"Surely it were
child's play to call in a physician and then hide the sore!"
"You would tell me, then, that I know all?" said Roger
Chillingworth, deliberately, and fixing an eye, bright with
intense and concentrated intelligence, on the minister's face.
"Be it so! But again! He to whom only the outward and physical
evil is laid open, knoweth, oftentimes, but half the evil which
he is called upon to cure. A bodily disease, which we look upon
as whole and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a
symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part. Your pardon once
again, good sir, if my speech give the shadow of offence. You,
sir, of all men whom I have known, are he whose body is the
closest conjoined, and imbued, and identified, so to speak, with
the spirit whereof it is the instrument."
"Then I need ask no further," said the clergyman, somewhat
hastily rising from his chair. "You deal not, I take it, in
medicine for the soul!"
"Thus, a sickness," continued Roger Chillingworth, going on, in
an unaltered tone, without heeding the interruption, but
standing up and confronting the emaciated and white-cheeked
minister, with his low, dark, and misshapen figure,--"a
sickness, a sore place, if we may so call it, in your spirit
hath immediately its appropriate manifestation in your bodily
frame.
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