d
hedgerows. There was nothing here, when he rose in the deep morning
quiet and looked out on the dewy brambles and rank tufted grass, that
seemed to have any relation with that life centring in Lantern Yard,
which had once been to him the altar-place of high dispensations. The
whitewashed walls; the little pews where well-known figures entered
with a subdued rustling, and where first one well-known voice and then
another, pitched in a peculiar key of petition, uttered phrases at once
occult and familiar, like the amulet worn on the heart; the pulpit
where the minister delivered unquestioned doctrine, and swayed to and
fro, and handled the book in a long accustomed manner; the very pauses
between the couplets of the hymn, as it was given out, and the
recurrent swell of voices in song: these things had been the channel of
divine influences to Marner--they were the fostering home of his
religious emotions--they were Christianity and God's kingdom upon
earth. A weaver who finds hard words in his hymn-book knows nothing of
abstractions; as the little child knows nothing of parental love, but
only knows one face and one lap towards which it stretches its arms for
refuge and nurture.

And what could be more unlike that Lantern Yard world than the world in
Raveloe?--orchards looking lazy with neglected plenty; the large church
in the wide churchyard, which men gazed at lounging at their own doors
in service-time; the purple-faced farmers jogging along the lanes or
turning in at the Rainbow; homesteads, where men supped heavily and
slept in the light of the evening hearth, and where women seemed to be
laying up a stock of linen for the life to come. There were no lips in
Raveloe from which a word could fall that would stir Silas Marner's
benumbed faith to a sense of pain. In the early ages of the world, we
know, it was believed that each territory was inhabited and ruled by
its own divinities, so that a man could cross the bordering heights and
be out of the reach of his native gods, whose presence was confined to
the streams and the groves and the hills among which he had lived from
his birth. And poor Silas was vaguely conscious of something not
unlike the feeling of primitive men, when they fled thus, in fear or in
sullenness, from the face of an unpropitious deity. It seemed to him
that the Power he had vainly trusted in among the streets and at the
prayer-meetings, was very far away from this land in which he had tak