On the Christmas following my eighteenth birthday, a little Mission Church in which Minnie was much interested, was opened near Albert Square.  My High Church enthusiasm was in full bloom, and the services in this little Mission Church were “high”, whereas those in all the neighboring churches were “low”.  A Mr. Hoare, an intensely earnest man, was working there in most devoted fashion, and was glad to welcome any aid; we decorated his church, worked ornaments for it, and thought we were serving God when we were really amusing ourselves in a small place where our help was over-estimated, and where the clergy, very likely unconsciously, flattered us for our devotion.  Among those who helped to carry on the services there, was a young undermaster of Stockwell Grammar School, the rev.  Frank Besant, a Cambridge man, who had passed as 28th wrangler in his year, and who had just taken orders.  At Easter we were again at Albert Square, and devoted much time to the little church, decking it on Easter Eve with soft yellow tufts of primrose blossom, and taking much delight in the unbounded admiration bestowed on the dainty spring blossoms by the poor who crowded in.  I made a lovely white cross for the super-altar with camelias and azaleas and white geraniums, but after all it was not really as spring-like, as suitable for a “Resurrection”, as the simple sweet wild flowers, still dewy from their nests in field and glade and lane.

That Easter was memorable to me for another cause.  It saw waked and smothered my first doubt.  That some people did doubt the historical accuracy of the Bible I knew, for one or two of the Harrow masters were friends of Colenso, the heretic Bishop of Natal, but fresh from my Patristic studies, I looked on heretics with blind horror, possibly the stronger from its very vagueness, and its ignorance of what it feared.  My mother objected to my reading controversial books which dealt with the points at issue between Christianity and Freethought, and I did not care for her favorite Stanley, who might have widened my views, regarding him (on the word of Pusey) as “unsound in the faith once delivered to the saints”.  I had read Pusey’s book on “Daniel the prophet”, and, knowing nothing of the criticisms he attacked, I felt triumphant at his convincing demonstrations of their error, and felt sure that none but the wilfully blind could fail to see how weak were the arguments of the heretic writers.  That stately preface of his was one of my favorite pieces of reading, and his dignified defence against all novelties of “that which must be old because it is eternal, and must be unchangeable because it is true”, at once charmed and satisfied me.  The delightful vagueness of Stanley, which just suited my mother’s broad views, because it was vague and beautiful, was denounced by Pusey—­not unwarrantably—­ as that “variegated use of words which destroys all definiteness of meaning”.  When she would bid me not be uncharitable to those with whom I differed in matters of religion, I would answer in his words, that “charity to error is treason to truth”, and that to speak out the truth unwaveringly as it was revealed, was alone “loyalty to God and charity to the souls of men”.