If any one was to do this, it was of course I who should first of all have ‘testified’.  But I had grown cautious about making confidences.  One never knew how awkwardly they might develop or to what disturbing excesses of zeal they might precipitously lead.  I was on my guard against my Father, who was, all the time, only too openly yearning that I should approach him for help, for comfort, for ghostly counsel.  Still ‘delicate’, though steadily gaining in solidity of constitution, I was liable to severe chills and to fugitive neuralgic pangs.  My Father was, almost maddeningly, desirous that these afflictions should be sanctified to me, and it was in my bed, often when I was much bowed in spirit by indisposition, that he used to triumph over me most pitilessly.  He retained the singular superstition, amazing in a man of scientific knowledge and long human experience, that all pains and ailments were directly sent by the Lord in chastisement for some definite fault, and not in relation to any physical cause.  The result was sometimes quite startling, and in particular I recollect that my stepmother and I exchanged impressions of astonishment at my Father’s action when Mrs. Goodyer, who was one of the ‘Saints’ and the wife of a young journeyman cobbler, broke her leg.  My Father, puzzled for an instant as to the meaning of this accident, since Mrs. Goodyer was the gentlest and most inoffensive of our church members, decided that it must be because she had made an idol of her husband, and he reduced the poor thing to tears by standing at her bed-side and imploring the Holy Spirit to bring this sin home to her conscience.

When, therefore, I was ill at home with one of my trifling disorders, the problem of my spiritual state always pressed violently upon my Father, and this caused me no little mental uneasiness.  He would appear at my bedside, with solemn solicitude, and sinking on his knees would earnestly pray aloud that the purpose of the Lord in sending me this affliction might graciously be made plain to me; and then, rising, and standing by my pillow, he would put me through a searching spiritual inquiry as to the fault which was thus divinely indicated to me as observed and reprobated on high.

It was not on points of moral behaviour that he thus cross-examined me; I think he disdained such ignoble game as that.  But uncertainties of doctrine, relinquishment of faith in the purity of this dogma or of that, lukewarm zeal in ’taking up the cross of Christ’, growth of intellectual pride,—­such were the insidious offences in consequence of which, as he supposed, the cold in the head or the toothache had been sent as heavenly messengers to recall my straggling conscience to its plain path of duty.

What made me very uncomfortable on these occasions was my consciousness that confinement to bed was hardly an affliction at all.  It kept me from the boredom of school, in a fire-lit bedroom at home, with my pretty, smiling stepmother lavishing luxurious attendance upon me, and it gave me long, unbroken days for reading.  I was awkwardly aware that I simply had not the effrontery to ‘approach the Throne of Grace’ with a request to know for what sin I was condemned to such a very pleasant disposition of my hours.