"Haggard, H Rider- The Wizard" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haggard H. Rider)

by right, speak of him as "poor Thomas," and mark their disapprobation
of his peculiar conduct by refusing with an unvarying steadiness to
subscribe even a single shilling to a missionary society. How "poor
Thomas" speaks of them in the place where he is we may wonder, but as
yet we cannot know--probably with the gentle love and charity that
marked his every action upon earth. But this is by the way.

He had entered the Church, but what had he done in its shadow? This
was the question which Owen asked himself as he sat that night by the
open window, arraigning his past before the judgment-seat of
conscience. For three years he had worked hard somewhere in the slums;
then this living had fallen to him. He had taken it, and from that day
forward his record was very much of a blank. The parish was small and
well ordered; there was little to do in it, and the Salvation Army had
seized upon and reclaimed two of the three confirmed drunkards it
could boast.

His guest's saying echoed in his brain like the catch of a tune--"that
/you/ might lead that life and attain that death." Supposing that he
were bidden so to do now, this very night, would he indeed "think
differently"? He had become a priest to serve his Maker. How would it
be were that Maker to command that he should serve Him in this extreme
and heroic fashion? Would he flinch from the steel, or would he meet
it as the martyrs met it of old?

Physically he was little suited to such an enterprise, for in
appearance he was slight and pale, and in constitution delicate. Also,
there was another reason against the thing. High Church and somewhat
ascetic in his principles, in the beginning he had admired celibacy,
and in secret dedicated himself to that state. But at heart Thomas was
very much a man, and of late he had come to see that which is
against nature is presumably not right, though fanatics may not
hesitate to pronounce it wrong. Possibly this conversion to more
genial views of life was quickened by the presence in the
neighbourhood of a young lady whom he chanced to admire; at least it
is certain that the mere thought of seeing her no more for ever smote
him like a sword of sudden pain.

*****

That very night--or so it seemed to him, and so he believed--the Angel
of the Lord stood before him as he was wont to stand before the men of
old, and spoke a summons in his ear. How or in what seeming that
summons came Thomas Owen never told, and we need not inquire. At the
least he heard it, and, like the Apostles, he arose and girded his
loins to obey. For now, in the hour of trial, it proved that this
man's faith partook of the nature of their faith. It was utter and
virgin; it was not clogged with nineteenth-century qualifications; it
had never dallied with strange doctrines, or kissed the feet of
pinchbeck substitutes for God. In his heart he believed that the