" And so
went on through the gas-lit streets into his parishes in cellars
and alleys, with a sorer heart, but cheerfuller words, now that
he had nothing but words to give.
The only place where he hardened his heart was in the hospital
with Holmes. After he had wakened to full consciousness, Knowles
thought the man a beast to sit there uncomplaining day after day,
cold and grave, as if the lifeful warmth of the late autumn were
enough for him. Did he understand the iron fate laid on him?
Where was the strength of the self-existent soul now? Did he
know that it was a balked, defeated life, that waited for him,
vacant of the triumphs he had planned? "The self-existent soul!
stopped in its growth by chance, this omnipotent deity,--the
chance burning of a mill!" Knowles muttered to himself, looking
at Holmes. With a dim flash of doubt, as he said it, whether
there might not, after all, be a Something,--some deep of calm,
of eternal order, where he and Holmes, these coarse chances,
these wrestling souls, these creeds, Catholic or Humanitarian,
even that namby-pamby Kitts and his picture, might be
unconsciously working out their part. Looking out of the
hospital-window, he saw the deep of the stainless blue,
impenetrable, with the stars unconscious in their silence of the
maddest raging of the petty world. There was such calm! such
infinite love and justice! it was around, above him; it held him,
it held the world,--all Wrong, all Right! For an instant the
turbid heart of the man cowered, awestruck, as yours or mine has
done when some swift touch of music or human love gave us a
cleaving glimpse of the great I AM.
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