Endeavoring to find the spiritual plenipotentiary

From Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

To merge his life in the common tide of other lives was harder for him than any fasting or prayer and it was his constant failure to do this to his own satisfaction which caused in his soul at least a sensation of spiritual dryness together with a growth of doubts and scruples. His soul traversed a period of desolation in which the sacraments themselves seemed to have turned into dryed up sources.