Cross-examination by letter slackened, but on occasion of my brief and usually summer visits to Devonshire I suffered acutely from my Father’s dialectical appetites.  He was surrounded by peasants, on whom the teeth of his arguments could find no purchase.  To him, in that intellectual Abdera, even an unwilling youth from London offered opportunities of pleasant contest.  He would declare himself ready, nay eager, for argument.  With his mental sleeves turned up, he would adopt a fighting attitude, and challenge me to a round on any portion of the Scheme of Grace.  His alacrity was dreadful to me, his well-aimed blows fell on what was rather a bladder or a pillow than a vivid antagonist.

He was, indeed, most unfairly handicapped,—­I was naked, he in a suit of chain armour,—­for he had adopted a method which I thought, and must still think, exceedingly unfair.  He assumed that he had private knowledge of the Divine Will, and he would meet my temporizing arguments by asseverations,—­’So sure as my God liveth!’ or by appeals to a higher authority,—­’But what does my Lord tell me in Paul’s Letter to the Philippians?’ It was the prerogative of his faith to know, and of his character to overpower objection; between these two millstones I was rapidly ground to powder.

These ‘discussions’, as they were rather ironically called, invariably ended for me in disaster.  I was driven out of my papier-mache fastnesses, my canvas walls rocked at the first peal from my Father’s clarion, and the foe pursued me across the plains of Jericho until I lay down ignominiously and covered my face.  I seemed to be pushed with horns of iron, such as those which Zedekiah the son of Chenaanah prepared for the encouragement of Ahab.

When I acknowledged defeat and cried for quarter, my Father would become radiant, and I still seem to hear the sound of his full voice, so thrilling, so warm, so painful to my over-strained nerves, bursting forth in a sort of benediction at the end of each of these one-sided contentions, with ’I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might by His Spirit in the inner man; that Christ may dwell in your heart by faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height, and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that you might be filled with the fullness of God.’

Thus solemn and thus ceremonious was my Father apt to become, without a moment’s warning, on plain and domestic occasions; abruptly brimming over with emotion like a basin which an unseen flow of water has filled and over-filled.