ought to need—­appeared at the bottom of the counterpane, and slowly advanced.  I think it was nothing worse than a beetle.  It walked successfully past my Father’s sleek black ball of a head, and climbed straight up at me, nearer, nearer, until it seemed all a twinkle of horns and joints.  I bore it in silent fascination until it almost tickled my chin, and then I screamed ‘Papa!  Papa!’ My Father rose in great dudgeon, removed the insect (what were insects to him!) and then gave me a tremendous lecture.

The sense of desperation which this incident produced I shall not easily forget.  Life seemed really to be very harassing when to visions within and beetles without there was joined the consciousness of having grievously offended God by an act of disrespect.  It is difficult for me to justify to myself the violent jobation which my Father gave me in consequence of my scream, except by attributing to him something of the human weakness of vanity.  I cannot help thinking that he liked to hear himself speak to God in the presence of an admiring listener.  He prayed with fervour and animation, in pure Johnsonian English, and I hope I am not undutiful if I add my impression that he was not displeased with the sound of his own devotions.  My cry for help had needlessly, as he thought, broken in upon this holy and seemly performance.  ‘You, the child of a naturalist,’ he remarked in awesome tones, ’you to pretend to feel terror at the advance of an insect?’ It could but be a pretext, he declared, for avoiding the testimony of faith in prayer.  ’If your heart were fixed, if it panted after the Lord, it would take more than the movements of a beetle to make you disturb oral supplication at His footstool.  Beware! for God is a jealous God and He consumes them in wrath who make a noise like a dog.’

My Father took at all times a singular pleasure in repeating that ‘our God is a jealous God’.  He liked the word, which I suppose he used in an antiquated sense.  He was accustomed to tell the ‘saints’ at the Room,—­in a very genial manner, and smiling at them as he said it,—­’I am jealous over you, my beloved brothers and sisters, with a godly jealousy.’  I know that this was interpreted by some of the saints,—­for I heard Mary Grace say so to Miss Marks—­as meaning that my Father was resentful because some of them attended the service at the Wesleyan chapel on Thursday evenings.  But my Father was utterly incapable of such littleness as this, and when he talked of ‘jealousy’ he meant a lofty solicitude, a careful watchfulness.  He meant that their spiritual honour was a matter of anxiety to him.  No doubt when he used to tell me to remember that our God is a jealous God, he meant that my sins and shortcomings were not matters of indifference to the Divine Being.  But I think, looking back, that it was very extraordinary for a man, so instructed and so intelligent as he, to dwell so much on the possible anger of the Lord, rather than on his pity and love.  The theory of extreme Puritanism can surely offer no quainter example of its fallacy than this idea that the omnipotent Jehovah—­could be seriously offended, and could stoop to revenge, because a little, nervous child of nine had disturbed a prayer by being frightened at a beetle.