On the subject of all feasts of the Church he held views of an almost grotesque peculiarity.  He looked upon each of them as nugatory and worthless, but the keeping of Christmas appeared to him by far the most hateful, and nothing less than an act of idolatry.  ‘The very word is Popish’, he used to exclaim, ‘Christ’s Mass!’ pursing up his lips with the gesture of one who tastes assafoetida by accident.  Then he would adduce the antiquity of the so-called feast, adapted from horrible heathen rites, and itself a soiled relic of the abominable Yule-Tide.  He would denounce the horrors of Christmas until it almost made me blush to look at a holly-berry.

On Christmas Day of this year 1857 our villa saw a very unusual sight.  My Father had given strictest charge that no difference whatever was to be made in our meals on that day; the dinner was to be neither more copious than usual nor less so.  He was obeyed, but the servants, secretly rebellious, made a small plum-pudding for themselves. (I discovered afterwards, with pain, that Miss Marks received a slice of it in her boudoir.) Early in the afternoon, the maids,—­of whom we were now advanced to keeping two,—­kindly remarked that ’the poor dear child ought to have a bit, anyhow’, and wheedled me into the kitchen, where I ate a slice of plum-pudding.  Shortly I began to feel that pain inside which in my frail state was inevitable, and my conscience smote me violently.  At length I could bear my spiritual anguish no longer, and bursting into the study I called out:  ’Oh!  Papa, Papa, I have eaten of flesh offered to idols!’ It took some time, between my sobs, to explain what had happened.  Then my Father sternly said:  ‘Where is the accursed thing?’ I explained that as much as was left of it was still on the kitchen table.  He took me by the hand, and ran with me into the midst of the startled servants, seized what remained of the pudding, and with the plate in one hand and me still tight in the other, ran until we reached the dust-heap, when he flung the idolatrous confectionery on to the middle of the ashes, and then raked it deep down into the mass.  The suddenness, the violence, the velocity of this extraordinary act made an impression on my memory which nothing will ever efface.

The key is lost by which I might unlock the perverse malady from which my Father’s conscience seemed to suffer during the whole of this melancholy winter.  But I think that a dislocation of his intellectual system had a great deal to do with it.  Up to this point in his career, he had, as we have seen, nourished the delusion that science and revelation could be mutually justified, that some sort of compromise was possible.  With great and ever greater distinctness, his investigations had shown him that in all departments of organic nature there are visible the evidences of slow modification of forms, of the type developed by the pressure and practice of aeons.  This conviction had been borne in upon him until it was positively irresistible.  Where was his place, then, as a sincere and accurate observer?  Manifestly, it was with the pioneers of the new truth, it was with Darwin, Wallace and Hooker.  But did not the second chapter of ‘Genesis’ say that in six days the heavens and earth were finished, and the host of them, and that on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made?