I have written much of clergymen, but in doing so I have endeavored to portray them as they bear on our social life rather than to describe the mode and working of their professional careers. Had I done the latter, I could hardly have steered clear of subjects on which it has not been my intention to pronounce an opinion, and I should either have laden my fiction with sermons, or I should have degraded my sermons into fiction. Therefore I have said but little in my narrative of this man's feelings or doings as a clergyman.
But I must protest against its being on this account considered that Mr. Robarts was indifferent to the duties of his clerical position. He had been fond of pleasure, and had given way to temptation, as is so customarily done by young men of six-and-twenty, who are placed beyond control and who have means at command. Had he remained as a curate till that age, subject in all his movements to the eye of a superior, he would, we may say, have put his name to no bills, have ridden after no hounds, have seen nothing of the iniquities of Gatherum Castle. There are men of twenty-six as fit to stand alone as ever they will be—fit to be prime ministers, heads of schools, judges on the bench—almost fit to be bishops; but Mark Robarts had not been one of them. He had within him many aptitudes for good, but not the strengthened courage of a man to act up to them. The stuff of which his manhood was to be formed had been slow of growth, as it is with many men, and, consequently, when temptation was offered to him, he had fallen.
But he deeply grieved over his own stumbling, and from time to time, as his periods of penitence came upon him, he resolved that he would once more put his shoulder to the wheel as became one who fights upon earth that battle for which he had put on his armor. Over and over again did he think of those words of Mr. Crawley, and now, as he walked up and down the path, crumpling Mr. Sowerby's letter in his hand, he thought of them again: "It is a terrible falling off; terrible in the fall, but doubly terrible through that difficulty of returning." Yes, that is a difficulty which multiplies itself in a fearful ratio as one goes on pleasantly running down the path—whitherward? Had it come to that with him that he could not return? that he could never again hold up his head with a safe conscience
