By way of preparing themselves more completely they would have
meetings in one another's rooms for tea and prayer and other spiritual
exercises. Placing themselves under the guidance of a few well-known
tutors they would teach in Sunday Schools, and be instant, in season
and out of season, in imparting spiritual instruction to all whom they
could persuade to listen to them.
But the soil of the more prosperous undergraduates was not
suitable for the seed they tried to sow. The small pieties with
which they larded their discourse, if chance threw them into the
company of one whom they considered worldly, caused nothing but
aversion in the minds of those for whom they were intended. When
they distributed tracts, dropping them by night into good men's letter
boxes while they were asleep, their tracts got burnt, or met with even
worse contumely; they were themselves also treated with the ridicule
which they reflected proudly had been the lot of true followers of
Christ in all ages. Often at their prayer meetings was the passage
of St. Paul referred to in which he bids his Corinthian converts
note concerning themselves that they were for the most part neither
well-bred nor intellectual people.
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