LITTLE boys from quiet, pious households, commonly found, in those days, a chasm yawning at the feet of their inexperience when they arrived at Boarding-school.  But the fact that I still slept at home on Saturday and Sunday nights preserved me, I fancy, from many surprises.  There was a crisis, but it was broad and slow for me.  On the other hand, for my Father I am inclined to think that it was definite and sharp.  Permission for me to desert the parental hearth, even for five days in certain weeks, was tantamount, in his mind, to admitting that the great scheme, so long caressed, so passionately fostered, must in its primitive bigness be now dropped.

The Great Scheme (I cannot resist giving it the mortuary of capital letters) had been, as my readers know, that I should be exclusively and consecutively dedicated through the whole of my life, ’to the manifest and uninterrupted and uncompromised service of the Lord’.  That had been the aspiration of my Mother, and at her death she had bequeathed that desire to my Father, like a dream of the Promised Land.  In their ecstasy, my parents had taken me, as Elkanah and Hannah had long ago taken Samuel, from their mountain-home of Ramathaim-Zophim down to sacrifice to the Lord of Hosts in Shiloh.  They had girt me about with a linen ephod, and had hoped to leave me there; ‘as long as he liveth,’ they had said, ‘he shall be lent unto the Lord.’

Doubtless in the course of these fourteen years it had occasionally flashed upon my Father, as he overheard some speech of mine, or detected some idiosyncrasy, that I was not one of those whose temperament points them out as ultimately fitted for an austere life of religion.  What he hoped, however, was that when the little roughnesses of childhood were rubbed away, there would pass a deep mellowness over my soul.  He had a touching way of condoning my faults of conduct, directly after reproving them, and he would softly deprecate my frailty, saying, in a tone of harrowing tenderness, ‘Are you not the child of many prayers?’ He continued to think that prayer, such passionate importunate prayer as his, must prevail.  Faith could move mountains; should it not be able to mould the little ductile heart of a child, since he was sure that his own faith was unfaltering?  He had yearned and waited for a son who should be totally without human audacities, who should be humble, pure, not troubled by worldly agitations, a son whose life should be cleansed and straightened from above, in custodiendo sermones Dei; in whom everything should be sacrificed except the one thing needful to salvation.

How such a marvel of lowly piety was to earn a living had never, I think, occurred to him.  My Father was singularly indifferent about money.  Perhaps his notion was that, totally devoid of ambitions as I was to be, I should quietly become adult, and continue his ministrations among the poor of the Christian flock.  He had some dim dream, I think, of there being just enough for us all without my having to take up any business or trade.  I believe it was immediately after my first term at boarding-school, that I was a silent but indignant witness of a conversation between my Father and Mr. Thomas Brightwen, my stepmother’s brother, who was a banker in one of the Eastern Counties.