There is no need for them to preach hell fire and damnation, but throughout all their preaching, making it a real thing and a thing of the most pressing moment, must ring that just and inevitable word, Retribution.

In a moral universe, selfishness involves, rightly and inevitably, suffering--suffering self-sown, self-determined, and self-merited.
He is the last man in the world from whom one would expect such teaching to emanate.

He seems, in his social moments, a scholar who is scarcely aware of humanity in his delicious pursuit of pure truth, a man who inhabits the faery realm of ideas, and drinks the milk of Paradise.

But approach him on other ground and you find, though his serenity never deserts him, though he is always imperturbable and unassertive, that his interest in humanity and the practical problems of humanity is as vivid and consuming as that of any social reformer.
There, in Oxford, among his books, and carrying on his duties as Principal of Mansfield College, Dr.Selbie, back from holidays spent in watching the great working world and listening to the teachers of that world, finds himself not alarmed, but anxious.

The voice of religion, he feels, is not making itself heard, and the voices of churches are making only a discord.