Donal Grant | Page 9

me, I'll ha'e nane o' 't. I'll hae
naething hide me frae him wha made me! I wadna hide a thoucht frae
him. The waur it is, the mair need he see't."
"What book is that you are reading?" asked the minister sharply. "It's
not your bible, I'll be bound! You never got such notions from it!"
He was angry with the presumptuous youth--and no wonder; for the
gospel the minister preached was a gospel but to the slavish and
unfilial.

"It's Shelley," answered Donal, recovering himself.
The minister had never read a word of Shelley, but had a very decided
opinion of him. He gave a loud rude whistle.
"So! that's where you go for your theology! I was puzzled to
understand you, but now all is plain! Young man, you are on the brink
of perdition. That book will poison your very vitals!"
"Indeed, sir, it will never go deep enough for that! But it came near
touching them as I sat eating my bread and cheese."
"He's an infidel!" said the minister fiercely.
"A kind of one," returned Donal, "but not of the worst sort. It's the
people who call themselves believers that drive the like of poor Shelley
to the mouth of the pit."
"He hated the truth," said the minister.
"He was always seeking after it," said Donal, "though to be sure he
didn't get to the end of the search. Just listen to this, sir, and say
whether it be very far from Christian."
Donal opened his little volume, and sought his passage. The minister
but for curiosity and the dread of seeming absurd would have stopped
his ears and refused to listen. He was a man of not merely dry or stale,
but of deadly doctrines. He would have a man love Christ for
protecting him from God, not for leading him to God in whom alone is
bliss, out of whom all is darkness and misery. He had not a glimmer of
the truth that eternal life is to know God. He imagined justice and love
dwelling in eternal opposition in the bosom of eternal unity. He knew
next to nothing about God, and misrepresented him hideously. If God
were such as he showed him, it would be the worst possible misfortune
to have been created.
Donal had found the passage. It was in The Mask of Anarchy. He read
the following stanzas:--

Let a vast assembly be, And with great solemnity Declare with
measured words that ye Are, as God has made ye, free.
Be your strong and simple words Keen to wound as sharpened swords,
And wide as targes let them be, With their shade to cover ye.
And if then the tyrants dare, Let them ride among you there, Slash, and
stab, and maim, and hew-- What they like, that let them do.
With folded arms and steady eyes, And little fear, and less surprise,
Look upon them as they slay, Till their rage has died away.
And that slaughter to the Nation Shall steam up like inspiration,
Eloquent, oracular-- A volcano heard afar.
Ending, the reader turned to the listener. But the listener had
understood little of the meaning, and less of the spirit. He hated
opposition to the powers on the part of any below himself, yet scorned
the idea of submitting to persecution.
"What think you of that, sir?" asked Donal.
"Sheer nonsense!" answered the minister. "Where would Scotland be
now but for resistance?"
"There's more than one way of resisting, though," returned Donal.
"Enduring evil was the Lord's way. I don't know about Scotland, but I
fancy there would be more Christians, and of a better stamp, in the
world, if that had been the mode of resistance always adopted by those
that called themselves such. Anyhow it was his way."
"Shelley's, you mean!"
"I don't mean Shelley's, I mean Christ's. In spirit Shelley was far nearer
the truth than those who made him despise the very name of
Christianity without knowing what it really was. But God will give
every man fair play."
"Young man!" said the minister, with an assumption of great solemnity

and no less authority, "I am bound to warn you that you are in a state of
rebellion against God, and he will not be mocked. Good morning!"
Donal sat down on the roadside--he would let the minister have a good
start of him--took again his shabby little volume, held more talk with
the book-embodied spirit of Shelley, and saw more and more clearly
how he was misled in his every notion of Christianity, and how
different those who gave him his notions must have been from the
evangelists and apostles. He saw in the poet a boyish nature striving
after liberty, with scarce a notion of what liberty really was: he knew