Children of clergy -- Fiction; Clergy -- England -- Fiction
that the experience he might expect to gain would help him later as a
parish priest. He could not confide in the Rector his reason for wanting
to subject himself to monastic discipline, and he expected a good deal
of opposition. It might be better to write from whatever village he
stayed in to-night and make the announcement without going back at all.
And this is what in the end he decided to do.
The Sun Inn,
Ladingford.
June 24.
My dear Rector,
I expect you gathered from our talk the day before yesterday that I
was feeling dissatisfied with myself, and you must know that the
problem of occupying my time wisely before I am ordained has lately
been on my mind. I don't feel that I could honestly take up a
profession to which I had no intention of sticking, and though
Father Rowley recommended me to stay at home and work with the
village people I don't feel capable of doing that yet. If it was a
question of helping you by taking off your shoulders work that I
could do it would be another matter. But you've often said to me
that you had more time on your hands than you cared for since you
gave up coaching me for an Oxford scholarship, and so I don't think
I'm wrong in supposing that you would find it hard to discover for
me any parochial routine work. I'm not old enough yet to fish for
souls, and I have no confidence in my ability to hook them.
Besides, I think it would bore you if I started "missionizing" in
Wych-on-the-Wold.
I've settled therefore to try to get into the Order of St. George.
I don't think you know Father Burrowes personally, but I've always
heard that he does a splendid work among soldiers, and I'm hoping
that he will accept me as a novice.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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