help by sewing in laces, or by doing some trifle in aid, she would kiss me and bid me run to my books or my play, telling me that her only pleasure in life was caring for her “treasure”.  Alas! how lightly we take the self-denying labor that makes life so easy, ere yet we have known what life means when the protecting mother-wing is withdrawn.  So guarded and shielded had been my childhood and youth from every touch of pain and anxiety that love could bear for me, that I never dreamed that life might be a heavy burden, save as I saw it in the poor I was sent to help; all the joy of those happy years I took, not ungratefully I hope, but certainly with as glad unconsciousness of anything rare in it as I took the sunlight.  Passionate love, indeed, I gave to my darling, but I never knew all I owed her till I passed out of her tender guardianship, till I left my mother’s home.  Is such training wise?  I am not sure.  It makes the ordinary roughnesses of life come with so stunning a shock, when one goes out into the world, that one is apt to question whether some earlier initiation into life’s sterner mysteries would not be wiser for the young.  Yet it is a fair thing to have that joyous youth to look back upon, and at least it is a treasury of memory that no thief can steal in the struggles of later life.

During those happy years my brain was given plenty of exercise.  I used to keep a list of the books I read, so that I might not neglect my work; and finding a “Library of the Fathers” on the shelves, I selected that for one piece de resistance.  Soon those strange mystic writers won over me a great fascination, and I threw myself ardently into a study of the question:  “Where is now the Catholic Church?”.  I read Pusey, and Liddon, and Keble, with many another of that school, and many of the seventeenth century English divines.  I began to fast—­to the intense disapproval of my mother, who cared for my health far more than for all the Fathers the Church could boast of—­to use the sign of the cross, to go to weekly communion.  Indeed, the contrast I found between my early Evangelical training and the doctrines of the Primitive Christian Church would have driven me over to Rome, had it not been for the proofs afforded by Pusey and his co-workers, that the English Church might be Catholic although non-Roman.  But for them I should most certainly have joined the Papal Communion; for if the Church of the early centuries be compared with Rome and with Geneva, there is no doubt that Rome shows marks of primitive Christianity of which Geneva is entirely devoid.  I became content when I found that the practices and doctrines of the Anglican Church could be knitted on to those of the martyrs and confessors of the early Church, for it had not yet struck me that the early Church might itself be challenged.  To me, at that time, the authority of Jesus was supreme and unassailable; his apostles were his infallible messengers; Clement of Rome, Polycarp, and Barnabas,