This propaganda of beneficence, this constant attention to the moral and physical improvement of persons who have been neglected, is quite recent as a leading feature of religion, though indeed it seems to have formed some part of the Saviour’s original design.  It was unknown to the great preachers of the seventeenth century, whether Catholic or Protestant, and it offered but a shadowy attraction to my Father, who was the last of their disciples.  When Bossuet desired his hearers to listen to the cri de misere l’entour de nous, qui devrait nous fondre le coeur, he started a new thing in the world of theology.  We may search the famous ‘Rule and Exercises of Holy Living’ from cover to cover, and not learn that Jeremy Taylor would have thought that any activity of the district-visitor or the Salvation lassie came within the category of saintliness.

My Father, then, like an old divine, concentrated on thoughts upon the intellectual part of faith.  In his obsession about me, he believed that if my brain could be kept unaffected by any of the seductive errors of the age, and my heart centred in the adoring love of God, all would be well with me in perpetuity.  He was still convinced that by intensely directing my thoughts, he could compel them to flow in a certain channel, since he had not begun to learn the lesson, so mournful for saintly men of his complexion, that ’virtue would not be virtue, could it be given by one fellow creature to another’.  He had recognized, with reluctance, that holiness was not hereditary, but he continued to hope that it might be compulsive.  I was still ’the child of many prayers’, and it was not to be conceded that these prayers could remain unanswered.

The great panacea was now, as always, the study of the Bible, and this my Father never ceased to urge upon me.  He presented to me a copy of Dean Alford’s edition of the Greek New Testament, in four great volumes, and these he had had so magnificently bound in full morocco that the work shone on my poor shelf of sixpenny poets like a duchess among dairy maids.  He extracted from me a written promise that I would translate and meditate upon a portion of the Greek text every morning before I started for business.  This promise I presently failed to keep, my good intentions being undermined by an invincible ennui; I concealed the dereliction from him, and the sense that I was deceiving my Father ate into my conscience like a canker.  But the dilemma was now before me that I must either deceive my Father in such things or paralyse my own character.

My growing distaste for the Holy Scriptures began to occupy my thoughts, and to surprise as much as it scandalized me.  My desire was to continue to delight in those sacred pages, for which I still had an instinctive veneration.  Yet I could not but observe the difference between the zeal with which I snatched at a volume of Carlyle or Ruskin—­since these magicians were now first revealing themselves