'OF THE IMITATION OF CHRIST'
She read on and on in the old book, devouring eagerly the dialogues with
the invisible Teacher, the pattern of sorrow, the source of all
strength; returning to it after she had been called away, and reading
till the sun went down behind the willows. With all the hurry of an
imagination that could never rest in the present, she sat in the
deepening twilight forming plans of self-humiliation and entire
devotedness; and, in the ardour of first discovery, renunciation seemed
to her the entrance into that satisfaction which she had so long been
craving in vain. She had not perceived--how could she until she had
lived longer?--the inmost truth of the old monk's outpourings, that
renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly. Maggie was
still panting for happiness, and was in ecstasy because she had found
the key to it. She knew nothing of doctrines and systems--of mysticism
or quietism; but this voice out of the far-off middle ages was the
direct communication of a human soul's belief and experience, and came
to Maggie as an unquestioned message.
I suppose that is the reason why the small old-fashioned book, for which
you need only pay sixpence at a bookstall, works miracles to this day,
turning bitter waters into sweetness; while expensive sermons and
treatises, newly issued, leave all things as they were before. It was
written down by a hand that waited for the heart's prompting; it is the
chronicle of a solitary, hidden anguish, struggle, trust and
triumph--not written on velvet cushions to teach endurance to those who
are treading with bleeding feet on the stones. And so it remains to all
time a lasting record of human needs and human consolations: the voice
of a brother who, ages ago, felt and suffered and renounced--in the
cloister, perhaps, with serge gown and tonsured head, with much chanting
and long fasts, and with a fashion of speech different from ours--but
under the same silent far-off heavens, and with the same passionate
desires, the same strivings, the same failures, the same weariness.--G.
ELIOT. _The Mill on the Floss._