So saying, he turned and left them.  The ladies went also, and the crowd dispersed.  But already rumors, as evil as discordant, were abroad in Glaston to the prejudice of Faber, and at the door of his godlessness was from all sides laid the charge of cruelty.

How difficult it is to make prevalent the right notion of any thing!  But only a little reflection is required to explain the fact.  The cause is, that so few people give themselves the smallest trouble to understand what is told them.  The first thing suggested by the words spoken is taken instead of the fact itself, and to that as a ground-plan all that follows is fitted.  People listen so badly, even when not sleepily, that the wonder is any thing of consequence should ever be even approximately understood.  How appalling it would be to one anxious to convey a meaning, to see the shapes his words assumed in the mind of his listening friend!  For, in place of falling upon the table of his perception, kept steady by will and judgment, he would see them tumble upon the sounding-board of his imagination, ever vibrating, and there be danced like sand into all manner of shapes, according to the tune played by the capricious instrument.  Thus, in Glaston, the strangest stories of barbarity and cruelty were now attributed to a man entirely incapable of them.  He was not one of the foul seekers after knowledge, and if he had had a presentiment of the natural tendency of his opinions, he would have trembled at the vision, and set himself to discover whether there might not be truth in another way of things.

As he went about in the afternoon amongst his sick and needy, the curate heard several of these ill reports.  Some communicated them to ease their own horror, others in the notion of pleasing the believer by revolting news of the unbeliever.  In one house he was told that the poor young man whom Dr. Faber had enticed to be his assistant, had behaved in the most gentlemanly fashion, had thrown up his situation, consenting to the loss of his salary, rather than connive at the horrors of cruelty in which the doctor claimed his help.  Great moan was made over the pity that such a nice man should be given to such abominations; but where was the wonder, some said, seeing he was the enemy of God, that he should be the enemy of the beasts God had made?  Much truth, and many wise reflections were uttered, only they were not “as level as the cannon to his blank,” for they were pointed at the wrong man.

There was one thing in which Wingfold differed from most of his parishioners:  he could hear with his judgment, and make his imagination lie still.  At the same time, in order to arrive the more certainly at the truth, in any matter presented to him, he would, in general, listen to the end of what any body had to say.  So doing he let eagerness exhaust itself, and did not by opposition in the first heat of narration, excite partisan interest, or wake malevolent caution.