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Pleasant Pathways, Or, Persuasives to Early Piety
Pleasant Pathways Or Persuasives to Early Piety Author:Daniel Wise Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: OHAPTEE III. THE SOCIAL HAZARDS OF A SINFUL LIFE. A Little more than a century ago a young man named William Dodd graduated with eclat at Cambridge Univers... more »ity, England. Being the son of a clergyman he had enjoyed the benefits of early religious training. Having the advantages of a fine person, a superior mind, a thorough education, and good family connections, his life-prospects were as bright and promising as those of any young man in his class. Who could have predicted that such a fair beginning would be succeeded by an ignoble end? Yet so it was. For a time this young man's path was sunlit, and his hopes bloomed out into beautiful successes. Having entered the ministry he soon became singularly popular. His fine physique, charming voice, elegant manners, and eloquent utterances, led admiring thousands to throng his church. Nobles, wits, andhighborn ladies heard him with delight, and filled hia ears with their flatteries. Preferments followed in the wake of popularity. Lectureships, college titles, a prebend's stall, a royal chaplaincy, a vicarage, and the tutorship of the young Earl of Chesterfield, were given him. The highest honors of his exalted profession hung like ripening fruit within his grasp. Alas for this favored child of Providence! His priestly robes concealed a worldling's heart. An insane passion for the society of the wealthy, the titled, and the nobly born, burned like a consuming flame in his breast. He yielded himself to its impulses, and it beguiled him into a style of living, the expenses of which preyed like locusts on his income, and made him poor in the midst of plenty. Eeason pleaded and conscience protested against this passion in vain. It was his Calypso. Syren-like, it fascinated him, and drew him farther and farther from the line of duty,...« less