Donal would rather have forded the river, and gone to inquire his way at the nearest farm-house, but he thought it polite to walk a little way with the clergyman.
"How far are you going?" asked the minister at length.
"As far as I can," replied Donal.
"Where do you mean to pa.s.s the night?"
"In some barn perhaps, or on some hill-side."
"I am sorry to hear you can do no better."
"You don"t think, sir, what a decent bed costs; and a barn is generally, a hill-side always clean. In fact the hill-side "s the best. Many"s the time I have slept on one. It"s a strange notion some people have, that it"s more respectable to sleep under man"s roof than G.o.d"s."
"To have no settled abode," said the clergyman, and paused.
"Like Abraham?" suggested Donal with a smile. "An abiding city seems hardly necessary to pilgrims and strangers! I fell asleep once on the top of Glashgar: when I woke the sun was looking over the edge of the horizon. I rose and gazed about me as if I were but that moment created. If G.o.d had called me, I should hardly have been astonished."
"Or frightened?" asked the minister.
"No, sir; why should a man fear the presence of his saviour?"
"You said G.o.d!" answered the minister.
"G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 Sh.e.l.ley," answered Donal, recovering himself.
The minister had never read a word of Sh.e.l.ley, 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 Sh.e.l.ley 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 pa.s.sage. 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 G.o.d, not for leading him to G.o.d 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 G.o.d. He imagined justice and love dwelling in eternal opposition in the bosom of eternal unity. He knew next to nothing about G.o.d, and misrepresented him hideously. If G.o.d were such as he showed him, it would be the worst possible misfortune to have been created.
Donal had found the pa.s.sage. It was in The Mask of Anarchy. He read the following stanzas:--
Let a vast a.s.sembly be, And with great solemnity Declare with measured words that ye Are, as G.o.d 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."
"Sh.e.l.ley"s, you mean!"
"I don"t mean Sh.e.l.ley"s, I mean Christ"s. In spirit Sh.e.l.ley was far nearer the truth than those who made him despise the very name of Christianity without knowing what it really was. But G.o.d will give every man fair play."
"Young man!" said the minister, with an a.s.sumption of great solemnity and no less authority, "I am bound to warn you that you are in a state of rebellion against G.o.d, 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 Sh.e.l.ley, 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!
CHAPTER III.
THE MOOR.
The night began to descend and he to be weary, and look about him for a place of repose. But there was a long twilight before him, and it was warm.
For some time the road had been ascending, and by and by he found himself on a bare moor, among heather not yet in bloom, and a forest of bracken. Here was a great, beautiful chamber for him! and what better bed than G.o.d"s heather! what better canopy than G.o.d"s high, star-studded night, with its airy curtains of dusky darkness! Was it not in this very chamber that Jacob had his vision of the mighty stair leading up to the gate of heaven! Was it not under such a roof Jesus spent his last nights on the earth! For comfort and protection he sought no human shelter, but went out into his Father"s house--out under his Father"s heaven! The small and narrow were not to him the safe, but the wide and open. Thick walls cover men from the enemies they fear; the Lord sought s.p.a.ce. There the angels come and go more freely than where roofs gather distrust. If ever we hear a far-off rumour of angel-visit, it is not from some solitary plain with lonely children?
Donal walked along the high table-land till he was weary, and rest looked blissful. Then he turned aside from the rough track into the heather and bracken. When he came to a little dry hollow, with a yet thicker growth of heather, its tops almost close as those of his bed at his father"s cottage, he sought no further. Taking his knife, he cut a quant.i.ty of heather and ferns, and heaped it on the top of the thickest bush; then creeping in between the cut and the growing, he cleared the former from his face that he might see the worlds over him, and putting his knapsack under his head, fell fast asleep.
When he woke not even the shadow of a dream lingered to let him know what he had been dreaming. He woke with such a clear mind, such an immediate uplifting of the soul, that it seemed to him no less than to Jacob that he must have slept at the foot of the heavenly stair. The wind came round him like the stuff of thought unshaped, and every breath he drew seemed like G.o.d breathing afresh into his nostrils the breath of life. Who knows what the thing we call air is? We know about it, but it we do not know. The sun shone as if smiling at the self-importance of the sulky darkness he had driven away, and the world seemed content with a heavenly content. So fresh was Donal"s sense that he felt as if his sleep within and the wind without had been washing him all the night. So peaceful, so blissful was his heart that it longed to share its bliss; but there was no one within sight, and he set out again on his journey.
He had not gone far when he came to a dip in the moorland--a round hollow, with a cottage of turf in the middle of it, from whose chimney came a little smoke: there too the day was begun! He was glad he had not seen it before, for then he might have missed the repose of the open night. At the door stood a little girl in a blue frock. She saw him, and ran in. He went down and drew near to the door. It stood wide open, and he could not help seeing in.