Page 129 - a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man

time to time by saying:
—Shut up, will you. Don’t make such a bally racket!
It was strange too that he found an arid pleasure in fol-
lowing up to the end the rigid lines of the doctrines of the
church and penetrating into obscure silences only to hear
and feel the more deeply his own condemnation. The sen-
tence of saint James which says that he who offends against
one commandment becomes guilty of all, had seemed to
him first a swollen phrase until he had begun to grope in
the darkness of his own state. From the evil seed of lust all
other deadly sins had sprung forth: pride in himself and
contempt of others, covetousness in using money for the
purchase of unlawful pleasures, envy of those whose vices
he could not reach to and calumnious murmuring against
the pious, gluttonous enjoyment of food, the dull glowering
anger amid which he brooded upon his longing, the swamp
of spiritual and bodily sloth in which his whole being had
sunk.
As he sat in his bench gazing calmly at the rector’s shrewd
harsh face, his mind wound itself in and out of the curious
questions proposed to it. If a man had stolen a pound in
his youth and had used that pound to amass a huge fortune
how much was he obliged to give back, the pound he had
stolen only or the pound together with the compound inter-
est accruing upon it or all his huge fortune? If a layman in
giving baptism pour the water before saying the words is the
child baptized? Is baptism with a mineral water valid? How
comes it that while the first beatitude promises the kingdom
of heaven to the poor of heart the second beatitude prom-

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