That there was
danger lurking in such a creed he was very well aware. The
grosser temptations of the world-- money and the vulgar
attributes
of power-- had, indeed, no charms for him; but there were subtler
and more insinuating allurements which it was not so easy to
resist. More than one observer declared that ambition was, in
reality, the essential motive in his life: ambition, neither for
wealth nor titles, but for fame and influence, for the swaying of
multitudes, and for that kind of enlarged and intensified
existence 'where breath breathes most even in the mouths of men'.
Was it so? In the depths of Gordon's soul there were intertwining
contradictions-- intricate recesses where egoism and renunciation
melted into one another, where the flesh lost itself in the
spirit, and the spirit in the flesh. What was the Will of God?
The question, which first became insistent during his retirement
at Gravesend, never afterwards left him; it might almost be said
that he spent the remainder of his life in searching for the
answer to it. In all his Odysseys, in all his strange and
agitated adventures, a day never passed on which he neglected the
voice of eternal wisdom as it spoke through the words of Paul or
Solomon, of Jonah or Habakkuk. He opened his Bible, he read, and
then he noted down his reflections upon scraps of paper, which,
periodically pinned together, he dispatched to one or other of
his religious friends, and particularly his sister Augusta.
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