace.’”