A change took place in him which turned all aims, all efforts, all victories of the world, into the merest, most poverty-stricken trifling.
He had been a tarrer and smearer, a marker and shearer of sheep, rather than a pastor; but now he recognized the rod and leaned on the staff of the true Shepherd Who feeds both shepherds and sheep.

Hearty were the thanks he offered that he had been staid in his worse than foolish career.
Since then, he had got into a hollow in the valley, and at this moment, as he sat in his summer-house, was looking from a verge abrupt into what seemed a bottomless gulf of humiliation.

For his handsome London house, he had little better than a cottage, in which his study was not a quarter of the size of the one he had left; he had sold two-thirds of his books; for three men and four women servants, he had but one old woman and his own daughter to do the work of the house; for all quadrupedal menie, he had but a nondescript canine and a contemptuous feline foundling; from a devoted congregation of comparatively educated people, he had sunk to one in which there was not a person of higher standing than a tradesman, and that congregation had now rejected him as not up to their mark, turning him off to do his best with fifty pounds a year.

He had himself heard the cheating butcher remark in the open street that it was quite enough, and more than ever his Master had.

But all these things were as nothing in his eyes beside his inability to pay Mr.Jones's bill.