The wretched minister! He had made a bargain very like it!
Tempted by a dream of happiness, he had yielded himself with
deliberate choice, as he had never done before, to what he knew
was deadly sin. And the infectious poison of that sin had been
thus rapidly diffused throughout his moral system. It had
stupefied all blessed impulses, and awakened into vivid life the
whole brotherhood of bad ones. Scorn, bitterness, unprovoked
malignity, gratuitous desire of ill, ridicule of whatever was
good and holy, all awoke to tempt, even while they frightened
him. And his encounter with old Mistress Hibbins, if it were a
real incident, did but show its sympathy and fellowship with
wicked mortals, and the world of perverted spirits.
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He had by this time reached his dwelling on the edge of the
burial ground, and, hastening up the stairs, took refuge in his
study. The minister was glad to have reached this shelter,
without first betraying himself to the world by any of those
strange and wicked eccentricities to which he had been
continually impelled while passing through the streets. He
entered the accustomed room, and looked around him on its books,
its windows, its fireplace, and the tapestried comfort of the
walls, with the same perception of strangeness that had haunted
him throughout his walk from the forest dell into the town and
thitherward. Here he had studied and written; here gone through
fast and vigil, and come forth half alive; here striven to pray;
here borne a hundred thousand agonies! There was the Bible, in
its rich old Hebrew, with Moses and the Prophets speaking to
him, and God's voice through all.
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