And the mind of this stranger was
tugging at the doctor's mind, anxiously, insistently. There was a depth
of distress in it that was as no mere human distress, and that moved the
doctor to a mood beyond the mood of tears or of prayers. There came over
him an awful sense of pity for this stranger-soul. What had it done? How
was it circumstanced? In what ghastly train of events did it move? It was
surely powerful and helpless at the same time; a cripple with a mind on
fire with fight; Samson blind. He felt that it wanted something--of him,
or of his companions, some light in its severe desolation. Deeper and
deeper grew his horror and pity for it, deeper and deeper his sense of
its ill fate. The woe of it was unearthly, yet more than earthly woe.
Similes came to the doctor to compare with its dreadful circumstance:
a child motherless in a world all winter; a saint devoted to hell by
some great error of God; even one more blasphemous, and more _bizarre_
still--God worsted by humanity, and, at the last, helpless to reclaim
the souls to which He had Himself given being; lonely God in a lonely
heaven, seeing far-off hell bursting with the countless multitudes of
the writhing lost. This last simile stayed with him.
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