Men... are bettered and improved by trial, and refined out of broken hopes and blighted expectations.

The questioning spirit was first aroused in him by the disappointing fruit of evangelical doctrine which he found in Cheltenham as well as by intimacy with men of varied reading. - Groningen J. Further reading
Beardsley Christina.

Frederick William Robertson (3 February 1816 – 15 August 1853) known as Robertson of Brighton was an English divine. He did not find Oxford wholly congenial to his intensely earnest spirit but he read hard and as he afterwards said "Plato Aristotle Butler Thucydides Sterne Jonathan Edwards; passed like the iron atoms of the blood into my mental constitution. His sensitive nature was subjected to extreme suffering arising mainly from the opposition aroused by his sympathy with the revolutionary ideas of the 1848 epoch.