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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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