While thus suffering under bodily disease, and gnawed and

tortured by some black trouble of the soul, and given over to

the machinations of his deadliest enemy, the Reverend Mr.

Dimmesdale had achieved a brilliant popularity in his sacred

office. He won it indeed, in great part, by his sorrows. His

intellectual gifts, his moral perceptions, his power of

experiencing and communicating emotion, were kept in a state of

preternatural activity by the prick and anguish of his daily

life. His fame, though still on its upward slope, already

overshadowed the soberer reputations of his fellow-clergymen,

eminent as several of them were. There are scholars among them,

who had spent more years in acquiring abstruse lore, connected

with the divine profession, than Mr. Dimmesdale had lived; and

who might well, therefore, be more profoundly versed in such

solid and valuable attainments than their youthful brother.

There were men, too, of a sturdier texture of mind than his, and

endowed with a far greater share of shrewd, hard iron, or

granite understanding; which, duly mingled with a fair

proportion of doctrinal ingredient, constitutes a highly

respectable, efficacious, and unamiable variety of the clerical

species. There were others again, true saintly fathers, whose

faculties had been elaborated by weary toil among their books,

and by patient thought, and etherealised, moreover, by spiritual

communications with the better world, into which their purity of

life had almost introduced these holy personages, with their

garments of mortality still clinging to them. All that they

lacked was, the gift that descended upon the chosen disciples at

Pentecost, in tongues of flame; symbolising, it would seem, not

the power of speech in foreign and unknown languages, but that

of addressing the whole human brotherhood in the heart's native

language. These fathers, otherwise so apostolic, lacked Heaven's

last and rarest attestation of their office, the Tongue of

Flame. They would have vainly sought--had they ever dreamed of

seeking--to express the highest truths through the humblest

medium of familiar words and images. Their voices came down,

afar and indistinctly, from the upper heights where they

habitually dwelt.

Not improbably, it was to this latter class of men that Mr.

Dimmesdale, by many of his traits of character, naturally

belonged. To the high mountain peaks of faith and sanctity he

would have climbed, had not the tendency been thwarted by the

burden, whatever it might be, of crime or anguish, beneath which

it was his doom to totter. It kept him down on a level with the

lowest; him, the man of ethereal attributes, whose voice the

angels might else have listened to and answered! But this very

burden it was that gave him sympathies so intimate with the

sinful brotherhood of mankind; so that his heart vibrated in

unison with theirs, and received their pain into itself and sent

its own throb of pain through a thousand other hearts, in gushes

of sad, persuasive eloquence. Oftenest persuasive, but sometimes

terrible! The people knew not the power that moved them thus.

They deemed the young clergyman a miracle of holiness. They

fancied him the mouth-piece of Heaven's messages of wisdom, and

rebuke, and love. In their eyes, the very ground on which he

trod was sanctified. The virgins of his church grew pale around

him, victims of a passion so imbued with religious sentiment,

that they imagined it to be all religion, and brought it openly,

in their white bosoms, as their most acceptable sacrifice before

the altar. The aged members of his flock, beholding Mr.

Dimmesdale's frame so feeble, while they were themselves so

rugged in their infirmity, believed that he would go heavenward

before them, and enjoined it upon their children that their old

bones should be buried close to their young pastor's holy grave.

And all this time, perchance, when poor Mr. Dimmesdale was

thinking of his grave, he questioned with himself whether the

grass would ever grow on it, because an accursed thing must

there be buried!




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