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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