sin, thou 'point'st the season;
'Tis thou that spurn'st at right, at law, at reason;
And in thy shady cell, where none may spy him,
Sits Sin, to seize the souls that wander by him.

If the guilt of opportunity is great, how much greater is the guilt of
that which is believed to be opportunity, but in reality is no
opportunity at all. If the better part of valour is discretion, how much
more is not discretion the better part of vice

About ten minutes after we last saw Ernest, a scared, insulted girl,
flushed and trembling, was seen hurrying from Mrs Jupp's house as fast as
her agitated state would let her, and in another ten minutes two
policemen were seen also coming out of Mrs Jupp's, between whom there
shambled rather than walked our unhappy friend Ernest, with staring eyes,
ghastly pale, and with despair branded upon every line of his face.

CHAPTER LXI

Pryer had done well to warn Ernest against promiscuous house to house
visitation. He had not gone outside Mrs Jupp's street door, and yet what
had been the result?

Mr Holt had put him in bodily fear; Mr and Mrs Baxter had nearly made a
Methodist of him; Mr Shaw had undermined his faith in the Resurrection;
Miss Snow's charms had ruined--or would have done so but for an
accident--his moral character. As for Miss Maitland, he had done his
best to ruin hers, and had damaged himself gravely and irretrievably in
consequence. The only lodger who had done him no harm was the bellows'
mender, whom he had not visited.

Other young clergymen, much greater fools in many respects than he, would
not have got into these scrapes. He seemed to have developed an aptitude
for mischief almost from the day of his having been ordained. He could
hardly preach without making some horrid _faux pas_. He preached one
Sunday morning when the Bishop was at his Rector's church, and made his
sermon turn upon the question what kind of little cake it was that the
widow of Zarephath had intended making when Elijah found her gathering a
few sticks. He demonstrated that it was a seed cake. The sermon was
really very amusing, and more than once he saw a smile pass over the sea
of faces underneath him. The Bishop was very angry, and gave my hero a
severe reprimand in the vestry after service was over; the only excuse he
could make was that he was preaching _ex tempore_, had not thought of
this particular point till he was actually in the pulpit, and had then
been car