had been profoundly and permanently weakened.

He had a curious history. He was the only child of a doctor in a
Lincolnshire country town. His old parents had brought him up in
strict provincial ways, ignoring the boy's idiosyncrasies as much
as possible. They did not want an exceptional and abnormal son,
and they tried to put down his dreamy, self-conscious habits by
forcing him into the common, middle-class Evangelical groove. As
soon as he got to college, however, the brooding, gifted nature had
a moment of sudden and, as it seemed to the old people in Gainsborough,
most reprehensible expansion. Poems were sent to them, cut out of
one or the other of the leading periodicals, with their son's
initials appended, and articles of philosophical art-criticism,
published while the boy was still an undergraduate--which seemed
to the stern father everything that was sophistical and subversive.
For they treated Christianity itself as an open question, and
showed especially scant respect for the "Protestantism of the
Protestant religion." The father warned him grimly that he was not
going to spend his hard-earned savings on the support of a free-thinking
scribbler, and the young man wrote no more till just after he had
taken a double first in Greats. Then the publication of an article
in one of the leading Reviews on "The Ideals of Modern Culture,"
not only brought him a furious letter from home stopping all supplies,
but also lost him a probable fellowship. His college was one of
the narrowest and most backward in Oxford, and it was made perfectly
plain to him before the fellowship examination that be would not
be elected.

He left the college, took pupils for a while, then stood for a
vacant fellowship at St. Anselm's, the Liberal headquarters, and