You might have noted only the physical
dying, the shattered frame and hacking cough; but in that soul
lay deeper death than that. He found a chapel in New York,--
the church of his father; he labored for it in poverty and
starvation, scorned by his fellow priests. Half in despair, he
wandered across the sea, a beggar with outstretched hands.
Englishmen clasped them,--Wilberforce and Stanley, Thirwell
and Ingles, and even Froude and Macaulay; Sir Benjamin
Brodie bade him rest awhile at Queen's College in Cam-
bridge, and there he lingered, struggling for health of body
and mind, until he took his degree in '53. Restless still, and
unsatisfied, he turned toward Africa, and for long years, amid
the spawn of the slave-smugglers, sought a new heaven and a
new earth.
So the man groped for light; all this was not Life,--it was
the world-wandering of a soul in search of itself, the striving
of one who vainly sought his place in the world, ever haunted
by the shadow of a death that is more than death,--the
passing of a soul that has missed its duty. Twenty years he
wandered,--twenty years and more; and yet the hard rasping
question kept gnawing within him, "What, in God's name,
am I on earth for?" In the narrow New York parish his soul
seemed cramped and smothered.
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