
    »Which you suppose has biassed me.«
    »But that I am sure it has not,« cried Fanny.
    »Thank you for your good word, Fanny, but it is more than I would affirm
myself. On the contrary, the knowing that there was such a provision for me,
probably did bias me. Nor can I think it wrong that it should. There was no
natural disinclination to be overcome, and I see no reason why a man should make
a worse clergyman for knowing that he will have a competence early in life. I
was in safe hands. I hope I should not have been influenced myself in a wrong
way, and I am sure my father was too conscientious to have allowed it. I have no
doubt that I was biassed, but I think it was blamelessly.«
    »It is the same sort of thing,« said Fanny, after a short pause, »as for the
son of an admiral to go into the navy, or the son of a general to be in the
army, and nobody sees any thing wrong in that. Nobody wonders that they should
prefer the line where their friends can serve them best, or suspects them to be
less in earnest in it than they appear.«
    »No, my dear Miss Price, and for reasons good. The profession, either navy
or army, is its own justification. It has every thing in its favour; heroism,
danger, bustle, fashion. Soldiers and sailors are always acceptable in society.
Nobody can wonder that men are soldiers and sailors.«
    »But the motives of a man who takes orders with the certainty of preferment,
may be fairly suspected, you think?« said Edmund. »To be justified in your eyes,
he must do it in the most complete uncertainty of any provision.«
    »What! take orders without a living! No, that is madness indeed, absolute
madness!«
    »Shall I ask you how the church is to be filled, if a man is neither to take
orders with a living, nor without? No, for you certainly would not know what to
say. But I must beg some advantage to the clergyman from your own argument. As
he cannot be influenced by those feelings which you rank highly as temptation
and reward to the soldier and sailor in their choice of a profession, as
heroism, and noise, and fashion are all against him, he ought to be less liable
to the suspicion of wanting sincerity or good intentions in the choice of his.«
    »Oh! no doubt he is very sincere
