Silas Marner | Page 8

the case held less
scandal to the community. But the members were bound to take other
measures for finding out the truth, and they resolved on praying and
drawing lots. This resolution can be a ground of surprise only to those

who are unacquainted with that obscure religious life which has gone
on in the alleys of our towns. Silas knelt with his brethren, relying on
his own innocence being certified by immediate divine interference, but
feeling that there was sorrow and mourning behind for him even
then--that his trust in man had been cruelly bruised. _The lots declared
that Silas Marner was guilty._ He was solemnly suspended from
church-membership, and called upon to render up the stolen money:
only on confession, as the sign of repentance, could he be received
once more within the folds of the church. Marner listened in silence. At
last, when everyone rose to depart, he went towards William Dane and
said, in a voice shaken by agitation--
"The last time I remember using my knife, was when I took it out to cut
a strap for you. I don't remember putting it in my pocket again. You
stole the money, and you have woven a plot to lay the sin at my door.
But you may prosper, for all that: there is no just God that governs the
earth righteously, but a God of lies, that bears witness against the
innocent."
There was a general shudder at this blasphemy.
William said meekly, "I leave our brethren to judge whether this is the
voice of Satan or not. I can do nothing but pray for you, Silas."
Poor Marner went out with that despair in his soul--that shaken trust in
God and man, which is little short of madness to a loving nature. In the
bitterness of his wounded spirit, he said to himself, "She will cast me
off too." And he reflected that, if she did not believe the testimony
against him, her whole faith must be upset as his was. To people
accustomed to reason about the forms in which their religious feeling
has incorporated itself, it is difficult to enter into that simple, untaught
state of mind in which the form and the feeling have never been
severed by an act of reflection. We are apt to think it inevitable that a
man in Marner's position should have begun to question the validity of
an appeal to the divine judgment by drawing lots; but to him this would
have been an effort of independent thought such as he had never known;
and he must have made the effort at a moment when all his energies
were turned into the anguish of disappointed faith. If there is an angel

who records the sorrows of men as well as their sins, he knows how
many and deep are the sorrows that spring from false ideas for which
no man is culpable.
Marner went home, and for a whole day sat alone, stunned by despair,
without any impulse to go to Sarah and attempt to win her belief in his
innocence. The second day he took refuge from benumbing unbelief,
by getting into his loom and working away as usual; and before many
hours were past, the minister and one of the deacons came to him with
the message from Sarah, that she held her engagement to him at an end.
Silas received the message mutely, and then turned away from the
messengers to work at his loom again. In little more than a month from
that time, Sarah was married to William Dane; and not long afterwards
it was known to the brethren in Lantern Yard that Silas Marner had
departed from the town.



CHAPTER II
Even people whose lives have been made various by learning,
sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life,
on their faith in the Invisible, nay, on the sense that their past joys and
sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly transported to a
new land, where the beings around them know nothing of their history,
and share none of their ideas-- where their mother earth shows another
lap, and human life has other forms than those on which their souls
have been nourished. Minds that have been unhinged from their old
faith and love, have perhaps sought this Lethean influence of exile, in
which the past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished,
and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories.
But even their experience may hardly enable them thoroughly to
imagine what was the effect on a simple weaver like Silas Marner,
when he left his own country and people and came to settle in Raveloe.

Nothing could be more unlike his