He took for granted that people were at bottom good and
noble, and the assumption went a long way towards making them so.
Robin, for instance, was probably saved by his father's unclouded
faith in him. Mrs. Morrison, a woman who had much trouble with
herself, having come into the world with the wings of the angel in her
well glued down and prevented from spreading by a multitude of little
defects, had been helped without her knowing it by his example out of
many a pit of peevishness and passion. Who shall measure the influence
of one kind and blameless life? His wife, in her gustier moments,
thought it sheer weakness, this persistent turning away from evil,
this refusal to investigate and dissect, to take sides, to wrestle.
The evil was there, and it was making an ostrich or a vegetable of
one's self to go on being calm in the face of it. With the blindness
of wives, who are prevented from seeing clearly by the very closeness
of the object--the same remark exactly applies to husbands--she did
not see that the vicar was the candle shining in a naughty world, that
he was the leaven that leaveneth the whole lump.
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