ad 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 mu