Better for them if their gates had been open to the pestilence! the
pestilence could but have killed the body, but this boy--this fore-front
fighter in the devil's battle--did ruin many an immortal soul. He
systematically, from the very first, called evil good and good evil,
put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. He openly threw aside the
admission of any one moral obligation. Never did some of the Roslyn
boys, to their dying day, forget the deep, intolerable, unfathomable
flood of moral turpitude and iniquity which he bore with him; a flood,
which seemed so irresistible, and the influence of such boys as Montagu
and Owen to stay its onrush seemed as futile as the weight of a feather
to bar the fury of a mountain stream. Eric might have done much, Duncan
might have done much, to aid the better cause, had they tried; but they
resisted at first but faintly, and then not at all, until they too were
swept away in the broadening tide of degeneracy and sin.
Big, burly, and strong, though much younger than he looked (if he stated
his age correctly, which I doubt), Brigson, being low in the school,
naturally became the bully and the Coryphaeus of all the lower
forms--the bully if they opposed him, the Coryphaeus if they accepted
his guidance.
Pages:
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257