My New Curate | Page 9

gales. I took Father
Letheby through a secret path in the plantation. We rested a little while,
and talked of many things. Then we followed a tiny path, strewn with
withered pine needles, and which cut upward through the hill. We
passed from the shelter of the trees, and stood on the brow of a high
declivity. I never saw such surprise in a human face before, and such
delight. Like summer clouds sweeping over, and dappling a meadow,
sensations of wonder and ecstasy rolled visibly across his fine mobile
features. Then, he turned, and said, as if not quite sure of himself:--
"Why! 't is the sea!"
So it was. God's own sea, and his retreat, where men come but seldom,
and then at their peril. There the great ball-room of the winds and

spirits stretched before us, to-day as smooth as if waxed and polished,
and it was tessellated with bands of blue and green and purple, at the
far horizon line, where, down through a deep mine shaft in the clouds,
the hidden sun was making a silent glory. It was a dead sea, if you will.
No gleam of sail, near or afar, lit up its loneliness. No flash of sea bird,
poised for its prey, or beating slowly over the desolate waste, broke the
heavy dulness that lay upon the breast of the deep. The sky stooped
down and blackened the still waters; and anear, beneath the cliff on
which we were standing, a faint fringe of foam alone was proof that the
sea still lived, though its face was rigid and its voice was stilled, as of
the dead.
Father Letheby continued gazing in silence over the solemn scene for
some time. Then lifting his hat he said aloud:--
"Mirabiles elationes maris; Mirabilis in altis Dominus!"
"Not very many 'upliftings' to-day," I replied. "You see our great friend
at a disadvantage. But you know she has moods: and you will like her."
"Like her!" he replied. "It is not liking. It is worship. Some kind of
Pantheism which I cannot explain. Nowhere are the loneliness and
grandeur of God so manifested. Mind, I don't quite sympathize with
that comparison of St. Augustine's where he detects a resemblance
between yon spectra of purple and green and the plumage of a dove.
What has a dove to do with such magnificence and grandeur? It was an
anti-climax, a bathos, of which St. Augustine is seldom guilty. 'And the
Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.' There's the sublime!"
"It is desolate," said I. "Not even a seamew or a gull."
"Quite so," he replied. "It is limitless and unconditioned. There is its
grandeur. If that sea were ploughed by navies, or disfigured by the
hideous black hulks of men-of-war, it would lose its magnificence. It
would become a poor limited thing, with pygmies sporting on its
bosom. It is now unlimited, free, unconditioned, as space. It is the
infinite and the eternal in it that appeals to us. When we were children,
the infinite lay beyond the next mountain, because it was the unknown.

We grew up and we got knowledge; and knowledge destroyed our
dreams, and left us only the commonplace. It is the unknown and
unlimited that still appeals to us,--the something behind the dawn, and
beyond the sunset, and far away athwart the black line of that horizon,
that is forever calling, calling, and beckoning to us to go thither. Now,
there is something in that sombre glory that speaks to you and me. It
will disappear immediately; and we will feel sad. What is it? Voiceless
echoes of light from the light that streams from the Lamb?"
"I hope," I said demurely, for I began to fear this young enthusiast,
"that you don't preach in that tone to the people!"
"Oh dear, no," he said, with a little laugh, "but you must forgive my
nonsense. You gave me such a shock of surprise."
"But," he said, after a pause, "how happy your life must have been here!
I always felt in Manchester that I was living at the bottom of a black
chimney, in smoke and noise and fetor, material and spiritual. Here,
you have your holy people, and the silence and quiet of God. How
happy you must have been!"
"What would you think if we returned," I said. "It's almost our dinner
hour."
It was not so late, however, but that I was able to take a ten minutes'
stroll through the village, and bid "good day" to some of my
parishioners.
I suppose there was a note of interrogation hidden away somewhere
under my greeting, for I was told in different tones and degrees of
enthusiasm:--
"Yerra, your reverence, he's a nate man."
"Yerra, we never saw his