True Manliness: From the Writings of Thomas HughesHughes, Thomas
Religion
True Manliness: From the Writings of Thomas Hughes
Hughes, Thomas
Conduct of life
He passed through the vestibule, and then paused for a moment to glance
over the empty benches. His heart was still proud and high, and he
walked up to the seat which he had last occupied as a sixth-form boy,
and sat himself down there to collect his thoughts.
And, truth to tell, they needed collecting and setting in order not a
little. The memories of eight years were all dancing through his brain,
and carrying him about whither they would; while, beneath them all,
his heart was throbbing with the dull sense of a loss that could never
be made up to him. The rays of the evening sun came solemnly through
the painted windows above his head, and fell in gorgeous colors on the
opposite wall, and the perfect stillness soothed his spirit by little
and little. And he turned to the pulpit, and looked at it, and then,
leaning forward with his head on his hands, groaned aloud:
“If he could only have seen the Doctor again for one five minutes—have
told him all that was in his heart, what he owed to him, how he loved
and reverenced him, and would by God’s help follow his steps in life
and death—he could have borne it all without a murmur. But that he
should have gone away for ever without knowing it all, was too much
to bear.”—“But am I sure he does not know it all?”—the thought made
him start—“May he not even now be near me, in this very chapel? If he
be, am I sorrowing as he would have me sorrow—as I should wish to have
sorrowed when I shall meet him again?”
He raised himself up and looked around; and after a minute rose and
walked humbly down to the lowest bench, and sat down on the very seat
which he had occupied on his first Sunday at Rugby. And then the old
memories rushed back again, but softened and subdued, and soothing
him as he let himself be carried away by them. And he looked up at
the great painted window above the altar, and remembered how when a
little boy he used to try not to look through it at the elm-trees and
the rocks, before the painted glass came—and the subscription for the
painted glass, and the letter he wrote home for money to give to it.
And there, down below, was the very name of the boy who sat on his
right hand on that first day, scratched rudely in the oak paneling.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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