The most charitable excuse that I can make for the vagaries which it
will now be my duty to chronicle is that the shock of change
consequent upon his becoming suddenly religious, being ordained, and
leaving Cambridge, had been too much for my hero, and had for the time
thrown him off an equilibrium which was yet little supported by
experience, and therefore as a matter of course unstable.
Everyone has a mass of bad work in him which he will have to work
off and get rid of before he can do better- and indeed, the more
lasting a man's ultimate good work is, the more sure he is to pass
through a time, and perhaps a very long one, in which there seems very
little hope for him at all. We must all sow our spiritual wild oats.
The fault I feel personally disposed to find with my godson is not
that he had wild oats to sow, but that they were such an exceedingly
tame and uninteresting crop. The sense of humour and tendency to think
for himself, of which till a few months previously he had been showing
fair promise, were nipped as though by a late frost, while his earlier
habit of taking on trust everything that was told him by those in
authority, and following everything out to the bitter end, no matter
how preposterous, returned with redoubled strength.
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