All this was accomplished with a subtlety so perfect, that the
minister, though he had constantly a dim perception of some evil
influence watching over him, could never gain a knowledge of its
actual nature. True, he looked doubtfully, fearfully--even, at
times, with horror and the bitterness of hatred--at the deformed
figure of the old physician. His gestures, his gait, his
grizzled beard, his slightest and most indifferent acts, the
very fashion of his garments, were odious in the clergyman's
sight; a token implicitly to be relied on of a deeper antipathy
in the breast of the latter than he was willing to acknowledge
to himself. For, as it was impossible to assign a reason for
such distrust and abhorrence, so Mr. Dimmesdale, conscious that
the poison of one morbid spot was infecting his heart's entire
substance, attributed all his presentiments to no other cause.
He took himself to task for his bad sympathies in reference to
Roger Chillingworth, disregarded the lesson that he should have
drawn from them, and did his best to root them out. Unable to
accomplish this, he nevertheless, as a matter of principle,
continued his habits of social familiarity with the old man, and
thus gave him constant opportunities for perfecting the purpose
to which--poor forlorn creature that he was, and more wretched
than his victim--the avenger had devoted himself.
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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.
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