His life, before he came to Raveloe, had been filled with
the movement, the mental activity, and the close fellowship, which, in
that day as in this, marked the life of an artisan early
incorporated in a narrow religious sect, where the poorest layman
has the chance of distinguishing himself by gifts of speech, and
has, at the very least, the weight of a silent voter in the government
of his community. Marner was highly thought of in that little hidden
world, known to itself as the church assembling in Lantern Yard; he
was believed to be a young man of exemplary life and ardent faith; and
a peculiar interest had been centred in him ever since he had
fallen, at a prayer-meeting, into a mysterious rigidity and suspension
of consciousness, which, lasting for an hour or more, had been
mistaken for death. To have sought a medical explanation for this
phenomenon would have been held by Silas himself, as well as by his
minister and fellow-members, a wilful self-exclusion from the
spiritual significance that might lie therein. Silas was evidently a
brother selected for a peculiar discipline, and though the effort to
interpret this discipline was discouraged by the absence, on his part,
of any spiritual vision during his outward trance, yet it was believed
by himself and others that its effect was seen in an accession of
light and fervour. A less truthful man than he might have been tempted
into the subsequent creation of a vision in the form of resurgent
memory; a less sane man might have believed in such a creation; but
Silas was both sane and honest, though, as with many honest and
fervent men, culture had not defined any channels for his sense of
mystery, and so it spread itself over the proper pathway of inquiry
and knowledge.
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