“What a wretch!” said one man to himself, who made a large part of his living by the sale of under-garments whose every stitch was an untacking of the body from the soul of a seamstress. “Bah!” said some. “A hypocrite, by his own confession!” said others. “Exceedingly improper!” said Mrs. Ramshorn. “Unheard-of and most unclerical behaviour! And actually to confess such paganism!” For Helen, she waked up a little, began to listen, and wondered what he had been saying that a wind seemed to have blown rustling among the heads of the congregation.
“Having made this confession,” Wingfold proceeded, “you will understand that whatever I now say, I say to and of myself as much as to and of any other to whom it may apply.”
He then proceeded to show that faith and obedience are one and the same spirit, passing as it were from room to room in the same heart: what in the heart we call faith, in the will we call obedience. He showed that the Lord refused absolutely the faith that found its vent at the lips in the worshipping words, and not at the limbs in obedient action--which some present pronounced bad theology, while others said to themselves surely that at least was common sense. For Helen, what she heard might be interesting to clergymen, or people like her aunt who had to do with such matters, but to her it was less than nothing and vanity, whose brother lay at home “sick in heart and sick in head.”
But hard thoughts of him could not stay the fountain of Wingfold’s utterance, which filled as it flowed. Eager after a right presentation of what truth he saw, he dwelt on the mockery it would be of any man to call him the wisest, the best, the kindest, yea and the dearest of men, yet never heed either the smallest request or the most urgent entreaty he made.
“There’s stuff in the fellow!” said the rector’s churchwarden, who had been brought up a Wesleyan.
“He’d make a fellow fancy he did believe all his grandmother told him!” thought Bascombe.
As he went on, the awakened curate grew almost eloquent. His face shone with earnestness. Even Helen found her gaze fixed upon him, though she had not a notion what he was talking about. He closed at length with these words:
“After the confession I have now made to you, a confession which I have also entreated everyone to whom it belongs to make to himself and his God, it follows that I dare not call myself a Christian. How should such a one as I know anything about that which, if it be true at all, is the loftiest, the one all-absorbing truth in the universe? How should such a fellow as I”--he went on, growing scornful at himself in the presence of the truth--“judge of its sacred probabilities? or, having led such a life of simony, be heard when he declares that such a pretended message from God to men seems too good to be true? The things therein contained I declare good, yet went not and did them. Therefore am I altogether out of court, and must not be heard in the matter.