You
English boys, for whom this book is meant (God bless your bright faces
and kind hearts!), will learn it all soon enough.
Into such a parish and state of society Arthur's father had been thrown
at the age of twenty-five--a young married parson, full of faith,
hope, and love. He had battled with it like a man, and had lots of fine
Utopian ideas about the perfectibility of mankind, glorious humanity,
and such-like, knocked out of his head, and a real, wholesome Christian
love for the poor, struggling, sinning men, of whom he felt himself one,
and with and for whom he spent fortune, and strength, and life, driven
into his heart. He had battled like a man, and gotten a man's reward--no
silver tea-pots or salvers, with flowery inscriptions setting forth
his virtues and the appreciation of a genteel parish; no fat living or
stall, for which he never looked, and didn't care; no sighs and praises
of comfortable dowagers and well-got-up young women, who worked him
slippers, sugared his tea, and adored him as "a devoted man;" but a
manly respect, wrung from the unwilling souls of men who fancied his
order their natural enemies; the fear and hatred of every one who was
false or unjust in the district, were he master or man; and the blessed
sight of women and children daily becoming more human and more homely, a
comfort to themselves and to their husbands and fathers.
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