To look at the thing from the other side,
the genuineness of the man's reception of it will be manifest in
the meeting of his present conditions with the new thing--in the
show of results natural to one of his degree of development. To
hear a rude man utter his experience in the forms of cultivation,
would be at once to suspect the mere glitter of a reflex, and to
doubt an illumination from within. I repeat, the genuine influence
shows itself such in showing that it has laid hold of the very man,
at the very stage of growth he had reached. The dancing of David
before the ark, the glow of St. Stephen's face, and the wild gestures
and rude songs of miners and fishers and negroes, may all be signs
of the presence of the same spirit in temples various. Children
will rush and shout and hollo for the same joy which sends others
of the family to weep apart.
Of course the one infallible test as to whether any such movement
is of man without God, or of God within the man, is the following
life; only a large space for fluctuation must be allowed where a
whole world of passions and habits has to be subjected to the will
of God through the vice regency of a human will hardly or only just
awakened, and as yet unconscious of itself.
The nearest Joseph Mair could come to the origin of the present
movement was the influence of a certain Stornoway fisherman, whom
they had brought back with them on their return from the coasts
of Lewis--a man of Celtic fervour and faith, who had agreed to
accompany them probably in the hope of serving a set of the bravest
and hardest working men in the world, who yet spent a large part
of their ease in drinking up the earnings of fierce and perilous
labour.
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