II. Down, Boy, Down
It is possible that Father Halton of Princeton will be remembered as the liberator of the college chaplain. Even now, six months after his expulsion, the talk about him is tangential. Father Halton’s obsession with his faith may indeed have blunted his manners, and the conventions of the Academe he quite clearly did not understand; or if he did, he did not heed them. Sir Harold Nicolson in his study of Good Behaviour insists that the early Christians were persecuted not so much for their faith as their manners—the essence of bad manners being, for Sir Harold as for so many others, a disputatious zeal in propounding one’s views. Well, their manners notwithstanding, the Christians ended up making their point.
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