He sought his rooms, he loved to hear his discourses, he called himself his pupil and his son, and was the most regular and enthusiastic attender of his lectures and disputations.
And now he had taken a new and forward step.

Suddenly he seemed to have been launched upon a tide with which hitherto he had only dallied and played.

He was pushing out his bark into deeper waters, and already felt as though the cables binding him to the shores of safety and ease were completely parted.
It was in part due to the magnetic personality of Garret that this thing had come to pass.

When Dalaber left Oxford it was with no idea that it would be a crisis in his life.

He wished, out of curiosity, to be present at the strange ceremony to be enacted in St.Paul's Churchyard; and the knowledge that Clarke was going to London for a week on some private business gave the finishing touch to his resolution.
But it was not until he sat with Thomas Garret in his dark lodgings, hearing the rush of the river beneath him, looking into the fiery eyes of the priest, and hearing the fiery words which fell from his lips, that Dalaber thoroughly understood to what he had pledged himself when first he had uttered the fateful words, "I will be a member of the Association of Christian Brothers." True, Clarke had, on their way to town, spoken to him of a little community, pledged to seek to distribute the life-giving Word of God to those who were hungering for it, and to help each in his measure to let the light, now shrouded beneath a mass of observances which had lost their original meaning to the unlettered people, shine out in its primitive brilliance and purity; but Dalaber had only partially understood the significance of all this.
Clarke was the man of thought and devotion.