"
"What then would you have of me?--what am I to DO?" said Wingfold,
who, having found his master, was docile as a child, but had not
laid firm enough hold upon what he had last said.
"I repeat," said Polwarth, "that the community whose servant you are
was not founded to promulgate or defend the doctrine of the
existence of a Deity, but to perpetuate the assertion of a man that
he was the son and only revealer of the Father of men, a fact, if it
be a fact, which precludes the question of the existence of a God,
because it includes the answer to it. Your business, therefore, even
as one who finds himself in your unfortunate position as a
clergyman, is to make yourself acquainted with that man: he will be
to you nobody save in revealing, through knowledge of his inmost
heart, the Father to you. Take then your New Testament as if you had
never seen it before, and read--to find out. If in him you fail to
meet God, then go to your consciousness of the race, your
metaphysics, your Plato, your Spinosa. Till then, this point
remains: there was a man who said he knew him, and that if you would
give heed to him, you too should know him. The record left of him is
indeed scanty, yet enough to disclose what manner of man he was--his
principles, his ways of looking at things, his thoughts of his
Father and his brethren and the relations between them, of man's
business in life, his destiny, and his hopes.
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