. He
would have suffered any increase of suffering, could he by such agony
have released them. Dearly as he loved them, he would have severed
himself from them, had it been possible. Terrible thoughts as to
their fate had come into his mind in the worst moments of his
moodiness,--thoughts which he had had sufficient strength and
manliness to put away from him with a strong hand, lest they should
drive him to crime indeed; and these had come from the great pity
which he had felt for them. But the commiseration which he had felt
for himself had been different from this, and had mostly visited him
at times when that other pity was for the moment in abeyance. What
though he had taken the cheque, and spent the money though it was not
his? He might be guilty before the law, but he was not guilty before
God. There had never been a thought of theft in his mind, or a desire
to steal in his heart. He knew that well enough. No jury could make
him guilty of theft before God. And what though this mixture of guilt
and innocence had come from madness,--from madness which these courts
must recognise if they chose to find him innocent of the crime? In
spite of his aberrations of intellect, if there were any such, his
ministrations in his parish were good. Had he not preached fervently
and well,--preaching the true gospel? Had he not been very diligent
among his people, striving with all his might to lessen the ignorance
of the ignorant, and to gild with godliness the learning of the
instructed? Had he not been patient, enduring, instant, and in all
things amenable to the laws and regulations laid down by the Church
for his guidance in his duties as a parish clergyman? Who could point
out in what he had been astray, or where he had gone amiss? But for
the work which he had done with so much zeal the Church which he
served had paid him so miserable a pittance that, though life and
soul had been kept together, the reason, or a fragment of the reason,
had at moments escaped from his keeping in the scramble. Hence it was
that this terrible calamity had fallen upon him! Who had been tried
as he had been tried, and had gone through such fire with less loss
of intellectual power than he had done? He was still a scholar,
though no brother scholar ever came near him, and would make
Greek iambics as he walked along the lanes. His memory was stored
with poetry, though no book ever came to his hands, except those
shorn and tattered volumes which lay