While thus suffering under bodily disease, and gnawedand tortured by some black trouble of the soul, and given over to the machinationsof 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 preternaturalactivity by the prickand anguish of his daily life. His fame, though still on its upward slope, already overshadowed the sobererreputations of his fellow-clergymen, eminent as several of them were. There were scholars among them, who had spent more years in acquiring abstruselore, 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 sturdiertexture 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 clericalspecies. There were others, again, true saintly fathers, whose faculties had been elaborated by wearytoil 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 attestationof 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, afarand indistinctly, from the upper heights where they habituallydwelt.
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