’You charge me with being suspicious, and I fear I cannot deny the charge.  But I can appeal to your own sensitive and thoughtful mind for a considerable allowance.  My deep and tender love for you; your youth and inexperience; the examples of other young men; your distance from parental counsel; our absolute and painful ignorance of all the details of your daily life, except what you yourself tell us:—­try to throw yourself into the standing of a parent, and say if my suspiciousness is unreasonable.  I rejoicingly acknowledge that from all I see you are pursuing a virtuous, steady, worthy course.  One good thing my suspiciousness does:—­ever and anon it brings out from you assurances, which greatly refresh and comfort me.  And again, it carries me ever to God’s Throne of Grace on your behalf Holy Job suspected that his sons might have sinned, and cursed God in their heart.  Was not his suspicion much like mine, grounded on the same reasons and productive of the same results?  For it drove him to God in intercession.  I have adduced the example of this Patriarch before, and he will endure being looked at again.’

In fact, Holy Job continued to be frequently looked at, and for this Patriarch I came to experience a hatred which was as venomous as it was undeserved.  But what youth of eighteen would willingly be compared with the sons of Job?  And indeed, for my part, I felt much more like that justly exasperated character, Elihu the Buzite, of the kindred of Ram.

As time went on, the peculiar strain of inquisition was relaxed, and I endured fewer and fewer of the torments of religious correspondence.  Nothing abides in one tense projection, and my Father, resolute as he was, had other preoccupations.  His orchids, his microscope, his physiological researches, his interpretations of prophecy, filled up the hours of his active and strenuous life, and, out of his sight, I became not indeed out of his mind, but no longer ceaselessly in the painful foreground of it.  Yet, although the reiteration of his anxiety might weary him a little as it had wearied me well nigh to groans of despair, there was not the slightest change in his real attitude towards the subject or towards me.

I have already had occasion to say that he had nothing of the mystic or the visionary about him.  At certain times and on certain points, he greatly desired that signs and wonders, such as had astonished and encouraged the infancy of the Christian Church, might again be vouchsafed to it, but he did not pretend to see such miracles himself, nor give the slightest credence to others who asserted that they did.  He often congratulated himself on the fact that although his mind dwelt so constantly on spiritual matters it was never betrayed into any suspension of the rational functions.