After that we got into a bewilderment. We knew nothing of the future question of temperance versus total abstinence; but after it had been extracted that Miss Newton regarded cards as the devil’s books, the inconsistent little sister changed sides, and declared it narrow and evangelical to renounce what was innocent. Clarence argued that what might be harmless for others might be dangerous for such as himself, and that his real difficulty in making even a mental vow was that, if broken, there was an additional sin.
‘It is not oneself that one trusts,’ I said.
‘No,’ said Clarence emphatically; ‘and setting up a vow seems as if it might be sticking up the reed of one’s own word, and leaning on that—when it breaks, at least mine does. If I could always get the grasp of Him that I felt to-day, there would be no more bewildered heart and failing spirit, which are worse than the actual falls they cause.’ And as Emily said she did not understand, he replied in words I wrote down and thought over, ‘What we are is the point, more than even what we do. We do as we are; and yet we form ourselves by what we do.’
‘And,’ I put in, ‘I know somebody who won a victory last night over himself and his two brothers. Surely doing that is a sign that he is more than he used to be.’
‘If he were, it would not have been an effort at all,’ said Clarence, but with his rare sweet smile.
Just then Griff called him away, and Emily sat pondering and impressed. ‘It did seem so odd,’ she said, ‘that Clarry should be so much the best, and yet so much the worst of us.’
I agreed. His insight into spiritual things, and his enjoyment of them, always humiliated us both, yet he fell so much lower in practice,—‘But then we had not his temptations.’
‘Yes,’ said Emily; ‘but look at Griff! He goes about like other young men, and keeps all right, and yet he doesn’t care about religious things a bit more than he can help.’
It was quite true. Religion was life to the one and an insurance to the other, and this had been a mystery to us all our young lives, as far as we had ever reflected on the contrast between the practical failure and success of each. Our mother, on the other hand, viewed Clarence’s tendencies as part of an unreal, self-deceptive nature, and regretted his intimacy with Miss Newton, who, she said, had fostered ‘that kind of thing’ in his childhood—made him fancy talk, feeling, and preaching were more than truth and honour—and might lead him to run after Irving, Rowland Hill, or Baptist Noel, about whose tenets she was rather confused. It would be an additional misfortune if he became a fanatical Evangelical light, and he was just the character to be worked upon.
My father held that she might be thankful for any good influence or safe resort for a young man in lodgings in London, and he merely bade Clarence never resort to any variety of dissenting preacher. We were of the school called—a little later—high and dry, but were strictly orthodox according to our lights, and held it a prime duty to attend our parish church, whatever it might be; nor, indeed, had Clarence swerved from these traditions.