those who want them.

"You are surrounded on every side by lies which would deceive even the
elect, if the elect were not generally so uncommonly wide awake; the
self of which you are conscious, your reasoning and reflecting self,
will believe these lies and bid you act in accordance with them. This
conscious self of yours, Ernest, is a prig begotten of prigs and
trained in priggishness; I will not allow it to shape your actions,
though it will doubtless shape your words for many a year to come.
Your papa is not here to beat you now; this is a change in the
conditions of your existence, and should be followed by changed
actions. Obey me, your true self, and things will go tolerably well
with you, but only listen to that outward and visible old husk of
yours which is called your father, and I will rend you in pieces even
unto the third and fourth generation as one who has hated God; for I,
Ernest, am the God who made you."

How shocked Ernest would have been if he could have heard the advice he
was receiving; what consternation too there would have been at Battersby;
but the matter did not end here, for this same wicked inner self gave him
bad advice about his pocket money, the choice of his companions and on
the whole Ernest was attentive and obedient to its behests, more so than
Theobald had been. The consequence was that he learned little, his mind
growing more slowly and his body rather faster than heretofore: and when
by and by his inner self urged him in directions where he met obstacles
beyond his strength to combat, he took--though with passionate
compunctions of conscience--the nearest course to the one from which he
was debarred which circumstances would allow.

It may be guessed that Ernest was not the chosen friend of the more
sedate and well-conducted youths then studying at Roughborough. Some of
the less desirable boys used to go to public-houses and drink more beer
than was good for them; Ernest's inner self can hardly have told him to
ally himself to these young gentlemen, but he did so at an early age, and
was sometimes made pitiably sick by an amount of beer which would have
produced no effect upon a stronger boy. Ernest's inner self must have
interposed at this point and told him that there was not much fun in
this, for he dropped the habit ere it had taken firm hold of him, and
never resumed it; but he contracted another at the disgracefully early
age