a great responsibility to which one is not equal.  It is a mere mistake, and a mistake which is even more reprehensible than the mistake of being over-persuaded into attempting a task for which one is not fitted.  One is given reason and common sense and prudence that one may use them, and to act contrary to their dictates because those who do not know you so well as you know yourself advise you cheerfully that it will probably be all right, is an act of criminal folly.  Heavy responsibilities are lightly assumed nowadays, because the temptations of power and publicity are very strong, and because too high a value is set upon worldly success.  It is a plainer and simpler duty for those who wish to act rightly, and who have formed a deliberate idea of own limitations, to refuse great positions humbly and seriously, if they know that they will be unequal to them.

Of course I knew that I should be reproached with indolence and even cowardice.  I knew that I should be supposed to be one of those consistently impracticable people who insist on going off at a tangent when the straight course lies before them.  That I should be relegated to the class of persons who have failed in life through some deep-seated defect of will.  The worst of a serious decision of the kind is that, whichever step one takes, one is sure to be blamed.  I saw all this with painful clearness, but it is better to be arraigned before the tribunal of other men’s consciences than to be condemned before one’s own.  It is better to refuse and be disappointed, than to accept and be disappointed.  Failure in the course marked out, in the event of acceptance, would have been disastrous, not only to myself but to the institution I was to be set to rule and guide.  Far better that the task should be entrusted to one who had no diffidence, no hesitation, but a sincere confidence in his power of dealing with the difficulties of the situation, and an ardent desire to grapple with them.

The only difficulty, if one believes very strongly, as I do, in a great and wise Providence that guides our path, is to interpret why the possibility of a great task is indicated to one if it is not intended that one should perform it.  But the essence of a true belief in the call of Providence seems to me to lie not in the rash acceptance of any invitation that happens to come in one’s way, but a stern and austere judgment of one’s own faculties and powers.  I have not the smallest doubt that Providence intended that this great task should be refused by me; my only difficulty is to see what to make of it, and why it was even suggested.  One lesson is that one must beware of personal vanity, another that one should not indulge in the temptation to desire important posts for any reason except the best:  the humble hope to do work that is useful and valuable.  If I had sternly repressed these tendencies at an earlier stage of life, this temptation would not have been necessary, nor the humiliation which inevitably succeeds it.