Explore "The Missioner" by E. Phillips Oppenheim on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Macheson in those days felt himself rapidly growing older. An immeasurable gap seemed to lie between him and the eager young apostle who had plunged so light-heartedly into the stress of life. All that wonderful enthusiasm, that undaunted courage with which he had faced coldness and ridicule in the earlier days of his self-chosen vocation seemed to have left him. Some way, somehow, he seemed to have suffered shipwreck! There was poison in his system! Fight against it as he might -- and he did fight -- there were moments when memory turned the life which he had taken up so solemnly into the maddest, most fantastic fairy story. At such times his blood ran riot, the sweetness of a strange, unknown world seemed to be calling to him across the forbidden borders. Inaction wearied him horribly -- and, after all, it was inaction which Holderness had recommended as the best means of re-establishing himself in a saner and more normal attitude towards life!
"Look round a bit, old chap," he advised, "and think. Don't do anything in a hurry. You're young, shockingly young for any effective work. You can't teach before you understand. Life isn't such a sink of iniquity as you young prigs at Oxford professed to find it. See the best of it and the worst. You'll be able to put your finger on the weak spots quick enough."