He saw the book he wanted to write before him, in his mental vision, much more distinctly than ever, but the idea of beginning it impetuously, and hurling it off hot and glowing week by week, had faded away like a dream.
This long afternoon, spent face to face with a project born of his own brain but yesterday, yet already so much bigger than himself, was really a most fruitful time for the young clergyman.

The lessons which cut most deeply into our consciousness are those we learn from our children.
Theron, in this first day's contact with the offspring of his fancy, found revealed to him an unsuspected and staggering truth.

It was that he was an extremely ignorant and rudely untrained young man, whose pretensions to intellectual authority among any educated people would be laughed at with deserved contempt.
Strangely enough, after he had weathered the first shock, this discovery did not dismay Theron Ware.

The very completeness of the conviction it carried with it, saturated his mind with a feeling as if the fact had really been known to him all along.

And there came, too, after a little, an almost pleasurable sense of the importance of the revelation.