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Against a fate thus settled for us we have no right to complain, lest we should seem to be setting ourselves into opposition to God's will. Here, although he writes in the spirit of a Christian, the authority cited is that of a heathen philosopher, and the form of his meditations is taken rather from Seneca than from father or schoolman.
"Quite so quite so," said Doctor Schoolman. "I am glad you see it. We cannot afford to give all our attention to the graver pursuits of life. We need relaxation. 'All work and no play' you know the old adage, eh? Ha, ha!" And the minister laughed an easy, social laugh, not at all boisterous, but of a mirth well in hand and suited to the occasion. Hubert looked at him almost with a frown.
For, in fact, the art which belongs to the imagination is often purest in an early age; but that which appertains to the reason and intellect is slow before it attains mature strength and manly judgment, Among these students was early trained and tutored the thoughtful mind of Euripides; and hence that art which in Sophocles was learned in more miscellaneous and active circles, and moulded by a more powerful imagination, in Euripides often sickens us with the tricks of a pleader, the quibbles of a schoolman, or the dullness of a moralizing declaimer.
But we of wider experience are prepared to forgive the Doctor that he did not recognize the spiritual as the more important interests which might lead a young man to a church social. While Hubert debated a reply which should illuminate Doctor Schoolman as to his real motive, others were pressing up to take the hand of the minister, and he passed on with his mother and Winifred.
She ventures to pluck from the forbidden tree of metaphysics; and, reckless of the fiats of the schools, she entered fearlessly into those inquiries which have appalled both Greek and schoolman. Think of a woman making the best translation and criticism of Kant which had appeared until her day! Her revelations might have found more value in the eyes of pedants had she been more obscure.
It was only the struggle that lay before him which revealed in the dry and subtle schoolman the founder of our later English prose, a master of popular invective, of irony, of persuasion, a dexterous politician, an audacious partizan, the organizer of a religious order, the unsparing assailant of abuses, the boldest and most indefatigable of controversialists, the first Reformer who dared, when deserted and alone, to question and deny the creed of the Christendom around him, to break through the tradition of the past, and with his last breath to assert the freedom of religious thought against the dogmas of the Papacy.
The dry, syllogistic Latin, the abstruse and involved argument which the great doctor had addressed to his academic hearers, were suddenly flung aside, and by a transition which marks the wonderful genius of the man the schoolman was transformed into the pamphleteer. If Chaucer is the father of our later English poetry, Wyclif is the father of our later English prose.
Her heart, perhaps, helped to instruct her understanding; for by a kind of intuition she could appreciate all that was beautiful and elevated. Her unvitiated and guileless taste had a logic of its own: no schoolman had ever a quicker penetration into truth, no critic ever more readily detected the meretricious and the false.
Hubert Gray, Winifred's only brother, had also been at church that morning. This was somewhat unusual, for Hubert was a sceptic, and he did not like to appear what he was not. But occasionally he went to hear what might be said and turn it over in his questioning brain. He was a young man of strong aversions, and one of his special dislikes happened to be the unfortunate Doctor Schoolman.
Schoolman will be there with her daughters, and so will many of the most prominent members of our church. I really cannot approve of such an extraordinary idea! extraordinary!" and she repeated the word which usually indicated the high water mark of her well-bred disapproval. Winifred looked silently at her plate, and Mrs. Gray spoke again, looking at her husband.
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