I find a difficulty in recalling the precise nature of the religious instruction which my Father gave me at this time.  It was incessant, and it was founded on the close inspection of the Bible, particularly of the epistles of the New Testament.  This summer, as my eighth year advanced, we read the ’Epistle to the Hebrews’, with very great deliberation, stopping every moment, that my Father might expound it, verse by verse.  The extraordinary beauty of the language—­for instance, the matchless cadences and images of the first chapter—­made a certain impression upon my imagination, and were (I think) my earliest initiation into the magic of literature.  I was incapable of defining what I felt, but I certainly had a grip in the throat, which was in its essence a purely aesthetic emotion, when my Father read, in his pure, large, ringing voice, such passages as ’The heavens are the works of Thy hands.  They shall perish, but Thou remainest, and they all shall wax old as doth a garment, and as a vesture shalt Thou fold them up, and they shall be changed; but Thou art the same, and Thy years shall not fail.’  But the dialectic parts of the Epistle puzzled and confused me.  Such metaphysical ideas as ’laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works’ and ‘crucifying the Son of God afresh’ were not successfully brought down to the level of my understanding.

My Father’s religious teaching to me was almost exclusively doctrinal.  He did not observe the value of negative education, that is to say, of leaving Nature alone to fill up the gaps which it is her design to deal with at a later and riper date.  He did not, even, satisfy himself with those moral injunctions which should form the basis of infantile discipline.  He was in a tremendous hurry to push on my spiritual growth, and he fed me with theological meat which it was impossible for me to digest.  Some glimmer of a suspicion that he was sailing on the wrong tack must, I should suppose, have broken in upon him when we had reached the eighth and ninth chapters of Hebrews, where, addressing readers who had been brought up under the Jewish dispensation, and had the formalities of the Law of Moses in their very blood, the apostle battles with their dangerous conservatism.  It is a very noble piece of spiritual casuistry, but it is signally unfitted for the comprehension of a child.  Suddenly by my flushing up with anger and saying, ’Oh how I do hate that Law,’ my Father perceived, and paused in amazement to perceive, that I took the Law to be a person of malignant temper from whose cruel bondage, and from whose intolerable tyranny and unfairness, some excellent person was crying out to be delivered.  I wished to hit Law with my fist, for being so mean and unreasonable.