If he does not do
what he is thus elected to do, he is but an inefficient master of
affairs. And what shall we say of the ministers of Religion who are
'ordained' to voice the Message of Christ? To echo the Divine!--to
repeat the grand Ethics of Life,--the Law of Love and Charity and
Forbearance and Pity and Forgiveness! When one of these highly
destined servants of the Great King fails in his duty,--when he
cannot pardon the sinner,--when he looks churlishly upon a child, or
condemns the innocent amusements of the young and happy,--when he
makes the sweet Sabbath a day of penance instead of praise--of
tyranny instead of rest,--when he has no charity for backsliders, no
sympathy for the sorrowful, no toleration for the contradictors of
his own particular theory--do we not feel that his very existence is
a blasphemy, and his preaching a presumption!"
Here Sylvie raised her eyes from the book. She was near an ancient
cedar-tree whose dark spreading boughs, glistening with the early
morning dew, sparkled like a jewelled canopy in the sun,--at her
feet the turf was brown and bare, but a little beyond at the turn of
the pathway, a cluster of white narcissi waved their graceful stems
to the light wind.
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