I was docile, I was plausible, I was anything but combative; if my Father could have persuaded himself to let me alone, if he could merely have been willing to leave my subterfuges and my explanations unanalysed, all would have been well.  But he refused to see any difference in temperament between a lad of twenty and a sage of sixty.  He had no vital sympathy for youth, which in itself had no charm for him.  He had no compassion for the weaknesses of immaturity, and his one and only anxiety was to be at the end of his spiritual journey, safe with me in the house where there are many mansions.  The incidents of human life upon the road to glory were less than nothing to him.

My Father was very fond of defining what was his own attitude at this time, and he was never tired of urging the same ambition upon me.  He regarded himself as the faithful steward of a Master who might return at any moment, and who would require to find everything ready for his convenience.  That master was God, with whom my Father seriously believed himself to be in relations much more confidential than those vouchsafed to ordinary pious persons.  He awaited, with anxious hope, ‘the coming of the Lord’, an event which he still frequently believed to be imminent.  He would calculate, by reference to prophecies in the Old and New Testament, the exact date of this event; the date would pass, without the expected Advent, and he would be more than disappointed,—­he would be incensed.  Then he would understand that he must have made some slight error in calculation, and the pleasures of anticipation would recommence.

Me in all this he used as a kind of inferior coadjutor, much as a responsible and upper servant might use a footboy.  I, also, must be watching; it was not important that I should be seriously engaged in any affairs of my own.  I must be ready for the Master’s coming; and my Father’s incessant cross-examination was made in the spirit of a responsible servant who fidgets lest some humble but essential piece of household work has been neglected.

My holidays, however, and all my personal relations with my Father were poisoned by this insistency.  I was never at my ease in his company; I never knew when I might not be subjected to a series of searching questions which I should not be allowed to evade.  Meanwhile, on every other stage of experience I was gaining the reliance upon self and the respect for the opinion of others which come naturally to a young man of sober habits who earns his own living and lives his own life.  For this kind of independence my Father had no respect or consideration, when questions of religion were introduced, although he handsomely conceded it on other points.  And now first there occurred to me the reflection, which in years to come I was to repeat over and over, with an ever sadder emphasis,—­what a charming companion, what a delightful parent, what a courteous and engaging friend my Father would have been, and would pre-eminently have been to me, if it had not been for this stringent piety which ruined it all.