There is not a word to
show that he met with any sympathy; indeed the misunderstanding,
whatever it was, that overshadowed him, had driven acquaintances,
friends, and lovers away from him; and yet his tender confidence in
God never fails; he feels that in his passionate worship of virtue
and truth, his intense love of purity and justice, he has got a
treasure which is more to him than riches or honour, or even than
human love. He speaks as though this passion for holiness had been
the very thing that had cost him so dear, and that exposed him to
derision and dislike. Perhaps he had refused to fall in with some
customary form of evil, and his resistance to temptation had led
him to be regarded as a precisian and a saint? I have little doubt
myself that this was so. He speaks as one might speak who had been
so smitten with the desire for purity and rightness of life, that
he could no longer even seem to condone the opposite. And yet he
was evidently not one who dared to withstand and rebuke evil; the
most he could do was to abstain from it; and the result was that he
saw the careless and evil-minded people about him prosperous, happy
and light-hearted, while he was himself plunged by his own act in
misunderstanding and solitude and tears.
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