Page:The Praises of Amida, 1907.djvu/104

, principles, and beliefs, which he had formed in his mind, were absolutely useless for all practical purposes, and so, renouncing all his former principles of life, he determined henceforth to be guided only by the convenience of the immediate Present which lay before his eyes. As a consequence, all his ideas and conceptions under went a radical change. He had hitherto looked upon the World as something solemn and marvellous; but now he deemed it to be absolutely worthless and trivial. He had hitherto deemed a moral life to be an essential, and that one should follow implicitly the teachings of the learned and the wise; he now came to feel that there was nothing in the world that had a claim upon his implicit obedience and faith. He had formerly been scrupulously exact in all money matters, he now squandered his wealth about him with a careless hand: his feelings towards women changed from a reverential deference to considering them merely as the instruments of a man's pleasures; and when, after leaving the University, he entered the Army,