It was while I was thus under the full spell of the Shakespearean necromancy that a significant event occurred.  My Father took me up to London for the first time since my infancy.  Our visit was one of a few days only, and its purpose was that we might take part in some enormous Evangelical conference.  We stayed in a dark hotel off the Strand, where I found the noise by day and night very afflicting.  When we were not at the conference, I spent long hours, among crumbs and bluebottle flies, in the coffee-room of this hotel, my Father being busy at the British Museum and the Royal Society.  The conference was held in an immense hall, somewhere in the north of London.  I remember my short-sighted sense of the terrible vastness of the crowd, with rings on rings of dim white faces fading in the fog.  My Father, as a privileged visitor, was obliged with seats on the platform, and we were in the heart of the first really large assemblage of persons that I had ever seen.

The interminable ritual of prayers, hymns and addresses left no impression on my memory, but my attention was suddenly stung into life by a remark.  An elderly man, fat and greasy, with a voice like a bassoon, and an imperturbable assurance, was denouncing the spread of infidelity, and the lukewarmness of professing Christians, who refrained from battling with the wickedness at their doors.  They were like the Laodiceans, whom the angel of the Apocalypse spewed out of his mouth.  For instance, who, the orator asked, is now rising to check the outburst of idolatry in our midst?  ‘At this very moment,’ he went on, ’there is proceeding, unreproved, a blasphemous celebration of the birth of Shakespeare, a lost soul now suffering for his sins in hell!’ My sensation was that of one who has suddenly been struck on the head; stars and sparks beat around me.  If some person I loved had been grossly insulted in my presence, I could not have felt more powerless in anguish.  No one in that vast audience raised a word of protest, and my spirits fell to their nadir.  This, be it remarked, was the earliest intimation that had reached me of the tercentenary of the Birth at Stratford, and I had not the least idea what could have provoked the outburst of outraged godliness.

But Shakespeare was certainly in the air.  When we returned to the hotel that noon, my Father of his own accord reverted to the subject.  I held my breath, prepared to endure fresh torment.  What he said, however, surprised and relieved me.  ‘Brother So and So,’ he remarked, ’was not, in my judgement, justified in saying what he did.  The uncovenanted mercies of God are not revealed to us.  Before so rashly speaking of Shakespeare as “a lost soul in hell”, he should have remembered how little we know of the poet’s history.  The light of salvation was widely disseminated in the land during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and we cannot know that Shakespeare did not accept the atonement of Christ in simple faith before he came to die.’  The concession will today seem meagre to gay and worldly spirits, but words cannot express how comfortable it was to me.  I gazed at my Father with loving eyes across the cheese and celery, and if the waiter had not been present I believe I might have hugged him in my arms.