Upon this, of course, it was necessary to reopen the whole line of exposition.  My Father, without realizing it, had been talking on his own level, not on mine, and now he condescended to me.  But without very great success.  The melodious language, the divine forensic audacities, the magnificent ebb and flow of argument which make the ‘Epistle to the Hebrews’ such a miracle, were far and away beyond my reach, and they only bewildered me.  Some evangelical children of my generation, I understand, were brought up on a work called ’Line upon Line:  Here a Little, and there a Little’.  My Father’s ambition would not submit to anything suggested by such a title as that, and he committed, from his own point of view, a fatal mistake when he sought to build spires and battlements without having been at the pains to settle a foundation beneath them.

We were not always reading the ‘Epistle to the Hebrews’, however; not always was my flesh being made to creep by having it insisted upon that ’almost all things are by the Law purged with blood, and without blood is no remission of sin’.  In our lighter moods, we turned to the ‘Book of Revelation’, and chased the phantom of Popery through its fuliginous pages.  My Father, I think, missed my Mother’s company almost more acutely in his researches into prophecy than in anything else.  This had been their unceasing recreation, and no third person could possibly follow the curious path which they had hewn for themselves through this jungle of symbols.  But, more and more, my Father persuaded himself that I, too, was initiated, and by degrees I was made to share in all his speculations and interpretations.

Hand in hand we investigated the number of the Beast, which number is six hundred three score and six.  Hand in hand we inspected the nations, to see whether they had the mark of Babylon in their foreheads.  Hand in hand we watched the spirits of devils gathering the kings of the earth into the place which is called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon.  Our unity in these excursions was so delightful, that my Father was lulled in any suspicion he might have formed that I did not quite understand what it was all about.  Nor could he have desired a pupil more docile or more ardent than I was in my flaming denunciations of the Papacy.

If there was one institution more than another which, at this early stage of my history, I loathed and feared, it was what we invariably spoke of as ‘the so-called Church of Rome’.  In later years, I have met with stout Protestants, gallant ’Down-with-the-Pope’ men from County Antrim, and ladies who see the hand of the Jesuits in every public and private misfortune.  It is the habit of a loose and indifferent age to consider this dwindling body of enthusiasts with suspicion, and to regard their attitude towards Rome as illiberal.  But my own feeling is that they are all too mild, that their denunciations err on the side of the anodyne.  I have no longer the slightest wish myself to denounce the Roman communion, but, if it is to be done, I have an idea that the latter-day Protestants do not know how to do it.  In Lord Chesterfield’s phrase, these anti-Pope men ’don’t understand their own silly business’.  They make concessions and allowances, they put on gloves to touch the accursed thing.