Others again judged him a fanatic--a dangerous man. Such did not all venture to assert that he had erred from the way, but what man was more dangerous than he who went too far? Possibly these forgot that the narrow way can hardly be one to sit down in comfortably, or indeed to be entered at all save by him who tries the gate with the intent of going all the way--even should it lead up to the perfection of the Father in heaven. “But,” they would in effect have argued, “is not a fanatic dangerous? and is not an enthusiast always in peril of becoming a fanatic?--Be his enthusiasm for what it may--for Jesus Christ, for God himself, such a man is dangerous--most dangerous! There are so many things, comfortably settled like Presumption’s tubs upon their own bottoms, which such men would, if they could, at once upset and empty!” Others suspected a Romanizing drift in the whole affair. “Wait until he gathers influence,” they said, “and a handful of followers, and then you’ll see! They’ll be all back to Rome together in a month!” As the wind took by the tail St. Peter’s cock on the church spire and whirled it about, so did the wind of words in Glaston rudely seize and flack hither and thither the spiritual reputation of Thomas Wingfold, curate. And all the time, the young man was wrestling, his life in his hand, with his own unbelief; while upon his horizon ever and anon rose the glimmer of a great aurora, or the glimpse of a boundless main--if only he could have been sure they were no mirage of his own parched heart and hungry eye--that they were thoughts in the mind of the Eternal, and THEREFORE had appeared in his, even as the Word was said to have become flesh and dwelt with men! The next moment he would be gasping in that malarious exhalation from the marshes of his neglected heart--the counter-fear, namely, that the word under whose potent radiance the world seemed on the verge of budding forth and blossoming as the rose, was TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE. “Yes, much too good, if there be no living, self-willing Good,” said Polwarth one evening, in answer to the phrase just dropped from his lips. “But if there be such a God as alone could be God, can anything be too good to be true?--too good for such a God as contented Jesus Christ?”