y notion of Orange with a wife and children. It went against the
grain, and upset the ideals of austerity which he had carefully
planned--not for himself, but for his friend. Robert, he urged, was born
to be an example--an encouragement to those who were called, by the
mercy of God, to less rigorous vocations. Reckage suffered many scruples
of conscience on Robert's account; he surveyed him with a sense of
disappointment; he had always supposed that he would ultimately turn
Jesuit in sober earnest, and die a martyr's death in the Far East. This
would, in his opinion, have been a fine end to a Quixotic, very
touching, most remarkable life. Would he now immaturely fall a victim to
an enticing face and the cares of a household? Would he be able to
sustain his character? One thing was certain. He could never again
expect to exercise precisely the same potent influence as he had in the
past, over his earth-bound, self-indulgent friends. Self-indulgent
people always exacted unusual privations from those who would seek to
move them--and Robert's call was clearly to materialists rather than to
the righteous. Pusey married, it was true. Keble married. No one thought
the less of them on that account. Even the judicious Hooker married. And
they were clergymen. Reckage called them priests. But Newman did not
marry, and, while Reckage was unable to agree in the main with Newman's
views, he had a fixed notion that he was the strong man--the master
spirit--among them. And another consideration. The passion of love has a
danger for very sensitive, reserved, and concentrated minds unknown to
creatures of more volatile, expansive, and unreflecting disposition.
Reckage knew well that he was himself too selfish a man to let affection
for any one creature come between his soul and its God. There was no
self-discipline required in his case when a choice had to be made
between a human being and his own advantage--whether temporal or
eternal. He had never--since he was a youth--felt an immoderate fondness
for anybody; he had likes and dislikes, admirations and partialities,
jealousies, too, and well-defined tastes where feminine beauty was in
question, but it was not in him to err from excess of charity. The
imaginative and visionary parts of life--and no one is wholly without
them--soon turned into severe reality whenever he found himself
confronted with that sole absorbing interest--his career. Marriage, in
his own case, seemed an imperative d