Philip’s confirmation and his decision to seek ordination are the culmination of a religious revival shaped by school discipline, the influence of Mr. Perkins, and Philip’s effort to give meaning to his club-foot. At the Cathedral ceremony, he turns the limp he had feared displaying into an offering to God. The resolve feels absolute, but its intensity cannot last: the fervour ebbs, and Philip eventually leaves the faith that had once seemed to define his future.

Religious Preparation

The event follows a renewed period of devotion at school. Earlier, Philip’s restless appetite for new experiences had led him to join the Bible League: he sent London his application and half a crown, then received a calendar of daily readings and a printed prayer. His nightly Bible reading did not endure. Later, as he approached confirmation, his religious concern revived under Mr. Perkins’s influence, and he reproached himself for having fallen away. The prospect of damnation weighed heavily on him; he believed in everlasting punishment more intensely than in eternal happiness.

Mr. Perkins treated confirmation as a first, consciously serious step in a boy’s life. Though occupied with a busy day, he made time to speak individually with those he prepared, hoping to reach their inner lives and kindle in them his own devotion. He saw in Philip’s temperament the possibility of a passion like his own. In their meetings, Philip listened with concentrated attention, moved less by a wish to analyze religious mysteries than by the force of feeling they stirred. His reverence for Mr. Perkins, already deepened by the kindness the headmaster had shown him, made this preparation a personal attachment as well as instruction.

The Question of His Club-Foot

The prospect of ordination gave Philip a future to imagine, but his body remained a source of shame. When Mr. Perkins noted that Philip’s choice of professions would be limited because he could not pursue work requiring physical activity, Philip reddened. The headmaster then challenged his response to the disability, asking whether he had considered thanking God for it. Philip remembered having prayed for months for his foot to be healed, trusting that God could cure him as he had cured the sick in scripture.

Mr. Perkins proposed a religious interpretation of the condition: if Philip accepted it not in rebellion but as a cross he had been given strength to bear, it could become a sign of divine favour rather than a cause of misery. Philip hated discussing the subject, and the headmaster let him go. Yet the exchange stayed with him. As confirmation approached, Philip’s attention turned to the ceremony and to the possibility of surrendering himself wholly to God. His resolution to be ordained emerged from this mingling of belief, bodily vulnerability, and desire for self-sacrifice.

The Confirmation at the Cathedral

The ceremony brought Philip’s inward commitment into public view. He dreaded having to walk alone up the chancel in front of the school and the strangers who had come to watch their sons being confirmed. The fear was specific: he would have to display his limp before a congregation. When the moment arrived, however, he found that he could accept the humiliation joyfully. He limped beneath the Cathedral’s lofty vaulting, small in scale against the building, and consciously offered his deformity to the God he believed loved him.

This act gives the confirmation its decisive meaning in Philip’s story. The ceremony is not simply the formal completion of religious instruction; it becomes a public enactment of the idea Mr. Perkins had offered him. What Philip had experienced as an unwanted limitation, and had once implored God to remove, he now treats as material for religious surrender. His resolve to enter the ministry belongs to the same peak of feeling: he aspires to perfection and wants to devote himself entirely to God.

The Fading of the Resolve

The exaltation does not last. Philip cannot remain for long in what the narration presents as the rarefied heights of religious emotion. The very strength of his desire for self-sacrifice exhausts him, and a sudden spiritual aridity takes the place of the rapture. Although he continues his religious exercises punctually at first, they become formal; the sense of God’s surrounding presence recedes, and fear of hell no longer revives the dead passion.

This decline does not erase what confirmation meant at the time. It shows instead how completely Philip’s intentions can be shaped by intense feeling and how poorly that intensity sustains a permanent vocation. His decision to be ordained follows an experience in which he gives his club-foot a spiritual meaning and imagines a life of service, but the fervour that supports the decision fades. The scene therefore marks both the high point of his adolescent faith and the beginning of its dissolution, a change that will eventually leave him open to a different understanding of himself and his future.