And as he worked the conviction grew
that the only protection against the terrors of alien presence is
the consciousness of the home presence of the eternal: if a man felt
that presence, how could he fear any other? But for those who are
not one with the source of being, every manifestation of that being
in a life other than their own, must be more or less a terror to
them; it is alien, antipathous, other,--it may be unappeasable,
implacable. The time must even come when to such their own being
will be a horror of repugnant consciousness; for God not self is
ours--his being, not our own, is our home; he is our kind.
The work was slow--the impression on the hard iron of the worn file
so weak that he was often on the point of giving up the attempt.
Fatigue at length began to invade him, and therewith the sense of
his situation grew more keen: great weariness overcomes terror; the
beginnings of weariness enhance it. Every now and then he would
stop, thinking he heard the cry of a child, only to recognize it as
the noise of his file. He resolved at last to stop for the night,
and after tea go to the town to buy a new and fitter file.
The next day was Sunday, and in the afternoon Donal and Davie were
walking in the old avenue together. They had been to church, and had
heard a dull sermon on the most stirring fact next to the
resurrection of the Lord himself--his raising of Lazarus.
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