Donal Grant | Page 7

garden and

moor, seemed sweeter than ever wind-borne scents before: they were
seeking to comfort him! He sighed--but turned from the sigh to God,
and found fresh gladness and welcome. The wind hovered about him as
if it would fain have something to do in the matter; the river rippled and
shone as if it knew something worth knowing as yet unrevealed. The
delight of creation is verily in secrets, but in secrets as truths on the
way. All secrets are embryo revelations. On the far horizon heaven and
earth met as old friends, who, though never parted, were ever renewing
their friendship. The world, like the angels, was rejoicing--if not over a
sinner that had repented, yet over a man that had passed from a lower to
a higher condition of life--out of its earth into its air: he was going to
live above, and look down on the inferior world! Ere the shades of
evening fell that day around Donal Grant, he was in the new childhood
of a new world.
I do not mean such thoughts had never been present to him before; but
to think a thing is only to look at it in a glass; to know it as God would
have us know it, and as we must know it to live, is to see it as we see
love in a friend's eyes--to have it as the love the friend sees in ours. To
make things real to us, is the end and the battle-cause of life. We often
think we believe what we are only presenting to our imaginations. The
least thing can overthrow that kind of faith. The imagination is an
endless help towards faith, but it is no more faith than a dream of food
will make us strong for the next day's work. To know God as the
beginning and end, the root and cause, the giver, the enabler, the love
and joy and perfect good, the present one existence in all things and
degrees and conditions, is life; and faith, in its simplest, truest,
mightiest form is--to do his will.
Donal was making his way towards the eastern coast, in the certain
hope of finding work of one kind or another. He could have been well
content to pass his life as a shepherd like his father but for two things:
he knew what it would be well for others to know; and he had a hunger
after the society of books. A man must be able to do without whatever
is denied him, but when his heart is hungry for an honest thing, he may
use honest endeavour to obtain it. Donal desired to be useful and live
for his generation, also to be with books. To be where was a good

library would suit him better than buying books, for without a place in
which to keep them, they are among the impedimenta of life. And
Donal knew that in regard to books he was in danger of loving after the
fashion of this world: books he had a strong inclination to accumulate
and hoard; therefore the use of a library was better than the means of
buying them. Books as possessions are also of the things that pass and
perish--as surely as any other form of earthly having; they are of the
playthings God lets men have that they may learn to distinguish
between apparent and real possession: if having will not teach them,
loss may.
But who would have thought, meeting the youth as he walked the road
with shoeless feet, that he sought the harbour of a great library in some
old house, so as day after day to feast on the thoughts of men who had
gone before him! For his was no antiquarian soul; it was a soul hungry
after life, not after the mummy cloths enwrapping the dead.
CHAPTER II.
A SPIRITUAL FOOT-PAD.
He was now walking southward, but would soon, when the mountains
were well behind him, turn toward the east. He carried a small wallet,
filled chiefly with oatcake and hard skim-milk cheese: about two
o'clock he sat down on a stone, and proceeded to make a meal. A brook
from the hills ran near: for that he had chosen the spot, his fare being
dry. He seldom took any other drink than water: he had learned that
strong drink at best but discounted to him his own at a high rate.
He drew from his pocket a small thick volume he had brought as the
companion of his journey, and read as he ate. His seat was on the last
slope of a grassy hill, where many huge stones rose out of the grass. A
few yards beneath was a country road, and on the other side of the