setting himself
the other way. The opportunity for telling his son that he was a fool
was too favourable not to be embraced, and Theobald was not slow to
embrace it. Ernest was annoyed and surprised, for had not his father and
mother been wanting him to be more religious all his life? Now that he
had become so they were still not satisfied. He said to himself that a
prophet was not without honour save in his own country, but he had been
lately--or rather until lately--getting into an odious habit of turning
proverbs upside down, and it occurred to him that a country is sometimes
not without honour save for its own prophet. Then he laughed, and for
the rest of the day felt more as he used to feel before he had heard Mr
Hawke's sermon.

He returned to Cambridge for the Long Vacation of 1858--none too soon,
for he had to go in for the Voluntary Theological Examination, which
bishops were now beginning to insist upon. He imagined all the time he
was reading that he was storing himself with the knowledge that would
best fit him for the work he had taken in hand. In truth, he was
cramming for a pass. In due time he did pass--creditably, and was
ordained Deacon with half-a-dozen others of his friends in the autumn of
1858. He was then just twenty-three years old.

CHAPTER LI

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 lastin