One very practical and mischievous result of this religious feeling is the idealisation of all clergymen, as being the special messengers of, and the special means of communication with, the “Most High”.  The priest is surrounded by the halo of Deity.  The power that holds the keys of heaven and of hell becomes the object of reverence and of awe.  Far more lofty than any title bestowed by earthly monarch is that patent of nobility straight from the hand of the “King of kings”, which seems to give to the mortal something of the authority of the immortal, to crown the head of the priest with the diadem which belongs to those who are “kings and priests unto God”.  Swayed by these feelings, the position of a clergyman’s wife seems second only to that of the nun, and has therefore a wonderful attractiveness, an attractiveness in which the particular clergyman affected plays a very subordinate part; it is the “sacred office”, the nearness to “holy things”, the consecration involved, which seem to make the wife a nearer worshipper than those who do not partake in the immediate “services of the altar”—­it is all these that shed a glamor over the clerical life which attracts most those who are most apt to self-devotion, most swayed by imagination.  I know how incomprehensible this will seem to many of my readers, but it is a fact none the less, and the saddest pity of it is that the glamor is most over those whose brains are quick and responsive to all forms of noble emotions, all suggestions of personal self-sacrifice; and if such later rise to the higher emotions whose shadows have attracted them, and to that higher self-sacrifice whose whispers reached them in their early youth, then the false prophet’s veil is raised, and the life is either wrecked, or through storm-wind and surge of battling billows, with loss of mast and sail, is steered by firm hand into the port of a higher creed.

My mother, Minnie, and I passed the summer holidays at St. Leonards, and many a merry gallop had we over our favorite fields, I on a favorite black mare, Gipsy Queen, as full of life and spirits as I was myself, who danced gaily over ditch and hedge, thinking little of my weight, for I rode barely eight stone.  At the end of those, our last free summer holidays, we returned as usual to Harrow, and shortly afterwards I went to Switzerland with some dear friends of ours named Roberts.

Everyone about Manchester will remember Mr. Roberts, the solicitor, the “poor man’s lawyer”.  Close friend of Ernest Jones, and hand-in-hand with him through all his struggles, Mr. Roberts was always ready to fight a poor man’s battle for him without fee, and to champion any worker unfairly dealt with.  He worked hard in the agitation which saved women from working in the mines, and I have heard him tell how he had seen them toiling, naked to the waist, with short petticoats barely reaching to their knees, rough, foul-tongued, brutalised out of all womanly decency and grace; and how he had seen little children