Chapter: Ernest had been ordained to a curacy in one of the central parts of
London.  He hardly knew anything of London yet, but his instincts drew
him thither.  The day after he was ordained he entered upon his
duties--feeling much as his father had done when he found himself boxed
up in the carriage with Christina on the morning of his marriage.  Before
the first three days were over, he became aware that the light of the
happiness which he had known during his four years at Cambridge had been
extinguished, and he was appalled by the irrevocable nature of the step
which he now felt that he had taken much too hurriedly.

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.  I suppose this was what might have been
expected from anyone placed as Ernest now was, especially when his
antecedents are remembered, but it surprised and disappointed some of his
cooler-headed Cambridge friends who had begun to think well of his
ability.  To himself it seemed that religion was incompatible with half
measures, or even with compromise.  Circumstances had led to his being
ordained; for the moment he was sorry they had, but he had done it and
must go through with it.  He therefore set himself to find out what was
expected of him, and to act accordingly.

His rector was a moderate High Churchman of no very pronounced views--an
elderly man who had had too many curates not to have long since found out
that the connection between rector and curate, like that between employer
and employed in every other walk of life, was a mere matter of business.
He had now two curates, of whom Ernest was the junior; the senior curate
was named Pryer, and when this gentleman made advances, as he presently
did, Ernest in his forlorn state was delighted to meet them.

Pryer was about twenty-eight years old.  He had been at Eton and at
Oxford.  He was tall, and passed generally for good-looking; I only saw
him once for about five minutes, and then thought him odious both in
manners and appearance.  Perhaps it was because he caught me up in a way
I did not like.  I had quoted Shakespeare for lack of something better to
fill up a sentence--and had said that one touch of nature made the whole
world kin.  "Ah," said Pryer, in a bold, brazen way which displeased me,
"but one touch of the unnatural makes it more kindred still," and he gave
me a look as though he thought me an old bore and did not care two straws
whether I was shocked or not.  Naturally enough, after this I did not
like him.

This, however, is anticipating, for it was not till Ernest had been three
or four months in London that I happened to meet his fellow-curate, and I
must deal here rather with the effect he produced upon my godson than
upon myself.  Besides being what was generally considered good-looking,
he was faultless in his get-up, and altogether the kind of man whom
Ernest was sure to be afraid of and yet be taken in by.  The style of his
dress was very High Church, and his acquaintances were exclusively of the
extreme High Church party, but he kept his views a good deal in the
background in his rector's presence, and that gentleman, though he looked
askance on some of Pryer's friends, had no such ground of complaint
against him as to make him sever the connection.  Pryer, too, was popular
in the pulpit, and, take him all round, it was probable that many worse
curates would be found for one better.  When Pryer called on my hero, as
soon as the two were alone together, he eyed him all over with a quick
penetrating glance and seemed not dissatisfied with the result--for I
must say here that Ernest had improved in personal appearance under the
more genial treatment he had received at Cambridge.  Pryer, in fact,
approved of him sufficiently to treat him civilly, and Ernest was
immediately won by anyone who did this.  It was not long before he
discovered that the High Church party, and even Rome itself, had more to
say for themselves than he had thought.  This was his first snipe-like
change of flight.

Pryer introduced him to several of his friends.  They were all of them
young clergymen, belonging as I have said to the highest of the High
Church school, but Ernest was surprised to find how much they resembled
other people when among themselves.  This was a shock to him; it was ere
long a still greater one to find that certain thoughts which he had
warred against as fatal to his soul, and which he had imagined he should
lose once for all on ordination, were still as troublesome to him as they
had been; he also saw plainly enough that the young gentlemen who formed
the circle of Pryer's friends were in much the same unhappy predicament
as himself.

This was deplorable.  The only way out of it that Ernest could see was
that he should get married at once.  But then he did not know any one
whom he wanted to marry.  He did not know any woman, in fact, whom he
would not rather die than marry.  It had been one of Theobald's and
Christina's main objects to keep him out of the way of women, and they
had so far succeeded that women had become to him mysterious, inscrutable
objects to be tolerated when it was impossible to avoid them, but never
to be sought out or encouraged.  As for any man loving, or even being at
all fond of any woman, he supposed it was so, but he believed the greater
number of those who professed such sentiments were liars.  Now, however,
it was clear that he had hoped against hope too long, and that the only
thing to do was to go and ask the first woman who would listen to him to
come and be married to him as soon as possible.

He broached this to Pryer, and was surprised to find that this gentleman,
though attentive to such members of his flock as were young and
good-looking, was strongly in favour of the celibacy of the clergy, as
indeed were the other demure young clerics to whom Pryer had introduced
Ernest.





"You know, my dear Pontifex," said Pryer to him, some few weeks after
Ernest had become acquainted with him, when the two were taking a
constitutional one day in Kensington Gardens, "You know, my dear
Pontifex, it is all very well to quarrel with Rome, but Rome has reduced
the treatment of the human soul to a science, while our own Church,
though so much purer in many respects, has no organised system either of
diagnosis or pathology--I mean, of course, spiritual diagnosis and
spiritual pathology.  Our Church does not prescribe remedies upon any
settled system, and, what is still worse, even when her physicians have
according to their lights ascertained the disease and pointed out the
remedy, she has no discipline which will ensure its being actually
applied.  If our patients do not choose to do as we tell them, we cannot
make them.  Perhaps really under all the circumstances this is as well,
for we are spiritually mere horse doctors as compared with the Roman
priesthood, nor can we hope to make much headway against the sin and
misery that surround us, till we return in some respects to the practice
of our forefathers and of the greater part of Christendom."

Ernest asked in what respects it was that his friend desired a return to
the practice of our forefathers.

"Why, my dear fellow, can you really be ignorant?  It is just this,
either the priest is indeed a spiritual guide, as being able to show
people how they ought to live better than they can find out for
themselves, or he is nothing at all--he has no _raison d'etre_.  If the
priest is not as much a healer and director of men's souls as a physician
is of their bodies, what is he?  The history of all ages has shown--and
surely you must know this as well as I do--that as men cannot cure the
bodies of their patients if they have not been properly trained in
hospitals under skilled teachers, so neither can souls be cured of their
more hidden ailments without the help of men who are skilled in
soul-craft--or in other words, of priests.  What do one half of our
formularies and rubrics mean if not this?  How in the name of all that is
reasonable can we find out the exact nature of a spiritual malady, unless
we have had experience of other similar cases?  How can we get this
without express training?  At present we have to begin all experiments
for ourselves, without profiting by the organised experience of our
predecessors, inasmuch as that experience is never organised and
co-ordinated at all.  At the outset, therefore, each one of us must ruin
many souls which could be saved by knowledge of a few elementary
principles."

Ernest was very much impressed.

"As for men curing themselves," continued Pryer, "they can no more cure
their own souls than they can cure their own bodies, or manage their own
law affairs.  In these two last cases they see the folly of meddling with
their own cases clearly enough, and go to a professional adviser as a
matter of course; surely a man's soul is at once a more difficult and
intricate matter to treat, and at the same time it is more important to
him that it should be treated rightly than that either his body or his
money should be so.  What are we to think of the practice of a Church
which encourages people to rely on unprofessional advice in matters
affecting their eternal welfare, when they would not think of
jeopardising their worldly affairs by such insane conduct?"

Ernest could see no weak place in this.  These ideas had crossed his own
mind vaguely before now, but he had never laid hold of them or set them
in an orderly manner before himself.  Nor was he quick at detecting false
analogies and the misuse of metaphors; in fact he was a mere child in the
hands of his fellow curate.

"And what," resumed Pryer, "does all this point to?  Firstly, to the duty
of confession--the outcry against which is absurd as an outcry would be
against dissection as part of the training of medical students.  Granted
these young men must see and do a great deal we do not ourselves like
even to think of, but they should adopt some other profession unless they
are prepared for this; they may even get inoculated with poison from a
dead body and lose their lives, but they must stand their chance.  So if
we aspire to be priests in deed as well as name, we must familiarise
ourselves with the minutest and most repulsive details of all kinds of
sin, so that we may recognise it in all its stages.  Some of us must
doubtlessly perish spiritually in such investigations.  We cannot help
it; all science must have its martyrs, and none of these will deserve
better of humanity than those who have fallen in the pursuit of spiritual
pathology."

Ernest grew more and more interested, but in the meekness of his soul
said nothing.

"I do not desire this martyrdom for myself," continued the other, "on the
contrary I will avoid it to the very utmost of my power, but if it be
God's will that I should fall while studying what I believe most
calculated to advance his glory--then, I say, not my will, oh Lord, but
thine be done."

This was too much even for Ernest.  "I heard of an Irish-woman once," he
said, with a smile, "who said she was a martyr to the drink."

"And so she was," rejoined Pryer with warmth; and he went on to show that
this good woman was an experimentalist whose experiment, though
disastrous in its effects upon herself, was pregnant with instruction to
other people.  She was thus a true martyr or witness to the frightful
consequences of intemperance, to the saving, doubtless, of many who but
for her martyrdom would have taken to drinking.  She was one of a forlorn
hope whose failure to take a certain position went to the proving it to
be impregnable and therefore to the abandonment of all attempt to take
it.  This was almost as great a gain to mankind as the actual taking of
the position would have been.

"Besides," he added more hurriedly, "the limits of vice and virtue are
wretchedly ill-defined.  Half the vices which the world condemns most
loudly have seeds of good in them and require moderate use rather than
total abstinence."

Ernest asked timidly for an instance.

"No, no," said Pryer, "I will give you no instance, but I will give you a
formula that shall embrace all instances.  It is this, that no practice
is entirely vicious which has not been extinguished among the comeliest,
most vigorous, and most cultivated races of mankind in spite of centuries
of endeavour to extirpate it.  If a vice in spite of such efforts can
still hold its own among the most polished nations, it must be founded on
some immutable truth or fact in human nature, and must have some
compensatory advantage which we cannot afford altogether to dispense
with."

"But," said Ernest timidly, "is not this virtually doing away with all
distinction between right and wrong, and leaving people without any moral
guide whatever?"

"Not the people," was the answer: "it must be our care to be guides to
these, for they are and always will be incapable of guiding themselves
sufficiently.  We should tell them what they must do, and in an ideal
state of things should be able to enforce their doing it: perhaps when we
are better instructed the ideal state may come about; nothing will so
advance it as greater knowledge of spiritual pathology on our own part.
For this, three things are necessary; firstly, absolute freedom in
experiment for us the clergy; secondly, absolute knowledge of what the
laity think and do, and of what thoughts and actions result in what
spiritual conditions; and thirdly, a compacter organisation among
ourselves.

"If we are to do any good we must be a closely united body, and must be
sharply divided from the laity.  Also we must be free from those ties
which a wife and children involve.  I can hardly express the horror with
which I am filled by seeing English priests living in what I can only
designate as 'open matrimony.'  It is deplorable.  The priest must be
absolutely sexless--if not in practice, yet at any rate in theory,
absolutely--and that too, by a theory so universally accepted that none
shall venture to dispute it."

"But," said Ernest, "has not the Bible already told people what they
ought and ought not to do, and is it not enough for us to insist on what
can be found here, and let the rest alone?"

"If you begin with the Bible," was the rejoinder, "you are three parts
gone on the road to infidelity, and will go the other part before you
know where you are.  The Bible is not without its value to us the clergy,
but for the laity it is a stumbling-block which cannot be taken out of
their way too soon or too completely.  Of course, I mean on the
supposition that they read it, which, happily, they seldom do.  If people
read the Bible as the ordinary British churchman or churchwoman reads it,
it is harmless enough; but if they read it with any care--which we should
assume they will if we give it them at all--it is fatal to them."

"What do you mean?" said Ernest, more and more astonished, but more and
more feeling that he was at least in the hands of a man who had definite
ideas.

"Your question shows me that you have never read your Bible.  A more
unreliable book was never put upon paper.  Take my advice and don't read
it, not till you are a few years older, and may do so safely."

"But surely you believe the Bible when it tells you of such things as
that Christ died and rose from the dead?  Surely you believe this?" said
Ernest, quite prepared to be told that Pryer believed nothing of the
kind.

"I do not believe it, I know it."

"But how--if the testimony of the Bible fails?"

"On that of the living voice of the Church, which I know to be infallible
and to be informed of Christ himself."





The foregoing conversation and others like it made a deep impression upon
my hero.  If next day he had taken a walk with Mr Hawke, and heard what
he had to say on the other side, he would have been just as much struck,
and as ready to fling off what Pryer had told him, as he now was to throw
aside all he had ever heard from anyone except Pryer; but there was no Mr
Hawke at hand, so Pryer had everything his own way.

Embryo minds, like embryo bodies, pass through a number of strange
metamorphoses before they adopt their final shape.  It is no more to be
wondered at that one who is going to turn out a Roman Catholic, should
have passed through the stages of being first a Methodist, and then a
free thinker, than that a man should at some former time have been a mere
cell, and later on an invertebrate animal.  Ernest, however, could not be
expected to know this; embryos never do.  Embryos think with each stage
of their development that they have now reached the only condition which
really suits them.  This, they say, must certainly be their last,
inasmuch as its close will be so great a shock that nothing can survive
it.  Every change is a shock; every shock is a _pro tanto_ death.  What
we call death is only a shock great enough to destroy our power to
recognise a past and a present as resembling one another.  It is the
making us consider the points of difference between our present and our
past greater than the points of resemblance, so that we can no longer
call the former of these two in any proper sense a continuation of the
second, but find it less trouble to think of it as something that we
choose to call new.

But, to let this pass, it was clear that spiritual pathology (I confess
that I do not know myself what spiritual pathology means--but Pryer and
Ernest doubtless did) was the great desideratum of the age.  It seemed to
Ernest that he had made this discovery himself and been familiar with it
all his life, that he had never known, in fact, of anything else.  He
wrote long letters to his college friends expounding his views as though
he had been one of the Apostolic fathers.  As for the Old Testament
writers, he had no patience with them.  "Do oblige me," I find him
writing to one friend, "by reading the prophet Zechariah, and giving me
your candid opinion upon him.  He is poor stuff, full of Yankee bounce;
it is sickening to live in an age when such balderdash can be gravely
admired whether as poetry or prophecy."  This was because Pryer had set
him against Zechariah.  I do not know what Zechariah had done; I should
think myself that Zechariah was a very good prophet; perhaps it was
because he was a Bible writer, and not a very prominent one, that Pryer
selected him as one through whom to disparage the Bible in comparison
with the Church.

To his friend Dawson I find him saying a little later on: "Pryer and I
continue our walks, working out each other's thoughts.  At first he used
to do all the thinking, but I think I am pretty well abreast of him now,
and rather chuckle at seeing that he is already beginning to modify some
of the views he held most strongly when I first knew him.

"Then I think he was on the high road to Rome; now, however, he seems to
be a good deal struck with a suggestion of mine in which you, too,
perhaps may be interested.  You see we must infuse new life into the
Church somehow; we are not holding our own against either Rome or
infidelity."  (I may say in passing that I do not believe Ernest had as
yet ever seen an infidel--not to speak to.)  "I proposed, therefore, a
few days back to Pryer--and he fell in eagerly with the proposal as soon
as he saw that I had the means of carrying it out--that we should set on
foot a spiritual movement somewhat analogous to the Young England
movement of twenty years ago, the aim of which shall be at once to outbid
Rome on the one hand, and scepticism on the other.  For this purpose I
see nothing better than the foundation of an institution or college for
placing the nature and treatment of sin on a more scientific basis than
it rests at present.  We want--to borrow a useful term of Pryer's--a
College of Spiritual Pathology where young men" (I suppose Ernest thought
he was no longer young by this time) "may study the nature and treatment
of the sins of the soul as medical students study those of the bodies of
their patients.  Such a college, as you will probably admit, will
approach both Rome on the one hand, and science on the other--Rome, as
giving the priesthood more skill, and therefore as paving the way for
their obtaining greater power, and science, by recognising that even free
thought has a certain kind of value in spiritual enquiries.  To this
purpose Pryer and I have resolved to devote ourselves henceforth heart
and soul.

"Of course, my ideas are still unshaped, and all will depend upon the men
by whom the college is first worked.  I am not yet a priest, but Pryer
is, and if I were to start the College, Pryer might take charge of it for
a time and I work under him nominally as his subordinate.  Pryer himself
suggested this.  Is it not generous of him?

"The worst of it is that we have not enough money; I have, it is true,
5000 pounds, but we want at least 10,000 pounds, so Pryer says, before we
can start; when we are fairly under weigh I might live at the college and
draw a salary from the foundation, so that it is all one, or nearly so,
whether I invest my money in this way or in buying a living; besides I
want very little; it is certain that I shall never marry; no clergyman
should think of this, and an unmarried man can live on next to nothing.
Still I do not see my way to as much money as I want, and Pryer suggests
that as we can hardly earn more now we must get it by a judicious series
of investments.  Pryer knows several people who make quite a handsome
income out of very little or, indeed, I may say, nothing at all, by
buying things at a place they call the Stock Exchange; I don't know much
about it yet, but Pryer says I should soon learn; he thinks, indeed, that
I have shown rather a talent in this direction, and under proper auspices
should make a very good man of business.  Others, of course, and not I,
must decide this; but a man can do anything if he gives his mind to it,
and though I should not care about having more money for my own sake, I
care about it very much when I think of the good I could do with it by
saving souls from such horrible torture hereafter.  Why, if the thing
succeeds, and I really cannot see what is to hinder it, it is hardly
possible to exaggerate its importance, nor the proportions which it may
ultimately assume," etc., etc.

Again I asked Ernest whether he minded my printing this.  He winced, but
said "No, not if it helps you to tell your story: but don't you think it
is too long?"

I said it would let the reader see for himself how things were going in
half the time that it would take me to explain them to him.

"Very well then, keep it by all means."

I continue turning over my file of Ernest's letters and find as follows--

   "Thanks for your last, in answer to which I send you a rough copy of a
   letter I sent to the _Times_ a day or two back.  They did not insert
   it, but it embodies pretty fully my ideas on the parochial visitation
   question, and Pryer fully approves of the letter.  Think it carefully
   over and send it back to me when read, for it is so exactly my present
   creed that I cannot afford to lose it.

   "I should very much like to have a _viva voce_ discussion on these
   matters: I can only see for certain that we have suffered a dreadful
   loss in being no longer able to excommunicate.  We should
   excommunicate rich and poor alike, and pretty freely too.  If this
   power were restored to us we could, I think, soon put a stop to by far
   the greater part of the sin and misery with which we are surrounded."

These letters were written only a few weeks after Ernest had been
ordained, but they are nothing to others that he wrote a little later on.

In his eagerness to regenerate the Church of England (and through this
the universe) by the means which Pryer had suggested to him, it occurred
to him to try to familiarise himself with the habits and thoughts of the
poor by going and living among them.  I think he got this notion from
Kingsley's "Alton Locke," which, High Churchman though he for the nonce
was, he had devoured as he had devoured Stanley's Life of Arnold,
Dickens's novels, and whatever other literary garbage of the day was most
likely to do him harm; at any rate he actually put his scheme into
practice, and took lodgings in Ashpit Place, a small street in the
neighbourhood of Drury Lane Theatre, in a house of which the landlady was
the widow of a cabman.

This lady occupied the whole ground floor.  In the front kitchen there
was a tinker.  The back kitchen was let to a bellows-mender.  On the
first floor came Ernest, with his two rooms which he furnished
comfortably, for one must draw the line somewhere.  The two upper floors
were parcelled out among four different sets of lodgers: there was a
tailor named Holt, a drunken fellow who used to beat his wife at night
till her screams woke the house; above him there was another tailor with
a wife but no children; these people were Wesleyans, given to drink but
not noisy.  The two back rooms were held by single ladies, who it seemed
to Ernest must be respectably connected, for well-dressed gentlemanly-
looking young men used to go up and down stairs past Ernest's rooms to
call at any rate on Miss Snow--Ernest had heard her door slam after they
had passed.  He thought, too, that some of them went up to Miss
Maitland's.  Mrs Jupp, the landlady, told Ernest that these were brothers
and cousins of Miss Snow's, and that she was herself looking out for a
situation as a governess, but at present had an engagement as an actress
at the Drury Lane Theatre.  Ernest asked whether Miss Maitland in the top
back was also looking out for a situation, and was told she was wanting
an engagement as a milliner.  He believed whatever Mrs Jupp told him.





This move on Ernest's part was variously commented upon by his friends,
the general opinion being that it was just like Pontifex, who was sure to
do something unusual wherever he went, but that on the whole the idea was
commendable.  Christina could not restrain herself when on sounding her
clerical neighbours she found them inclined to applaud her son for
conduct which they idealised into something much more self-denying than
it really was.  She did not quite like his living in such an
unaristocratic neighbourhood; but what he was doing would probably get
into the newspapers, and then great people would take notice of him.
Besides, it would be very cheap; down among these poor people he could
live for next to nothing, and might put by a great deal of his income.  As
for temptations, there could be few or none in such a place as that.  This
argument about cheapness was the one with which she most successfully met
Theobald, who grumbled more _suo_ that he had no sympathy with his son's
extravagance and conceit.  When Christina pointed out to him that it
would be cheap he replied that there was something in that.

On Ernest himself the effect was to confirm the good opinion of himself
which had been growing upon him ever since he had begun to read for
orders, and to make him flatter himself that he was among the few who
were ready to give up _all_ for Christ.  Ere long he began to conceive of
himself as a man with a mission and a great future.  His lightest and
most hastily formed opinions began to be of momentous importance to him,
and he inflicted them, as I have already shown, on his old friends, week
by week becoming more and more _entete_ with himself and his own
crotchets.  I should like well enough to draw a veil over this part of my
hero's career, but cannot do so without marring my story.

In the spring of 1859 I find him writing--

   "I cannot call the visible Church Christian till its fruits are
   Christian, that is until the fruits of the members of the Church of
   England are in conformity, or something like conformity, with her
   teaching.  I cordially agree with the teaching of the Church of
   England in most respects, but she says one thing and does another, and
   until excommunication--yes, and wholesale excommunication--be resorted
   to, I cannot call her a Christian institution.  I should begin with
   our Rector, and if I found it necessary to follow him up by
   excommunicating the Bishop, I should not flinch even from this.

   "The present London Rectors are hopeless people to deal with.  My own
   is one of the best of them, but the moment Pryer and I show signs of
   wanting to attack an evil in a way not recognised by routine, or of
   remedying anything about which no outcry has been made, we are met
   with, 'I cannot think what you mean by all this disturbance; nobody
   else among the clergy sees these things, and I have no wish to be the
   first to begin turning everything topsy-turvy.'  And then people call
   him a sensible man.  I have no patience with them.  However, we know
   what we want, and, as I wrote to Dawson the other day, have a scheme
   on foot which will, I think, fairly meet the requirements of the case.
   But we want more money, and my first move towards getting this has not
   turned out quite so satisfactorily as Pryer and I had hoped; we shall,
   however, I doubt not, retrieve it shortly."

When Ernest came to London he intended doing a good deal of
house-to-house visiting, but Pryer had talked him out of this even before
he settled down in his new and strangely-chosen apartments.  The line he
now took was that if people wanted Christ, they must prove their want by
taking some little trouble, and the trouble required of them was that
they should come and seek him, Ernest, out; there he was in the midst of
them ready to teach; if people did not choose to come to him it was no
fault of his.

"My great business here," he writes again to Dawson, "is to observe.  I
am not doing much in parish work beyond my share of the daily services.  I
have a man's Bible Class, and a boy's Bible Class, and a good many young
men and boys to whom I give instruction one way or another; then there
are the Sunday School children, with whom I fill my room on a Sunday
evening as full as it will hold, and let them sing hymns and chants.  They
like this.  I do a great deal of reading--chiefly of books which Pryer
and I think most likely to help; we find nothing comparable to the
Jesuits.  Pryer is a thorough gentleman, and an admirable man of
business--no less observant of the things of this world, in fact, than of
the things above; by a brilliant coup he has retrieved, or nearly so, a
rather serious loss which threatened to delay indefinitely the execution
of our great scheme.  He and I daily gather fresh principles.  I believe
great things are before me, and am strong in the hope of being able by
and by to effect much.

"As for you I bid you God speed.  Be bold but logical, speculative but
cautious, daringly courageous, but properly circumspect withal," etc.,
etc.

I think this may do for the present.





I had called on Ernest as a matter of course when he first came to
London, but had not seen him.  I had been out when he returned my call,
so that he had been in town for some weeks before I actually saw him,
which I did not very long after he had taken possession of his new rooms.
I liked his face, but except for the common bond of music, in respect of
which our tastes were singularly alike, I should hardly have known how to
get on with him.  To do him justice he did not air any of his schemes to
me until I had drawn him out concerning them.  I, to borrow the words of
Ernest's landlady, Mrs Jupp, "am not a very regular church-goer"--I
discovered upon cross-examination that Mrs Jupp had been to church once
when she was churched for her son Tom some five and twenty years since,
but never either before or afterwards; not even, I fear, to be married,
for though she called herself "Mrs" she wore no wedding ring, and spoke
of the person who should have been Mr Jupp as "my poor dear boy's
father," not as "my husband."  But to return.  I was vexed at Ernest's
having been ordained.  I was not ordained myself and I did not like my
friends to be ordained, nor did I like having to be on my best behaviour
and to look as if butter would not melt in my mouth, and all for a boy
whom I remembered when he knew yesterday and to-morrow and Tuesday, but
not a day of the week more--not even Sunday itself--and when he said he
did not like the kitten because it had pins in its toes.

I looked at him and thought of his aunt Alethea, and how fast the money
she had left him was accumulating; and it was all to go to this young
man, who would use it probably in the very last ways with which Miss
Pontifex would have sympathised.  I was annoyed.  "She always said," I
thought to myself, "that she should make a mess of it, but I did not
think she would have made as great a mess of it as this."  Then I thought
that perhaps if his aunt had lived he would not have been like this.

Ernest behaved quite nicely to me and I own that the fault was mine if
the conversation drew towards dangerous subjects.  I was the aggressor,
presuming I suppose upon my age and long acquaintance with him, as giving
me a right to make myself unpleasant in a quiet way.

Then he came out, and the exasperating part of it was that up to a
certain point he was so very right.  Grant him his premises and his
conclusions were sound enough, nor could I, seeing that he was already
ordained, join issue with him about his premises as I should certainly
have done if I had had a chance of doing so before he had taken orders.
The result was that I had to beat a retreat and went away not in the best
of humours.  I believe the truth was that I liked Ernest, and was vexed
at his being a clergyman, and at a clergyman having so much money coming
to him.

I talked a little with Mrs Jupp on my way out.  She and I had reckoned
one another up at first sight as being neither of us "very regular church-
goers," and the strings of her tongue had been loosened.  She said Ernest
would die.  He was much too good for the world and he looked so sad "just
like young Watkins of the 'Crown' over the way who died a month ago, and
his poor dear skin was white as alablaster; least-ways they say he shot
hisself.  They took him from the Mortimer, I met them just as I was going
with my Rose to get a pint o' four ale, and she had her arm in splints.
She told her sister she wanted to go to Perry's to get some wool, instead
o' which it was only a stall to get me a pint o' ale, bless her heart;
there's nobody else would do that much for poor old Jupp, and it's a
horrid lie to say she is gay; not but what I like a gay woman, I do: I'd
rather give a gay woman half-a-crown than stand a modest woman a pot o'
beer, but I don't want to go associating with bad girls for all that.  So
they took him from the Mortimer; they wouldn't let him go home no more;
and he done it that artful you know.  His wife was in the country living
with her mother, and she always spoke respectful o' my Rose.  Poor dear,
I hope his soul is in Heaven.  Well Sir, would you believe it, there's
that in Mr Pontifex's face which is just like young Watkins; he looks
that worrited and scrunched up at times, but it's never for the same
reason, for he don't know nothing at all, no more than a unborn babe, no
he don't; why there's not a monkey going about London with an Italian
organ grinder but knows more than Mr Pontifex do.  He don't know--well I
suppose--"

Here a child came in on an errand from some neighbour and interrupted
her, or I can form no idea where or when she would have ended her
discourse.  I seized the opportunity to run away, but not before I had
given her five shillings and made her write down my address, for I was a
little frightened by what she said.  I told her if she thought her lodger
grew worse, she was to come and let me know.

Weeks went by and I did not see her again.  Having done as much as I had,
I felt absolved from doing more, and let Ernest alone as thinking that he
and I should only bore one another.

He had now been ordained a little over four months, but these months had
not brought happiness or satisfaction with them.  He had lived in a
clergyman's house all his life, and might have been expected perhaps to
have known pretty much what being a clergyman was like, and so he did--a
country clergyman; he had formed an ideal, however, as regards what a
town clergyman could do, and was trying in a feeble tentative way to
realise it, but somehow or other it always managed to escape him.

He lived among the poor, but he did not find that he got to know them.
The idea that they would come to him proved to be a mistaken one.  He did
indeed visit a few tame pets whom his rector desired him to look after.
There was an old man and his wife who lived next door but one to Ernest
himself; then there was a plumber of the name of Chesterfield; an aged
lady of the name of Gover, blind and bed-ridden, who munched and munched
her feeble old toothless jaws as Ernest spoke or read to her, but who
could do little more; a Mr Brookes, a rag and bottle merchant in
Birdsey's Rents in the last stage of dropsy, and perhaps half a dozen or
so others.  What did it all come to, when he did go to see them?  The
plumber wanted to be flattered, and liked fooling a gentleman into
wasting his time by scratching his ears for him.  Mrs Gover, poor old
woman, wanted money; she was very good and meek, and when Ernest got her
a shilling from Lady Anne Jones's bequest, she said it was "small but
seasonable," and munched and munched in gratitude.  Ernest sometimes gave
her a little money himself, but not, as he says now, half what he ought
to have given.

What could he do else that would have been of the smallest use to her?
Nothing indeed; but giving occasional half-crowns to Mrs Gover was not
regenerating the universe, and Ernest wanted nothing short of this.  The
world was all out of joint, and instead of feeling it to be a cursed
spite that he was born to set it right, he thought he was just the kind
of person that was wanted for the job, and was eager to set to work, only
he did not exactly know how to begin, for the beginning he had made with
Mr Chesterfield and Mrs Gover did not promise great developments.

Then poor Mr Brookes--he suffered very much, terribly indeed; he was not
in want of money; he wanted to die and couldn't, just as we sometimes
want to go to sleep and cannot.  He had been a serious-minded man, and
death frightened him as it must frighten anyone who believes that all his
most secret thoughts will be shortly exposed in public.  When I read
Ernest the description of how his father used to visit Mrs Thompson at
Battersby, he coloured and said--"that's just what I used to say to Mr
Brookes."  Ernest felt that his visits, so far from comforting Mr
Brookes, made him fear death more and more, but how could he help it?

Even Pryer, who had been curate a couple of years, did not know
personally more than a couple of hundred people in the parish at the
outside, and it was only at the houses of very few of these that he ever
visited, but then Pryer had such a strong objection on principle to house
visitations.  What a drop in the sea were those with whom he and Pryer
were brought into direct communication in comparison with those whom he
must reach and move if he were to produce much effect of any kind, one
way or the other.  Why there were between fifteen and twenty thousand
poor in the parish, of whom but the merest fraction ever attended a place
of worship.  Some few went to dissenting chapels, a few were Roman
Catholics; by far the greater number, however, were practically infidels,
if not actively hostile, at any rate indifferent to religion, while many
were avowed Atheists--admirers of Tom Paine, of whom he now heard for the
first time; but he never met and conversed with any of these.

Was he really doing everything that could be expected of him?  It was all
very well to say that he was doing as much as other young clergymen did;
that was not the kind of answer which Jesus Christ was likely to accept;
why, the Pharisees themselves in all probability did as much as the other
Pharisees did.  What he should do was to go into the highways and byways,
and compel people to come in.  Was he doing this?   Or were not they
rather compelling him to keep out--outside their doors at any rate?  He
began to have an uneasy feeling as though ere long, unless he kept a
sharp look out, he should drift into being a sham.

True, all would be changed as soon as he could endow the College for
Spiritual Pathology; matters, however, had not gone too well with "the
things that people bought in the place that was called the Stock
Exchange."  In order to get on faster, it had been arranged that Ernest
should buy more of these things than he could pay for, with the idea that
in a few weeks, or even days, they would be much higher in value, and he
could sell them at a tremendous profit; but, unfortunately, instead of
getting higher, they had fallen immediately after Ernest had bought, and
obstinately refused to get up again; so, after a few settlements, he had
got frightened, for he read an article in some newspaper, which said they
would go ever so much lower, and, contrary to Pryer's advice, he insisted
on selling--at a loss of something like 500 pounds.  He had hardly sold
when up went the shares again, and he saw how foolish he had been, and
how wise Pryer was, for if Pryer's advice had been followed, he would
have made 500 pounds, instead of losing it.  However, he told himself he
must live and learn.

Then Pryer made a mistake.  They had bought some shares, and the shares
went up delightfully for about a fortnight.  This was a happy time
indeed, for by the end of a fortnight, the lost 500 pounds had been
recovered, and three or four hundred pounds had been cleared into the
bargain.  All the feverish anxiety of that miserable six weeks, when the
500 pounds was being lost, was now being repaid with interest.  Ernest
wanted to sell and make sure of the profit, but Pryer would not hear of
it; they would go ever so much higher yet, and he showed Ernest an
article in some newspaper which proved that what he said was reasonable,
and they did go up a little--but only a very little, for then they went
down, down, and Ernest saw first his clear profit of three or four
hundred pounds go, and then the 500 pounds loss, which he thought he had
recovered, slipped away by falls of a half and one at a time, and then he
lost 200 pounds more.  Then a newspaper said that these shares were the
greatest rubbish that had ever been imposed upon the English public, and
Ernest could stand it no longer, so he sold out, again this time against
Pryer's advice, so that when they went up, as they shortly did, Pryer
scored off Ernest a second time.

Ernest was not used to vicissitudes of this kind, and they made him so
anxious that his health was affected.  It was arranged therefore that he
had better know nothing of what was being done.  Pryer was a much better
man of business than he was, and would see to it all.  This relieved
Ernest of a good deal of trouble, and was better after all for the
investments themselves; for, as Pryer justly said, a man must not have a
faint heart if he hopes to succeed in buying and selling upon the Stock
Exchange, and seeing Ernest nervous made Pryer nervous too--at least, he
said it did.  So the money drifted more and more into Pryer's hands.  As
for Pryer himself, he had nothing but his curacy and a small allowance
from his father.

Some of Ernest's old friends got an inkling from his letters of what he
was doing, and did their utmost to dissuade him, but he was as infatuated
as a young lover of two and twenty.  Finding that these friends
disapproved, he dropped away from them, and they, being bored with his
egotism and high-flown ideas, were not sorry to let him do so.  Of
course, he said nothing about his speculations--indeed, he hardly knew
that anything done in so good a cause could be called speculation.  At
Battersby, when his father urged him to look out for a next presentation,
and even brought one or two promising ones under his notice, he made
objections and excuses, though always promising to do as his father
desired very shortly.

 Soon after taking his degree and being ordained as a curate, Ernest is assigned to a London parish. The senior curate, Pryer, is slightly older than Ernest and is a personable and persuasive conservative whose High Church views appeal to Ernest as much as did the diametrically opposed views of the Simeonites. Pryer's espousal of an odd mixture of clerical license and lay subservience to Church tenets gains Ernest's support, and the two of them soon agree on founding a College of Spiritual Pathology. They intend to treat people's souls in the manner that physicians treat bodies and thereby bring church practices up-to-date with developments in the field of science. Ernest not only pledges the inheritance from his grandfather to this cause but also writes solemn, pompous, and patronizing letters to his college friends, describing his design to regenerate the Church and the nation. Upon visiting Ernest in his living quarters -- appropriately named Ashpit Place, a squalid quarter of the oldest section of London -- Overton is vexed to learn of Ernest's ill-conceived plans. Mrs. Jupp, Ernest's cockney landlady, supports Overton's judgment by referring to Ernest as "knowing no more than an unborn babe." The metaphor is more appropriate than either of these two people realize, for Ernest soon permits Pryer to assume the entire responsibility of investing his money in the stock market so that the anticipated profits from the expected "quick killing" will hasten their implementation of God's work in the world. Unfortunately, in attempting to play the Good Shepherd, Ernest unwittingly allows himself to become a sacrificial lamb.

