A weaver who finds
hard words in his hymn-book knows nothing of abstractions; as the
little child knows nothing of parental love, but only knows one face
and one lap towards which it stretches its arms for refuge and
nurture.
And what could be more unlike that Lantern Yard world than the
world in Raveloe?- orchards looking lazy with neglected plenty; the
large church in the wide churchyard, which men gazed at lounging at
their own doors in service-time; the purple-faced farmers jogging
along the lanes or turning in at the Rainbow; homesteads, where men
supped heavily and slept in the light of the evening hearth, and where
women seemed to be laying up a stock of linen for the life to come.
There were no lips in Raveloe from which a word could fall that
would stir Silas Marner's benumbed faith to a sense of pain. In the
early ages of the world, we know, it was believed that each
territory was inhabited and ruled by its own divinities, so that a man
could cross the bordering heights and be out of the reach of his
native gods, whose presence was confined to the streams and the groves
and the hills among which he had lived from his birth. And poor
Silas was vaguely conscious of something not unlike the feeling of
primitive men, when they fled thus, in fear or in sullenness, from the
face of an unpropitious deity. It seemed to him that the Power in
which he had vainly trusted among the streets and in the
prayer-meetings, was very far away from this land in which he had
taken refuge, where men lived in careless abundance, knowing and
needing nothing of that trust, which, for him, had been turned to
bitterness.
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