th a
mystic Temple to him, the Earth's business all a kind of worship.
Glimpses of bright creatures flash in the common sunlight; angels yet
hover doing God's messages among men: that rainbow was set in the
clouds by the hand of God! Wonder, miracle encompass the man; he lives
in an element of miracle; Heaven's splendour over his head, Hell's
darkness under his feet. A great Law of Duty, high as these two
Infinitudes, dwarfing all else, annihilating all else,--making royal
Richard as small as peasant Samson, smaller if need be!--The
'imaginative faculties?' 'Rude poetic ages?' The 'primeval poetic
element?' Oh, for God's sake, good reader, talk no more of all that!
It was not a Dilettantism this of Abbot Samson. It was a Reality, and
it is one. The garment only of it is dead; the essence of it lives
through all Time and all Eternity!--

* * * * *

And truly, as we said above, is not this comparative silence of Abbot
Samson as to his religion precisely the healthiest sign of him and of
it? 'The Unconscious is the alone Complete.' Abbot Samson all along a
busy working man, as all men are bound to be, his religion, his
worship was like his daily bread to him;--which he did not take the
trouble to talk much about; which he merely ate at stated intervals,
and lived and did his work upon! This is Abbot Samson's Catholicism of
the Twelfth Century;--something like the _Ism_ of all true men in all
true centuries, I fancy! Alas, compared with any of the _Isms_ current
in these poor days, what a thing! Compared with the respectablest,
morbid, struggling Methodism, never so earnest; with the
respectablest, ghastly, dead or galvanised Dilettantism, never so
spasmodic!

Methodism with its eye forever turned on its own navel; asking itself
with torturing anxiety of Hope and Fear, "Am I right? am I wrong?
Shall I be saved? shall I not be damned?"--what is this, at bottom,
but a new phasis of _Egoism_, stretched out into the Infinite; not
always the heavenlier for its infinitude! Brother, so soon as
possible, endeavour to rise above all that. "Thou _art_ wrong; thou
art like to be damned:" consider that as the fact, reconcile thyself
even to that, if thou be a man;--then first is the devouring Universe
subdued under thee, and from the black murk of midnight and noise of
greedy Acheron, dawn as of an everlasting morning, how far above all
Hope and all Fear, springs for thee, enlightening thy steep path,