 dispensations. The white-washed walls; the little pews where well-known
figures entered with a subdued rustling, and where first one well-known voice
and then another, pitched in a peculiar key of petition, uttered phrases at once
occult and familiar, like the amulet worn on the heart; the pulpit where the
minister delivered unquestioned doctrine, and swayed to and fro, and handled the
book in a long-accustomed manner; the very pauses between the couplets of the
hymn, as it was given out, and the recurrent swell of voices in song: these
things had been the channel of divine influences to Marner - they were the
fostering home of his religious emotions - they were Christianity and God's
kingdom upon earth. 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 he had vainly trusted in among the
streets and at 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. The little
light he possessed spread its beams so narrowly, that frustrated belief was a
curtain broad enough to create for him the blackness
