lity is indeed
augmented, but wherein have my deeds of duty been proportionally
modified?... One conclusion theoretically has been much on my
mind--it is the increased importance and necessity and benefit of
prayer--of the life of obedience and self-sacrifice. May God use me
as a vessel for his own purposes, of whatever character and results
in relation to myself.... May the God who loves us all, still
vouchsafe me a testimony of His abiding presence in the protracted,
though well nigh dormant life of a desire which at times has risen
high in my soul, a fervent and a buoyant hope that I might work an
energetic work in this world, and by that work (whereof the worker
is only God) I might grow into the image of the Redeemer.... It
matters not whether the sphere of duty be large or small, but may
it be duly filled. May those faint and languishing embers be
kindled by the truth of the everlasting spirit into a living and a
life-giving flame.

Every reader will remember how, just two hundred years before, the
sublimest of English poets had on his twenty-third birthday closed the
same self-reproach for sluggishness of inward life, with the same
aspiration:--

Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow,
It shall be still in strictest measure even
To that same lot however mean or high,
Towards which time leads me and the will of heaven.
All is, if I have grace to use it so,
As ever in my great taskmaster's eye.

Two generations after he had quitted the university, Mr. Gladstone
summed up her influence upon him:--

Oxford had rather tended to hide from me the great fact that
liberty is a great and precious gift of God, and that human
excellence cannot grow up in a nation without it. And yet I do not
hesitate to say that Oxford had even at this time laid the
foundations of my liberalism. School pursuits had revealed little;
but in the region of philosophy she had initiated if not inured me
to the pursuit of truth as an end of study. The splendid integrity
of Aristotle, and still more of Butler, conferred upon me an
inestimable service. Elsewhere I have not scrupled to speak with
severity of myself, but I declare that while in the arms of Oxford,
I was possessed through and through with a single-minded and
passionate love of truth, with a virgin love of truth, so that,
although