Its results only, not its modes of operation or their stages, I may venture
attempting to convey. It was the wind blowing where it listed, doing
everything and explaining nothing. That wind from the timeless and
spaceless and formless region of God's feeling and God's thought, blew open
the eyes of this man's mind so that he saw, and became aware that he saw.
It blew away the long-gathered vapours of his self-satisfaction and
conceit; it blew wide the windows of his soul, that the sweet odour of his
father's and mother's thoughts concerning him might enter; and when it
entered, he knew it for what it was; it blew back to him his own judgments
of them and their doings, and he saw those judgments side by side with his
new insights into their real thoughts and feelings; it blew away the desert
sands of his own moral dulness, indifference, and selfishness, that had so
long hidden beneath them the watersprings of his own heart, existent by
and for love and its gladness; it cleared all his conscious being, made
him understand that he had never hitherto loved his mother or his father,
or any neighbour; that he had never loved God one genuine atom, never
loved the Lord Christ, his Master, or cared in the least that he had died
for him; had never at any moment loved Isy--least of all when to himself
he pleaded in his own excuse that he had loved her.
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