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.
Not improbably, it was to this latter class of men that Mr.
Dimmesdale, by many of his traits of character, naturally
belonged. To the high mountain peaks of faith and sanctity he
would have climbed, had not the tendency been thwarted by the
burden, whatever it might be, of crime or anguish, beneath which
it was his doom to totter. It kept him down on a level with the
lowest; him, the man of ethereal attributes, whose voice the
angels might else have listened to and answered! But this very
burden it was that gave him sympathies so intimate with the
sinful brotherhood of mankind; so that his heart vibrated in
unison with theirs, and received their pain into itself and sent
its own throb of pain through a thousand other hearts, in gushes
of sad, persuasive eloquence. Oftenest persuasive, but sometimes
terrible! The people knew not the power that moved them thus.
They deemed the young clergyman a miracle of holiness. They
fancied him the mouth-piece of Heaven's messages of wisdom, and
rebuke, and love. In their eyes, the very ground on which he
trod was sanctified. The virgins of his church grew pale around
him, victims of a passion so imbued with religious sentiment,
that they imagined it to be all religion, and brought it openly,
in their white bosoms, as their most acceptable sacrifice before
the altar. The aged members of his flock, beholding Mr.
Dimmesdale's frame so feeble, while they were themselves so
rugged in their infirmity, believed that he would go heavenward
before them, and enjoined it upon their children that their old
bones should be buried close to their young pastor's holy grave.
And all this time, perchance, when poor Mr. Dimmesdale was
thinking of his grave, he questioned with himself whether the
grass would ever grow on it, because an accursed thing must
there be buried!