These doings, however, gave--how should they fail to give?--a strong handle to the grasp of those who cared for nothing in religion but its respectability--who went to church Sunday after Sunday, “for the sake of example” as they said--the most arrogant of Pharisaical reasons! Many a screeching, dancing fisher-lass in the Seaton was far nearer the kingdom of heaven than the most respectable of such respectable people! I would unspeakably rather dance with the wildest of fanatics rejoicing over a change in their own spirits, than sit in the seat of the dull of heart, to whom the old story is an outworn tale. CHAPTER XLIX. MOUNT PISGAH. The intercourse between Florimel and Malcolm grew gradually more familiar, until at length it was often hardly to be distinguished from such as takes place between equals, and Florimel was by degrees forgetting the present condition in the possible future of the young man. But Malcolm, on the other hand, as often as the thought of that possible future arose in her presence, flung it from him in horror, lest the wild dream of winning her should make him for a moment desire its realization. The claim that hung over him haunted his very life, turning the currents of his thought into channels of speculation unknown before. Imagine a young fisherman meditating--as he wandered with bent head through the wilder woods on the steep banks of the burn, or the little green levels which it overflowed in winter--of all possible subjects what analogy there might be betwixt the body and the soul in respect of derivation--whether the soul was _traduced_ as well as the body?--as his material form came from the forms of his father and mother, did his soul come from their souls? or did the Maker, as at the first he breathed his breath into the form of Adam, still, at some crisis unknown in its creation, breathe into each form the breath of individual being? If the latter theory were the true, then, be his earthly origin what it might, he had but to shuffle off this mortal coil to walk forth a clean thing, as a prince might cast off the rags of an enforced disguise, and set out for the land of his birth. If the former were the true, then the well-spring of his being was polluted, nor might he by any death fling aside his degradation, or show himself other than defiled in the eyes of the old dwellers in “those high countries,” where all things seem as they are, and are as they seem. One day when, these questions fighting in his heart, he had for the hundredth time arrived thus far, all at once it seemed as if a soundless voice in the depth of his soul replied,--