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The most magnificent palaces of fancy had been suddenly flung open to him by a nobly-gifted mind, matured already by thought and critical examinations undertaken for their own sake, not for publication, but for the solitary thinker's own satisfaction.
We explored the inner part of this strange rock-bed; the little River Lison, springing from its dark cavernous home, leaping forth with wild exultation into the light, pursuing its way under all kinds of difficulties, growing broader and broader as it goes, till a wide, sunlit river, it flows onward and onward, finally reaching the sea, reminded me, as I gazed, of a lovely thought emerging from the thinker's brain, which, after obstacles and hindrances innumerable, at last, refreshing all as it goes, reaches the open light of universal truth.
His few choice books looked down upon him from their rude shelves. "Ah, old friends," he said, looking up at them, "if you could only comfort those men, as you have comforted me, what a help you would be now." Then it was that the books spoke to him. They suggested an idea, which, flashing along the brain, flushed the thinker's cheek.
'See that ye refuse not Him that speaketh, for if they escaped not when they refused her that spake through the Jewish thinker's lips of old, 'much more shall not we escape, if we turn away from Him that beseecheth us from heaven. Jesus is the power of God and the wisdom of God, and it is in Him crucified that our weakness and our folly are made strong and wise, and Wisdom's ancient promise is fulfilled: 'Whoso findeth me findeth life, and shall obtain favour of the Lord.
Its blessed form bade us honor virtue's cause, The honest sense 'gainst vice put forth its powers, Before a Solon had devised the laws That slowly bring to light their languid flowers. Before Eternity's vast scheme Was to the thinker's mind revealed, Was't not foreshadowed in his dream, Whose eyes explored yon starry field?
Behind the bayonet is the law-giver's statute, behind the statute the thinker's argument, behind the argument is the tender conscientiousness of woman, woman, the wife, the mother, who looks upon the face of God himself reflected in the unsullied soul of infancy. "Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength, because of thine enemies."
But "certain it is" to continue the same great thinker's comment on the Friars "that if these schoolmen to their great thirst of truth and unwearied travel of wit had joined variety of reading and contemplation, they had proved excellent lights to the great advancement of all learning and knowledge."
If we are now and then conscious in the book of a certain want of spacing, of changing perspectives and long vistas; if we have perhaps a sense of being too narrowly enclosed; if we miss the relish of humour or the occasional relief of irony; we ought to remember that we are busy not with a work of imagination or art, but with the practical record of the formation of an eminent thinker's mental habits and the succession of his mental attitudes.
Thus Professors Stewart and Tait's inferences as to the destructibility of matter, based on the supposition that the ether is not quite frictionless; Professor Dolbear's suggestions as to the creation of matter through the development of new ether ripples, and the same thinker's speculations as to an upper limit of temperature, based on the mechanical conception of a limit to the possible vibrations of a vortex ring, not to mention other more or less fascinating speculations based on the vortex hypothesis, must be regarded, whatever their intrinsic interest, as insecurely grounded, until such time as new experimental methods shall give them another footing.
The third smiled: there was a sort of mischief in the smile. Will our aged bachelor and that old maiden-lady yonder, who now wander along so young, smile so young, and speak so youthfully to each other, not be a married couple before the cuckoo sings again next year? See that is what I should like to know! and the smile played around the thinker's mouth, but she did not speak her thoughts.
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