us undergraduates was not suitable for
the seed they tried to sow. The small pieties with which they larded
their discourse, if chance threw them into the company of one whom they
considered worldly, caused nothing but aversion in the minds of those for
whom they were intended. When they distributed tracts, dropping them by
night into good men's letter boxes while they were asleep, their tracts
got burnt, or met with even worse contumely; they were themselves also
treated with the ridicule which they reflected proudly had been the lot
of true followers of Christ in all ages. Often at their prayer meetings
was the passage of St Paul referred to in which he bids his Corinthian
converts note concerning themselves that they were for the most part
neither well-bred nor intellectual people. They reflected with pride
that they too had nothing to be proud of in these respects, and like St
Paul, gloried in the fact that in the flesh they had not much to glory.

Ernest had several Johnian friends, and came thus to hear about the
Simeonites and to see some of them, who were pointed out to him as they
passed through the courts. They had a repellent attraction for him; he
disliked them, but he could not bring himself to leave them alone. On
one occasion he had gone so far as to parody one of the tracts they had
sent round in the night, and to get a copy dropped into each of the
leading Simeonites' boxes. The subject he had taken was "Personal
Cleanliness." Cleanliness, he said, was next to godliness; he wished to
know on which side it was to stand, and concluded by exhorting Simeonites
to a freer use of the tub. I cannot commend my hero's humour in this
matter; his tract was not brilliant, but I mention the fact as showing
that at this time he was something of a Saul and took pleasure in
persecuting the elect, not, as I have said, that he had any hankering
after scepticism, but because, like the farmers in his father's village,
though he would not stand seeing the Christian religion made light of, he
was not going to see it taken seriously. Ernest's friends thought his
dislike for Simeonites was due to his being the son of a clergyman who,
it was known, bullied him; it is more likely, however, that it rose from
an unconscious sympathy with them, which, as in St Paul's case, in the
end drew him into the ranks of those whom he had most despised and hated.

CHAPTER XLVIII

Once, recently, when he was down at home aft