not alluding to dogma. I implicitly take that from the Church. I mean life's little quandaries. Years ago, I used to consult my confessor. I never got an apt or an illuminating or even an intelligent response. Time was short: there were a lot of people waiting outside the confessional: or His Reverence had been interrupted in the middle of his Office. An inapplicable platitude was pitched at me; and of course I went away in a rage. Later, I grew to think that a man ought not to shirk his personal responsibility: that he ought to be prepared to decide for himself and face the consequence. I gave up consulting the clergy, except upon technical points. I do my best, by myself; and I pray God to be merciful to my mistakes. I earnestly desire to do His Will in all things: but I often fail. For example, I can't stand pain. It makes me savage, literally. I don't bear chastisement submissively. I confess all my failures. I was lacking in filial respect towards my parents. I have been irreverent and disobedient to my superiors. I have argued with them, instead of meekly submitting my will to theirs. I have given them nicknames, labels that stick, that annoy them by revealing mental and corporeal characteristics of which they are not proud. For example, I said that the violet legs of my college-rector were formed like little Jacobean[Pg 50] communion-rails; and I nicknamed a certain domestic prelate the Greek for Muddy-Mind, βορβοροθυμοϛ. I haven't done these things out of really vicious wanton cruelty: but out of pride in my own powers of penetration and perception, or out of culpable frivolity. I confess that I have been wanting in love, patience, sincerity, justice, towards my neighbour. Selfishness, self-will, and a fatuous desire to be distinct from other people, have caused these breaches of God's law. That desire nearly always is unconscious or subconscious: seldom deliberate. I am unkind with my bitter tongue and pen: for example, I made a jibe of the scrofula of a publisher. I am impatient with mental or natural weakness: for example I brought tears into a schoolboy's eyes by my remarks when he recorded Edward III.'s words to Philippa in reference to the six burgesses of Calais as 'Dam, I can deny you nothing, but I wish you had been otherwhere.' I am insincere, sinfully not criminally. I mean that I delight in bewildering others by posing as a monument of complex erudition, when I really am a very silly simpleton. I am unjust, in my readiness to judge on insufficient evidence: by my habit of believing all I hear,—that's a tremendously salient fault of mine:—and by telling or repeating detrimental stories. I confess the sin of detraction. I have told improper stories: not of the ordinary revolting kind, but those which are exquisite or witty or
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