Paul, grounded not on faith and love for human beings, but on
something very like suspicion and contempt? You will be but too
likely, Doctor, to make the coarsest mistakes, when you fancy yourself
most penetrating; to mistake the mere scurf and disease of the
character for its healthy organic tissue, and to find out at last,
somewhat to your confusion, that there are more things, not only in
heaven, but in the earthiest of the earth, than are dreamt of in your
philosophy. You have already set down Grace Harvey as a hypocrite, and
Willis as a dotard. Will you make up your mind in the same foolishness
of over-wisdom, that Frank Headley is a merely narrow-headed and
hard-hearted pedant, quite unaware that he is living an inner life of
doubts, struggles, prayers, self-reproaches, noble hunger after an
ideal of moral excellence, such as you, friend Tom, never yet dreamed
of, which would be to you as an unintelligible gibber of shadows out
of dreamland, but which is to him the only reality, the life of life,
for which everything is to be risked and suffered? You treat his
opinions (though he never thrusts them on you) about "the Church," and
his duty, and the souls of his parishioners, with civil indifference,
as much ado about nothing; and his rubrical eccentricities as
puerilities. You have already made up your mind to "try and put a
little common sense into him," not because it is any concern of yours
whether he has common sense or not, but because you think that it
will be better for you to have the parish at peace; but has it ever
occurred to you how noble the man is, even in his mistakes? How that
one thought, that the finest thing in the world is to be utterly good,
and to make others good also, puts him three heavens at least above
you, you most unangelic terrier-dog, bemired all day long by grubbing
after vermin! What if his idea of "the Church" be somewhat too narrow
for the year of grace 1854, is it no honour to him that he has such
an idea at all; that there has risen up before him the vision of a
perfect polity, a "Divine and wonderful Order," linking earth to
heaven, and to the very throne of Him, who died for men; witnessing to
each of its citizens what the world tries to make him forget, namely,
that he is the child of God himself; and guiding and strengthening
him, from the cradle to the grave, to do his Father's work? Is it a
shame to him that he has seen that such a polity must exist, that he
believes that it does exist; or that he thinks he finds it in its
highest, if not its perfect form, in the most ancient and august
traditions of his native land? True, he has much to learn, and you
may teach him something of it; but you will find some day, Thomas
Thurnall, that, granting you to be at one pole of the English
character, and Frank Headley at the other, he is as good an Englishman
as you, and can teach you more than you can him.
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