But the town kept hammering at his parents' ears, especially his former teachers, his pastor and Sabbath-school teacher, the hardware man. I asked his father to bring the critics for a talk in the Study, but they did not come. A friend of the family came, a pastor from Brooklyn. The appointment was made in such a way that I did not know whether he was for or against the Abbot's wish to remain in the work here. I told the story of the Abbot's coming, of his work and my ideas for him; that I would be glad to keep him by me until he was a man, because I thought he was a very great man within and believed the training here would enable him to get himself out.
My main effort with the Abbot, as I explained, was to help him develop an instrument commensurate in part with his big inner energies. I told them how I had specialised in his case to cultivate a positive and steadily-working brain-grip; how I had sought to install a system of order through geometry, which I wasn't equipped to teach, but that one of the college men was leading him daily deeper into this glassy and ordered plane.
The fact is, the Abbot had my heart because he loved his dreams, but I used to tell him every day that a man is not finished who has merely answered a call to the mountain; that Jesus himself told his disciples that they must not remain to build a temple on the mountain of Transfiguration. Going up to Sinai is but half the mystery; the gifted one must bring stone tablets down. If in impatience and anger at men, he shatter the tablets, he has done ill toward himself and toward men, and must try once more.
It appears that I did most of the talking and with some energy, believing that the Abbot had my best coming, since the hostility against his work here had long been in the wind from the town.... It was the next day that the boy told me that the decision had gone against us. I cannot quite explain how dulled it made me feel. The depression was of a kind that did not quickly lift. I was willing to let any one who liked hold the impression that the obligation was all my way, but there was really nothing to fight. I went to see the Abbot's father shortly afterward. We touched just the edges of the matter. As I left he assured me:
"The minister said that he didn't think the boy would come to any harm in your Study."
There was no answer to that.... And yet, as I have said, we have come up in different ways from the townspeople. The manuscripts that go forth from this Study are not designed to simplify matters for them, and the books we read in the main are not from the local library. One should really rise to a smile over a matter like this. The fact is, I said to the Abbot:
"Go and show them your quality. There's no danger of your falling into competitive study. Show them that you can move in and around and through the things they ask of you. We're always open when you want to come. You're the first and always one of us. You've got the philosophy—live it. This is just a mission. Take it this way, Abbot. Take it as an honour—a hard task for which you are chosen, because you are ready. Make your days interpret the best of you. Go to it with all your might. Feel us behind you—rooting strong—and hurry back."