As I have said that this anecdote was thought worth repeating, I ought to proceed to say that there was, so far as I can recollect, none of that flattery of childhood which is so often merely a backhanded way of indulging the vanity of parents.  My Mother, indeed, would hardly have been human if she had not occasionally entertained herself with the delusion that her solitary duckling was a cygnet.  This my Father did not encourage, remarking, with great affection, and chucking me under the chin, that I was ‘a nice little ordinary boy’.  My Mother, stung by this want of appreciation, would proceed so far as to declare that she believed that in future times the F.R.S. would be chiefly known as his son’s father! (This is a pleasantry frequent in professional families.)

To this my Father, whether convinced or not, would make no demur, and the couple would begin to discuss, in my presence, the direction which my shining talents would take.  In consequence of my dedication to ‘the Lord’s Service’, the range of possibilities was much restricted.  My Father, who had lived long in the Tropics, and who nursed a perpetual nostalgia for ’the little lazy isles where the trumpet-orchids blow’, leaned towards the field of missionary labour.  My Mother, who was cold about foreign missions, preferred to believe that I should be the Charles Wesley of my age, ‘or perhaps’, she had the candour to admit, ‘merely the George Whitefield’.  I cannot recollect the time when I did not understand that I was going to be a minister of the Gospel.

It is so generally taken for granted that a life strictly dedicated to religion is stiff and dreary, that I may have some difficulty in persuading my readers that, as a matter of fact, in these early days of my childhood, before disease and death had penetrated to our slender society, we were always cheerful and often gay.  My parents were playful with one another, and there were certain stock family jests which seldom failed to enliven the breakfast table.  My Father and Mother lived so completely in the atmosphere of faith, and were so utterly convinced of their intercourse with God, that, so long as that intercourse was not clouded by sin, to which they were delicately sensitive, they could afford to take the passing hour very lightly.  They would even, to a certain extent, treat the surroundings of their religion as a subject of jest, joking very mildly and gently about such things as an attitude at prayer or the nature of a supplication.  They were absolutely indifferent to forms.  They prayed, seated in their chairs, as willingly as, reversed, upon their knees; no ritual having any significance for them.  My Mother was sometimes extremely gay, laughing with a soft, merry sound.  What I have since been told of the guileless mirth of nuns in a convent has reminded me of the gaiety of my parents during my early childhood.