“On my honour, I will address you only as what you are, and know yourself to be.  But what are these faculties, so strangely beyond my friend Templeton’s reach?  He used to be distinguished at college for a very clear head, and a very kind heart, and the nicest sense of honour which I ever saw in living man; and I have not heard that they have failed him since he became Templeton of Templeton.  And as for his Churchmanship, were not the county papers ringing last month with the accounts of the beautiful new church which he had built, and the stained glass which he brought from Belgium, and the marble font which he brought from Italy; and how he had even given for an altar-piece his own pet Luini, the gem of Templeton House?”

“Effeminate picture!” he said.  “It was part and parcel of the idea-"

Before I could ask him what he meant, he looked up suddenly at me, with deep sadness on his usually nonchalant face.

“Well, my dear fellow, I suppose I must tell you all, as I have told you so much without your shaking the dust off your feet against me, and consulting Bradshaw for the earliest train to Shrewsbury.  You knew my dear mother?”

“I did.  The best of women.”

“The best of women, and the best of mothers.  But, if you recollect, she was a great Low-Church saint.”

“Why ‘but’?  How does that derogate in any wise from her excellence?”

“Not from her excellence; God forbid! or from the excellence of the people of her own party, whom she used to have round her, and who were, some of them, I do believe, as really earnest, and pious, and charitable, and all that, as human beings could be.  But it did take away very much indeed from her influence on me.”

“Surely she did not neglect to teach you.”

“It is a strange thing to say, but she rather taught me too much.  I don’t deny that it may have been my own fault.  I don’t blame her, or any one.  But you know what I was at college-no worse than other men, I dare say; but no better.  I had no reason for being better.”

“No reason?  Surely she gave you reasons.”

“There-you have touched the ailing nerve now.  The reasons were what you would call paralogisms.  They had no more to do with me than with those trout.”

“You mistake, friend, you mistake, indeed,” said I.

“I don’t mistake at all about this; that whether or not the reasons in themselves had to do with me, the way in which she put them made them practically so much Hebrew.  She demanded of me, as the only grounds on which I was to consider myself safe from hell, certain fears and hopes which I did not feel, and experiences which I did not experience; and it was my fault, and a sign of my being in a wrong state-to use no harder term-that I did not feel them; and yet it was only God’s grace which could make me feel them:  and so I grew up with a dark secret notion that I was a very bad boy; but that it was God’s fault and not mine that I was so.”