It was easy to become a preacher in those days

It was easy to become a preacher in those days; gospel halls and missions were everywhere; the greater the number of sects, the greater the opportunities for argument, Soon he was at it in the evenings, after he had put down the hod. Yet to have got religion would not have been enough. I think that what impelled and gave him a rough distinction was his commanding manner and the knowledge that he had a fine voice. He was a good singer, he loved the precise utterance of words. He loved language. All we ever knew was that a pious spinster lady in Kirbymoorside, heard of him and was impressed by his militant looks,his strenght and his voice. She got him off the builder's ladder and arranged hor him to be sent to a theological college in Nottingham.
But the flesh - and ambition- were as strong as the spirit in grandfather. He was courting the tailor's daughter and perhaps as a commomn workman he would not have get her. So at nineteen or twenty, on his prospects, he married her and went off with her to Nottingham as a student, and in a year was a father. He had only a small grant to live on. He got odd jobs. He told me he learned his Latin , Greek and Hebrew travelling on the Nottingham trams. He saved pennies, for it was part of the arrangement that he should pay back the cost of his education at so much a year in five years. My father had unhappy memories of a hungry chilhood, and one of great severity. But once his training was over grandfather triumphed. At twenty-two - the family legend is - he 'filled the Free Trade Hall i Manchester' with his harsh, denouncing sermons.
 Why was it , then, that after his success he was to be found in Bradford and then - getting smaller and smaller - in the little towns of the moos and the fells? It may have been that all his energy had been spent in getting out the working class and becoming a middle-class man.

Extract from the book “A cab in the door” by V.S. Pritchett