Straight,
honorable, unselfish fellows--Lankester knew scores of them, rich and
poor, clever and slow, who could and did pass the tests of life without
flinching; who could produce in any society--as politicians or
green-grocers--an impression of uprightness and power, an effect of
character, that Marsham, for all his ability, had never produced, or, in
the long run, and as he came to be known, had never sustained.
Well, what then? In the man looking down on Marsham not a tinge of
pharisaic condemnation mingled with the strange clearness of his
judgment. What are we all--the best of us? Lankester had not parted,
like the majority of his contemporaries, with the "sense of sin." A
vivid, spiritual imagination, trained for years on prayer and reverie,
showed him the world and human nature--his own first and
foremost--everywhere flecked and stained with evil. For the man of
religion the difference between saint and sinner has never been as sharp
as for the man of the world; it is for the difference between holiness
and sin that he reserves his passion. And the stricken or repentant
sinner is at all times nearer to his heart than the men "who need no
repentance.
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