My first impressions have not undergone much change. The young men are as good as gold, but oh dear, the gold is the gold of Mediocritas. The only thing that kindles a mild phosphorescence, a dim luminousness as of a bedside match-tray in the dark, in their eyes is when they hear of somebody's what they call conspicuous moderation. I suppose every deacon carries a bishop's apron in his sponge-bag or an archbishop's crosier among his golf-clubs. But in this lot I simply cannot perceive even an embryonic archdeacon. I rather expected when I came here that I should be up against men of brains and culture. I was looking forward to being trampled on by ruthless logicians. I hoped that latitudinarian opinions were going to make my flesh creep and my hair stand on end. But nothing of the kind. I've always got rather angry when I've read caricatures of curates in books with jokes about goloshes and bath-buns. Yet honestly, half my fellows might easily serve as models to any literary cheapjack of the moment. I'm willing to admit that probably most of them will develop under the pressure of life, but a few are bound to remain what they are. I know we get some eccentrics and hotheads and a few sensual knaves among the Catholic clergy, but we do not get these anæmic creatures. I feel that before I came here I knew nothing about the Church of England. I've been thrown all my life with people who had rich ideas and violent beliefs and passionate sympathies and deplorable hatreds, so that when I come into contact with what I am bound to accept as the typical English parson in the making I am really appalled. I've been wondering why the Bishop of Silchester told me to come here. Did he really think that the spectacle of moderation in the moulding was good for me? Did he fancy that I was a young zealot who required putting in his place? Or did he more subtly realize from the account I gave him of Malford that I was in danger of becoming moderate, even luke-warm, even tepid, perhaps even stone-cold? Did he grasp that I must owe something to party as well as mankind, if I was to give up anything worth giving to mankind? But perhaps in my egoism I am attributing much more to his lordship's paternal interest, a keener glance to his episcopal eye, than I have any right to attribute. Perhaps, after all, he merely saw in me a young man who had missed the advantages of Oxford, etc., and wished out of regard for my future to provide me with the best substitute.