The letter, the only too-confidently expected letter, would lie on the table as I descended to breakfast.  It would commonly be, of course, my only letter, unless tempered by a cosy and chatty note from my dear and comfortable stepmother, dealing with such perfectly tranquillizing subjects as the harvest of roses in the garden or the state of health of various neighbours.  But the other, the solitary letter, in its threatening whiteness, with its exquisitely penned address—­there it would lie awaiting me, destroying the taste of the bacon, reducing the flavour of the tea to insipidity.  I might fatuously dally with it, I might pretend not to observe it, but there it lay.  Before the morning’s exercise began, I knew that it had to be read, and what was worse, that it had to be answered.  Useless the effort to conceal from myself what it contained.  Like all its precursors, like all its followers, it would insist, with every variety of appeal, on a reiterated declaration that I still fully intended, as in the days of my earliest childhood, ‘to be on the Lord’s side’ in everything.

In my replies, I would sometimes answer precisely as I was desired to answer; sometimes I would evade the queries, and write about other things; sometimes I would turn upon the tormentor, and urge that my tender youth might be let alone.  It little mattered what form of weakness I put forth by way of baffling my Father’s direct, firm, unflinching strength.  To an appeal against the bondage of a correspondence of such unbroken solemnity I would receive—­with what a paralysing promptitude!—­such a reply as this:—­

’Let me say that the ‘solemnity’ you complain of has only been the expression of tender anxiousness of a father’s heart, that his only child, just turned out upon the world, and very far out of his sight and hearing, should be walking in God’s way.  Recollect that it is not now as it was when you were at school, when we had personal communication with you at intervals of five days—­we now know absolutely nothing of you, save from your letters, and if they do not indicate your spiritual prosperity, the deepest solicitudes of our hearts have nothing to feed on.  But I will try henceforth to trust you, and lay aside my fears; for you are worthy of my confidence; and your own God and your father’s God will hold you with His right hand.’

Over such letters as these I am not ashamed to say that I sometimes wept; the old paper I have just been copying shows traces of tears shed upon it more than forty years ago, tears commingled of despair at my own feebleness, distraction, at my want of will, pity for my Father’s manifest and pathetic distress.  He would ‘try henceforth to trust’ me, he said.  Alas! the effort would be in vain; after a day or two, after a hollow attempt to write of other things, the importunate subject would recur; there would intrude again the inevitable questions about the Atonement and the Means of Grace, the old anxious fears lest I was ‘yielding’ my intimacy to agreeable companions who were not ‘one with me in Christ’, fresh passionate entreaties to be assured, in every letter, that I was walking in the clear light of God’s presence.