It is, a large question whether one has a greater right to injure himself
than to harm another.
Dan could not admit, even to himself, that he had in any way neglected
the church, or fallen short of his duties as a hired shepherd. But after
all, was he not to some degree in error in his judgment of his people?
Had he not, perhaps, misunderstood the spirit that moved them? He had
come to Corinth from his school with the thought fixed in his mind that
the church was _all_ right. Had he not, by the unexpected and brutal
directness of his experience, been swung to the other extreme, conceiving
conditions as all wrong?
Groping in the dark of his ministry he had come to feel more and more
keenly his inexperience. After all, was he right in taking the hard,
seldom-traveled path, or was not the safe way of the church fathers the
true way? Was not his failure to put himself in tune with things as he
found them, only his own inability to grasp the deeper meanings of those
things? He had come to doubt those leaders whom he had been taught to
follow, but he had come to doubt more his own ability to lead, or even
to find the way for himself. It was this doubt that had led him to decide
as Hope Farwell knew he would.
_For Big Dan could not turn from the church and his chosen work without
the same certainty that had led him to it._
Least of all could he, after that which Hope had made so clear, go to her
with a shadow of doubt in his mind.
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