A Knight of the Nineteenth CenturyRoe, Edward Payson
General
A Knight of the Nineteenth Century
Roe, Edward Payson
Fiction
Last week I gave you a chance; this week I am induced to give you a good
word. While I warn you that I will tolerate no weak dallying with your
old temptations, I also tell you that I would like to see you make a man
of yourself, or, more correctly, perhaps, as Dr. Barstow would express
it, be made a man of. If one wants to do right, I believe there is help
for him (go and ask the Rev. Dr. Barstow about this); and if you will go
right straight ahead till I see you can be depended upon, I will
continue to speak good words to you and for you, and perhaps do more.
GEORGE IVISON.
This note greatly encouraged Haldane, and made his precarious foothold
among the world's industries seem more firm and certain. The danger of
being swept back into the deep water where those struggle who have no
foothold, no work, no place in society would not come from the caprice
or forgetfulness of his employer, but from his own peculiar temptations
and weaknesses. If he could patiently do his duty in his present humble
position, he justly believed that it would be the stepping-stone to
something better. But, having learned to know himself, he was afraid of
himself; and he had seen with an infinite dread what cold, dark depths
yawn about one whom society shakes off as a vile and venomous thing, and
who must eventually take evil and its consequences as his only portion.
The hot, reeking apartment wherein he toiled was the first solid ground
that he had felt beneath his feet for many days. If he could hold that
footing, the water might shoal so that he could reach the land. It is
true he could always look to his mother for food and clothing if he
would comply with her conditions. But, greatly perverted as his nature
had been, food and clothing, the maintenance of a merely animal life,
could no longer satisfy him. He had thought too deeply, and had seen too
much truth, to feed contentedly among the swine.
But the temptations which eventually lead to the swine--could he
persistently resist these? Could he maintain a hard, monotonous routine
of toil, with no excitements, no pleasures, with nothing that even
approached happiness? He dared not give way; he doubted his strength to
go forward alone with such a prospect. If conversion be a blessed
miracle by which a debased nature is suddenly lifted up, and a harsh,
lead-colored, prosaic world transfigured into the vestibule of heaven,
he longed to witness it in his own experience.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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