I not quite sure I understood following passage in chapter 3, after Mr. Norris has died and his living is to go to Edmund:

"There was another family living actually held for Edmund; but though this circumstance had made the arrangement somewhat easier to Sir Thomas’s conscience, he could not but feel it to be an act of injustice, and he earnestly tried to impress his eldest son with the same conviction, in the hope of its producing a better effect than anything he had yet been able to say or do."