to me—­and the increasing languor with which I took up Alford for my daily ‘passage’.  Of course, although I did not know it, and believed my reluctance to be sinful, the real reason why I now found the Bible so difficult to read was my familiarity with its contents.  These had the colourless triteness of a story retold a hundred times.  I longed for something new, something that would gratify curiosity and excite surprise.  Whether the facts and doctrines contained in the Bible were true or false was not the question that appealed to me; it was rather that they had been presented to me so often and had sunken into me so far that, as someone has said, they ’lay bedridden in the dormitory of the soul’, and made no impression of any kind upon me.

It often amazed me, and I am still unable to understand the fact, that my Father, through his long life—­or until nearly the close of it—­continued to take an eager pleasure in the text of the Bible.  As I think I have already said, before he reached middle life, he had committed practically the whole of it to memory, and if started anywhere, even in a Minor Prophet, he could go on without a break as long as ever he was inclined for that exercise.  He, therefore, at no time can have been assailed by the satiety of which I have spoken, and that it came so soon to me I must take simply as an indication of difference of temperament.  It was not possible, even through the dark glass of correspondence, to deceive his eagle eye in this matter, and his suspicions accordingly took another turn.  He conceived me to have become, or to be becoming, a victim of ’the infidelity of the age.’

In this new difficulty, he appealed to forms of modern literature by the side of which the least attractive pages of Leviticus or Deuteronomy struck me as even thrilling.  In particular, he urged upon me a work, then just published, called The Continuity of Scripture by William Page Wood, afterwards Lord Chancellor Hatherley.  I do not know why he supposed that the lucubrations of an exemplary lawyer, delivered in a style that was like the trickling of sawdust, would succeed in rousing emotions which the glorious rhetoric of the Orient had failed to awaken; but Page Wood had been a Sunday School teacher for thirty years, and my Father was always unduly impressed by the acumen of pious barristers.

As time went on, and I grew older and more independent in mind, my Father’s anxiety about what he called ’the pitfalls and snares which surround on every hand the thoughtless giddy youth of London’ became extremely painful to himself.  By harping in private upon these ’pitfalls’—­which brought to my imagination a funny rough woodcut in an old edition of Bunyan, where a devil was seen capering over a sort of box let neatly into the ground—­ he worked himself up into a frame of mind which was not a little irritating to his hapless correspondent, who was now ‘snared’ indeed, limed by the pen like a bird by the feet, and could not by any means escape.  To a peck or a flutter from the bird the implacable fowler would reply: