and feared of all men--are, after all, the fashioners and teachers of
humanity, to whom it is given to keep hearts pure, godly and
compassionate, to purge away the dross of pride, hardness, and
arrogance, to break the iron bands of ambition, self-love, and vanity,
to purify by endurance and by charity, welding together--as with the
cunning strokes of the master-craftsman's hammer--the innumerable
individual atoms into a corporate whole, of fair form, of supreme
excellence of proportion, the image and example of a perfect
brotherhood, of a republic more firmly based and more beneficent than
even that pictured by the divine Plato himself--since that was
consolidated by exclusion, this by inclusion and pacification of those
things which men most dread.--Perceived that, without the guiding and
chastening of these three lovely terrors, humanity would, indeed, wax
wanton, and this world become the merriest court of hell, lust and
corruption have it all their own foul way, the flesh triumph, and all
bestial things come forth to flaunt themselves gaudily, greedily,
without remonstrance and without shame in the light of day.--Perceived
in these three, a Trinity of Holy Spirits, bearing forever the message
of the divine mercy and forgiveness.--Perceived how, of necessity, only
the Man of Sorrows can truly be the Son of God.

And, perceiving all this, Richard's attitude towards his own unhappy
deformity began to suffer modification. The sordid, yet extravagant,
chap-book legend no longer outraged either his moral or his scientific
sense. He recalled his emotions in the theatre at Naples when Morabita
sang, remembering how wholly welcome had then been to him that imagined
approaching-act of retributive justice. He recalled, too, the going
forth of love towards his supposed executioners which he had
experienced, his reverence for, and yearning towards, the dull-coloured
working-bees of the _parterre_. How he had longed to be at one with
them, partaker of their corporate action and corporate strength! How he
had rejoiced in the conviction that the final issues are subject to
their ruling, that the claims of want are stronger than those of
wealth, that labour is more honourable than sloth, intelligence than
privilege, liberty more abiding than tyranny--the idea of equality, of
fellowship, more excellent than the aristocratic idea, that of born
master and of born serf! And both that welcome of the accomplishment of
a signal act of jus