ought to
be like--that its highest educational work should just be the
deliverance of us all from flunkeyism and money-worship--and then
looks at matters here without rose-colored spectacles, it gives
one sometimes a sort of chilly leaden despondency, which is very
hard to struggle against."

"I am sorry to hear you talk like that, Jack, for one can't help
loving the place after all."

"So I do, God knows. If I didn't I shouldn't care for its
shortcomings."

"Well, the flunkeyism and money-worship were bad enough, but I
don't think they were the worst things--at least not in my day.
Our neglects were almost worse than our worships."

"You mean the want of all reverence for parents? Well, perhaps
that lies at the root of the false worships. They spring up on
the vacant soil."

"And the want of reverence for women, Jack. The worst of all, to
my mind!"

"Perhaps you are right. But we are not at the bottom yet."

"How do you mean?"

"I mean that we must worship God before we can reverence parents
or women, or root out flunkeyism and money-worship."

"Yes. But, after all, can we fairly lay that sin on Oxford?
Surely, whatever may be growing up side by side with it, there's
more Christianity here than almost anywhere else."

"Plenty of common-room Christianity--belief in a dead God. There,
I have never said it to anyone but you, but that is the slough we
have to get out of. Don't think that I despair for us. We shall
do it yet; but it will be sore work, stripping off the
comfortable wine-party religion in which we are wrapped up--work
for our strongest and our wisest."

"And yet you think of leaving?"

"There are other reasons. I will tell you some day. But now, to
turn to other matters, how have you been getting on this last
year? You write so seldom that I am all behind-hand."

"Oh, much the same as usual."

"Then you are still like one of those who went out to David?"

"No, I'm not in debt."

"But discontented?"

"Pretty much like you there, Jack. However, content is no virtue,
that I can see, while there's anything to mend. Who is going to
be contented with game-preserving, and corn-laws, and grinding
the faces of the poor? David's camp was a better place than
Saul's, any day."

Hardy got up, opened a drawer, and took out a bundle of papers,
which Tom recognized as the _Wessex Freeman_. He felt rather
uncomfortable, as his friend seated himself again, and began
looking them over.

"You see w