If Hopkins had remained true to this vocation, our story would be different. But in his late teens he began to have a crisis of faith and came to “consider the harmless joys of life which had been barred to me.” He made up his mind to quit the ministry, preaching to his congregation of nearly eight hundred one last sermon, a heretical jeremiad “against hell fire, against infant damnation, against the discipline I knew. It even questioned the story of the creation and of Jonah and the whale.” The congregants left in stunned silence, and the next day his mother disowned him. Hopkins was now
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Dramatic character arc:D
