It seems to me now profoundly strange, although I knew too little of the world to remark it at the time, that these incessant exhortations dealt, not with conduct, but with faith.  Earlier in this narrative I have noted how disdainfully, with what an austere pride, my Father refused to entertain the subject of personal shortcomings in my behaviour.  There were enough of them to blame, Heaven knows, but he was too lofty-minded a gentleman to dwell upon them, and, though by nature deeply suspicious of the possibility of frequent moral lapses, even in the very elect, he refused to stoop to anything like espionage.

I owe him a deep debt of gratitude for his beautiful faith in me in this respect, and now that I was alone in London, at this tender time of life, ‘exposed’, as they say, to all sorts of dangers, as defenceless as a fledgling that has been turned out of its nest, yet my Father did not, in his uplifted Quixotism, allow himself to fancy me guilty of any moral misbehaviour, but concentrated his fears entirely upon my faith.

’Let me know more of your inner light.  Does the candle of the Lord shine on your soul?’ This would be the ceaseless inquiry.  Or, again, ’Do you get any spiritual companionship with young men?  You passed over last Sunday without even a word, yet this day is the most interesting to me in your whole week.  Do you find the ministry of the Word pleasant, and, above all, profitable?  Does it bring your soul into exercise before God?  The Coming of Christ draweth nigh.  Watch, therefore and pray always, that you may be counted worthy to stand before the Son of Man.’

If I quote such passages as this from my Father’s letters to me, it is not that I seek entertainment in a contrast between his earnestness and the casuistical inattention and provoked distractedness of a young man to whom the real world now offered its irritating and stimulating scenes of animal and intellectual life, but to call out sympathy, and perhaps wonder, at the spectacle of so blind a Roman firmness as my Father’s spiritual attitude displayed.

His aspirations were individual and metaphysical.  At the present hour, so complete is the revolution which has overturned the puritanism of which he was perhaps the latest surviving type, that all classes of religious persons combine in placing philanthropic activity, the objective attitude, in the foreground.  It is extraordinary how far-reaching the change has been, so that nowadays a religion which does not combine with its subjective faith a strenuous labour for the good of others is hardly held to possess any religious principle worth proclaiming.