We have seen how this
man had once believed that Providence had called him to an exceptional
and brilliant destiny. The total renouncement of what once glowed as a
mission requires a sturdy nature and plenty of active work. Clifton
possessed an exceeding susceptibility of nervous organization; he was
full of subtile intimations of what was passing in the minds of other
men, and at times seemed to have a strange power of controlling them.
The deep passion for metaphysical knowledge, which in his youth had been
kindled, was stilled, but never overcome. Wifeless, childless, he was
put under no bonds to struggle with the world. He knew the coldness of
the church in which he had been ordained to minister,--the hard and
dreary lives of those whom he had undertaken to illumine. But he made
the fatal mistake--inexcusable, it would seem, in a man of his liberal
nurture--of supposing that this world's evil was owing to the absence of
right opinion, and not of right feeling. It is to be feared that it was
not principle, but only a paroxysm of cowardice, which caused Clifton to
bury Vannelle's legacy in the Mather Safe. At all events, the minister
found himself unable to dismiss a certain thin and impalpable fantasy
which lingered behind that ponderous speculation of an all-embracing
philosophy.
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