"
Moreover, it is in men like Lankester that the ascetic temper common to
all ages and faiths is perpetually reproduced, the temper which makes of
suffering itself a divine and sacred thing--the symbol of a mystery. In
his own pity for this emaciated arrested youth he read the pledge of a
divine sympathy, the secret voice of a God suffering for and with man,
which, in its myriad forms, is the primeval faith of the race. Where a
thinker of another type would have seen mere aimless waste and
mutilation, this evangelical optimist bared the head and bent the knee.
The spot whereon he stood was holy ground, and above this piteous
sleeper heavenly dominations, princedoms, powers, hung in watch.
He sank, indeed, upon his knees beside the sleeper. In the intense and
mystical concentration, which the habit of his life had taught him, the
prayer to which he committed himself took a marvellous range without
ever losing its detail, its poignancy. The pain, moral and physical, of
man--pain of the savage, the slave, the child; the miseries of
innumerable persons he had known, whose stories had been confided to
him, whose fates he had shared; the anguish of irreparable failure, of
missed, untasted joy; agonies brutal or obscure, of nerve and
brain!--his mind and soul surrendered themselves to these impressions,
shook under the storm and scourge of them.
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