A few years of worthy labor in his profession had done much to develop him, and his character for uprightness, benevolence, and skill, with the people of Glaston and its neighborhood, where he had been ministering only about a year, was already of the highest.

Even now, when, in a fever of honesty, he declared there _could_ be no God in such an ill-ordered world, so full was his heart of the human half of religion, that he could not stand by the bedside of dying man or woman, without lamenting that there was no consolation--that stern truth would allow him to cast no feeblest glamour of hope upon the departing shadow.

His was a nobler nature than theirs who, believing no more than he, are satisfied with the assurance that at the heart of the evils of the world lie laws unchangeable.
The main weak point in him was, that, while he was indeed tender-hearted, and did no kindnesses to be seen of men, he did them to be seen of himself: he saw him who did them all the time.

The boy was in the man; doing his deeds he sought, not the approbation merely, but the admiration of his own consciousness.

I am afraid to say this was _wrong_, but it was poor and childish, crippled his walk, and obstructed his higher development.