But don't expect to
know that too soon. And don't yield to the awful temptation of saying, 'So
many good, fine, reasonable people seem certain of this and that; I had
better assume it to be true.' It isn't better, it is only more comfortable.
A great many more people suffer from making up their mind too early and too
decisively than suffer from open-mindedness and the power to relate new
experience to old experience. No one can write you out a prescription for
life. You can't anticipate experience; and if you do, you will only find
that you have to begin all over again."
XXI
OF BEAUTY
Father Payne had been away on one of his rare journeys. He always
maintained that a journey was one of the most enlivening things in the
world, if it was not too often indulged in. "It intoxicates me," he said,
"to see new places, houses, people."
"Why don't you travel more, then?" said someone.
"For that very reason," said Father Payne; "because it intoxicates me--and
I am too old for that sort of self-indulgence!"
"It's a dreadful business," he went on, "that northern industrial country.
There's a grandeur about it--the bare valleys, the steep bleak fields, the
dead or dying trees, the huge factories. Those great furnaces, with tall
iron cylinders and galleries, and spidery contrivances, and black pipes,
and engines swinging vast burdens about, and moving wheels, are fearfully
interesting and magnificent.
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