When the scrimmage and riot was at the highest point, Elsworth suddenly found himself separated from his companions, and involved in a rush of people who were making for the street. These persons were anxious to escape from the violence that had suddenly come upon them, and taking rapid stock of affairs, thought it best to be outside. So, in a very few moments, Elsworth was in Oxford Street, with no chance of getting back to the scenes which he had just so unwillingly left. He turned down the Seven Dials, and as he walked towards the Strand had time to feel heartily ashamed of himself and that night’s work. Had he not had nearly enough of this sort of thing? Was it for this he had read and worked, earned honours, learned many and great things, profited by the labours of the past, which surely could not have come to him through such channels as he was likely to prove? For several days past he had been immersed in the study of Browning’s “Paracelsus.” He had seen how that hero of medicine had torn himself away from home and friends, and all his loved surroundings, to go far into the distant world to gather, with enormous difficulty, hints and scraps of medical learning which were but the veriest crumbs compared to the loaded tables now set before the student of the healing art; how, with poor means, great hardships, and the scantiest help, in opposition to the teaching of its appointed professors, doing violence to the received notions of his time, he had struck out a path for himself, through the trackless forest to the unexplored country where lay, he felt and knew by the inner light that guided him, the key to the true treatment of the hurts and troubles of men’s bodies—all this against tears and entreaties such as often hold a man back from attempting new and great things. And how, after many wanderings and contentions, much violence, and opposition, he had seized, Prometheus like, Divine gifts for men, all by his own great soul, fortified by faith in God and love to man: and had dowered the human race with gifts greater than kings and captains ever won for it, and blessings for which the art of medicine yet sings his praises. While he, Elsworth, standing as it were high on the shoulders of the discoverers of the past, had been using his time at best to acquire a mere means of livelihood, his predecessors, who had helped him to all this knowledge, had been glad to win from nature, by years of work, one by one those secrets he was using so lightly. He was overcome by shame and the sense of his unfitness for such a work as he had dared to undertake.

Paracelsus,—the Paracelsus made known to this age, not by the false portraits limned by his contemporaries and enemies but as drawn by the master hand of Browning,—seemed to step out from the dark past and forbid his progress on a path he had traversed. A horrible sense of degradation took possession of him. He had once held a lofty ideal. When at Oxford, when his faith in God was a real working faith, he had often vowed himself to the service of humanity. That the saints of the Church, the fathers of the faith, the apostles, the prophets, the teachers of the past should have all worked to hand down to him—Elsworth—this noble, Divine light of Christian faith, which alike impelled his adhesion and claimed his co-operation; and for him to receive all, and then hesitate to give in his turn his best years and his whole heart to the world’s needs, was surely but to be repelled on its suggestion. But faith was gone, intellect had usurped the place of will, the will was unsanctified, and the man in brain and heart a chariot whose steeds rushed uncontrolled along the beaten track of habit, and were carrying him—whither? If there were no hereafter—nothing beyond this life—was it worth while to go on with this devilry, this riot, this attempt to drag the better part, the reason, into the mire, with the swine? Why not forsake it all, and now while there was time for repentance? The man was pulled up short: thrown back like a horse on his haunches. A great gulf in these few minutes was opened between him and the past; and not Paul when smitten down on Damascus road was blinder as to the future than Elsworth on this night in Seven Dials, amongst the suspicious men and bedraggled women, who passed him as he moved listlessly along, arrested by the scream of a conscience that would be heard at least once more, and whose voice had unspeakable terrors for him. For he was made for better things—that he always had felt; he was not vile, debauched, debased, as some of his companions were. He had fought against light; he had struggled not to believe, not that he might give the reins to his passions, but that he might deify intellect. He thought it was cowardly to leave those poor lads in the fight, but it was useless to go back; and even if he could have saved them from arrest, he dare not engage in any more of that work—away with that at least; it was too horrible to think of any more. So on he went, scolding himself, calling himself by every opprobrious epithet, and berating himself back into manhood again. He had reached Chelsea; it was almost too late to get a lodging, but he would try; for the conviction began to dawn upon him that he should not go back one single step into the past, but there and then break with it all, and be a man, and live a man’s life. He prayed—once more repeated, “Our Father, which art in heaven;” it seemed very unphilosophical, very unscientific. He had often sent out aspirations to “the Power not ourselves which makes for righteousness,” to “the one Consensus of the whole,” to “the Eternal Verity,” but it was long since Elsworth had said “Our Father;” he felt that in doing so he had reopened that long closed “window towards the Infinite,” and had once more let in the light of the Divine and supernatural wisdom without which he had been groping along. He found a clean, but mean lodging in a little eating-house down by the river, and went to bed. Surely a voice out of heaven had called him that night. Not clearer was Paul’s arrest—not plainer Loyola’s, “Hitherto, but no farther”—than this to him to-night. So, ever, when there is a work for a man that he must do, that he is sealed and set apart for, when the full time comes he shall hear the call; if not in the still small voice and the whispering wind, then in the fire and thunders of Sinai.

Elsworth felt that night, as he lay restlessly tossing on the rough bed, that he had gone about his whole work at the hospital the wrong way. Thus had not Paracelsus done! How he cried at the outset of his career:

His black arts were neither secret nor sublime, but the openly belauded methods of investigation, involving the tortures of sentient beings for the sake of learning the idle arts these pedants taught at the schools. He, too, had invoked the aid of the sullen forces of Nature, from which he had thrust Nature’s God, and they had done his bidding in a way—and the way was hopeless and dark. He had long felt this reckoning-day with himself must come; he was too honest to go on much longer leaving the question of his responsibility unsettled; he was too healthy-brained to give way to despair, till he had found a modus vivendi with his better nature impossible. Early bereft of a mother’s care, his father, wholly absorbed in his literary pursuits, and keeping up merely the slightest correspondence with his son, whom he had apparently almost forgotten, Elsworth had very few family ties, and was perfectly master of his own position. He had no fear of his father’s withdrawing his allowance of £300 a year. As it happened, he had the day before been paid a sum of rather over £100 by his agents; he was not in debt, save in a small sum to his landlady, and the hospital beadle, with some trifling amounts in the neighbourhood of St. Bernard’s which his man of business would pay. Why not cut the old familiar scenes? The wilderness period has to be gone through by every man with a work to do; the retreat is salutary for the stricken soul. Why not enter into it at once? He was a man of resolute will, possessed by a strong determination when the right and proper thing to be done confronted him. He had true stuff in his composition; originality, firm purpose. Boldness to do and dare came to him from his father, who had won his promotion in Indian warfare through a grandly conceived and brilliantly original movement, which had insured the enemy’s defeat at the moment his own seemed imminent. It should be done; he would go away early in the morning light. “Let him that is on the house-top not come down to take anything out of the house.” And he went not down, nor took anything of his old life, but made straight for Paris that same day, for, like his father when he made his brilliant move, he had formed a plan and carried it out.

He gave directions to his lawyer to discharge all claims upon him, to say that he had gone abroad, and would not return for some time, but begged him not to disclose his whereabouts to any one without first communicating with him at the address he should forward, when he had chosen his headquarters.

Now he began to enter into himself. He must seek some hallowed place of prayer to consecrate his remaining years to God, and renew his baptismal vows, to drink a deep draught of the Divine Spirit as he entered on his new work.

He turned into Notre Dame, to see the place again, and investigate some details of the architecture. He sat down on a bench before the high altar; they were singing the vesper service. A sense of heavenly calm pervaded his soul, his turbulent thoughts were quelled; his disquiet, his vague apprehensions, his disgust with life, all seemed to melt away as the influence of prayer lulled his troubled soul on the breast of God. The organ ceased to peal, the monotone of the priests and the clear young voices of the choir had died away. He peacefully slept in the house of prayer, and angels seemed to whisper sweet words to him, and glorified saints from out the storied panes to counsel him. He was aroused by a Suisse, who, noting him as a tourist, and having an eye to a douceur, invited him to come and see the relics, and the treasures in the sacristy and chapels. He declined, and moved away—moved to a less conspicuous place, and again sat down to muse on the great things the sacred fane had witnessed in the past. How many and great events of human history had been enacted under its shadow and beneath its roof! Here, and on that very altar, had been enthroned a vile woman to be worshipped as Goddess of Reason, a visible presentment of what a nation or a single human soul meant when it had cast out God. Could anything, had anything kept the intellect of man from madness when bereft of the idea of essential goodness outside the mean world of man? All history, he must confess, answered “No.” And “No” was thunder-pealed from that desecrated altar, where the idea of God had been openly crucified amid the highest civilization of modern Europe, by the lusts and madness of the age of science. Dethroned and cast out for what? When all was gone, and the last traces of the faith stamped out, as far as might be, what was to come in its place? What for that market woman kneeling by his side rapt by devotion at least to an idea more exalted than her business or her pleasures could have suggested? Surely something ennobling her small surroundings, if only by its poetry and sentiment. And that workman there under the sculpture of the Cross-bearer? Not altogether waste of time for him to meditate a few moments on sacrifice of self for good of other men. It might help him perhaps to bear a hand at a neighbour’s overpressing burden. And those little children before the picture of the Infant Saviour? At least for them such idealism must be a factor in their mental development which could ill be spared. Philosophy was good for men, the wisdom of the sages had often balanced a wavering mind, and strengthened the fibre of men to dare and do great things; but it was not possible for the masses of mankind to be so sustained any more than it was possible they could be all fed and housed like princes. Was not this contemned Christian religion which he had been helping to push aside, philosophy made easy for simple folk, unlearned and without culture? Would it not still further belittle their poor lives to take their faith from them? For them Plato, Dante, and Shakespeare were not horn-books. Was it so very wise to take away their gospels, and their psalms, and leave them nothing to elevate the daily round of life’s task above the muddy floor of their miserable dwellings?

And so he mused on all these things, and the worshippers came and went, knelt in prayer, and laid their poor burdens at the feet of God; took in from the infinite a draught of the water of life, wept their tears, sighed up to the throne of the Heavenly their anxieties; asked direction from the Wisest they knew of, wandered a little out of themselves a while; felt that bread and meat were not alone the sustenance of man, and went on their way. And as he thought and pondered in his heart, the sinking sun gloaming through the great west window scattered a thousand jewels over the floor around him, and he rose and knew that religion brightens life, and colours with rose and gold the dark shadow brooding over the soul of man. Not altogether was it a fact that man had been wholly wrong in his faith, and had done nothing but “build him fanes of fruitless prayer,” or had reaped from them nothing but the opportunities to “roll the psalm to wintry skies.”

As he rose from his long meditation, and went into the gay, busy world without, he felt how inconsistent with his previous mental attitude were the thoughts he had entertained. How often had he not dedicated himself to the overthrow of superstition, and pledged his energies to do what he could to erase its traces from the minds of his friends! It was but a few weeks since he had angrily tossed a crucifix from a patient’s couch, who he had directed should not be bothered by religion or priests. Had he not scoffed openly at a poor old woman’s simple assurance that God was helping her in her sickness, and that to her ears came often “songs in the night season?” At St. Bernard’s how many times had he not endeavoured to laugh or reason young freshmen out of the religion of their mothers, unworthy of belief now that facts, and facts only, were to be the study of their lives! There was a little band of true Christian men at the hospital, who met for prayer and Bible reading from time to time. He could not deny that they did their work in the wards conscientiously—did it more faithfully than the ardent young Comtists and Secularists, who made so much noise about Humanity and its claims. They were so cheerful, too, and helpful in their attitude towards the afflicted and poor who sought their aid, that they were a constant reproach to him for not living up to the faith with which, in his secret thoughts, he had never really broken.