"God is my saviour! Into his presence it is my desire to come."
"Under shelter of the atonement," supplemented the minister.
"Gien ye mean by that, sir," cried Donal, forgetting his English, "onything to come 'atween my God an' me, I'll ha'e nane o' 't. I'll hae naething hide me frae him wha made me! I wadna hide a thoucht frae him. The waur it is, the mair need he see't."
"What book is that you are reading?" asked the minister sharply.
"It's not your bible, I'll be bound! You never got such notions from it!"
He was angry with the presumptuous youth--and no wonder; for the gospel the minister preached was a gospel but to the slavish and unfilial.
"It's Shelley," answered Donal, recovering himself.
The minister had never read a word of Shelley, but had a very decided opinion of him. He gave a loud rude whistle.
"So! that's where you go for your theology! I was puzzled to understand you, but now all is plain! Young man, you are on the brink of perdition. That book will poison your very vitals!"
"Indeed, sir, it will never go deep enough for that! But it came near touching them as I sat eating my bread and cheese."
"He's an infidel!" said the minister fiercely.
"A kind of one," returned Donal, "but not of the worst sort. It's the people who call themselves believers that drive the like of poor Shelley to the mouth of the pit."
"He hated the truth," said the minister.
"He was always seeking after it," said Donal, "though to be sure he didn't get to the end of the search. Just listen to this, sir, and say whether it be very far from Christian."
Donal opened his little volume, and sought his passage. The minister but for curiosity and the dread of seeming absurd would have stopped his ears and refused to listen. He was a man of not merely dry or stale, but of deadly doctrines. He would have a man love Christ for protecting him from God, not for leading him to God in whom alone is bliss, out of whom all is darkness and misery. He had not a glimmer of the truth that eternal life is to know God. He imagined justice and love dwelling in eternal opposition in the bosom of eternal unity. He knew next to nothing about God, and misrepresented him hideously. If God were such as he showed him, it would be the worst possible misfortune to have been created.
Donal had found the passage. It was in The Mask of Anarchy. He read the following stanzas:--Let a vast assembly be, And with great solemnity Declare with measured words that ye Are, as God has made ye, free.
Be your strong and simple words Keen to wound as sharpened swords, And wide as targes let them be, With their shade to cover ye.
And if then the tyrants dare, Let them ride among you there, Slash, and stab, and maim, and hew--What they like, that let them do.
With folded arms and steady eyes, And little fear, and less surprise, Look upon them as they slay, Till their rage has died away.
And that slaughter to the Nation Shall steam up like inspiration, Eloquent, oracular--A volcano heard afar.
Ending, the reader turned to the listener. But the listener had understood little of the meaning, and less of the spirit. He hated opposition to the powers on the part of any below himself, yet scorned the idea of submitting to persecution.
"What think you of that, sir?" asked Donal.
"Sheer nonsense!" answered the minister. "Where would Scotland be now but for resistance?"
"There's more than one way of resisting, though," returned Donal.
"Enduring evil was the Lord's way. I don't know about Scotland, but I fancy there would be more Christians, and of a better stamp, in the world, if that had been the mode of resistance always adopted by those that called themselves such. Anyhow it was his way."
"Shelley's, you mean!"
"I don't mean Shelley's, I mean Christ's. In spirit Shelley was far nearer the truth than those who made him despise the very name of Christianity without knowing what it really was. But God will give every man fair play."
"Young man!" said the minister, with an assumption of great solemnity and no less authority, "I am bound to warn you that you are in a state of rebellion against God, and he will not be mocked.
Good morning!"
Donal sat down on the roadside--he would let the minister have a good start of him--took again his shabby little volume, held more talk with the book-embodied spirit of Shelley, and saw more and more clearly how he was misled in his every notion of Christianity, and how different those who gave him his notions must have been from the evangelists and apostles. He saw in the poet a boyish nature striving after liberty, with scarce a notion of what liberty really was: he knew nothing of the law of liberty--oneness with the will of our existence, which would have us free with its own freedom.
When the clergyman was long out of sight he rose and went on, and soon came to a bridge by which he crossed the river. Then on he went through the cultivated plain, his spirits never flagging. He was a pilgrim on his way to his divine fate!
