He has so good a conscience that he cannot believe
himself in the wrong. If he makes an egregious blunder, he says to
himself with infinite solemnity that it is right that his self-
satisfaction should be tenderly purged away, and glories in his own
humility. A far wholesomer frame of mind is that of the philosopher
who said, when complimented on the mellowness that advancing years
had brought him, that he still reserved to himself the right of
damning things in general. Because the truth is that the things
which really discipline us are the painful, dreary, intolerable
things of life, the results of one's own meanness, stupidity, and
weakness, or the black catastrophes which sometimes overwhelm us,
and not the things which we piously and cheerfully accept as
ministering to our consciousness of worth and virtue.
If I say that the dramatic failing is apt to be more common among
the clergy than among ordinary mortals, it is because the clerical
vocation is one that tempts men who have this temperament strongly
developed to enter it, and afterwards provides a good deal of
sustenance to the particular form of vanity that lies behind the
temptation.
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