grace.  In earlier years, certain sides of my character had offered a sort of passive resistance to his ideas.  I had let what I did not care to welcome pass over my mind in the curious density that children adopt in order to avoid receiving impressions—­blankly, dumbly, achieving by stupidity what they cannot achieve by argument.  I think that I had frequently done this; that he had been brought up against a dead wall; although on other sides of my nature I had been responsive and docile.  But now, in my tenth year, the imitative faculty got the upper hand, and nothing seemed so attractive as to be what I was expected to be.  If there was a doubt now, it lay in the other direction; it seemed hardly normal that so young a child should appear so receptive and so apt.

My Father believed himself justified, at this juncture, in making a tremendous effort.  He wished to secure me finally, exhaustively, before the age of puberty could dawn, before my soul was fettered with the love of carnal things.  He thought that if I could now be identified with the ‘saints’, and could stand on exactly their footing, a habit of conformity would be secured.  I should meet the paganizing tendencies of advancing years with security if I could be forearmed with all the weapons of a sanctified life.  He wished me, in short, to be received into the community of the Brethren on the terms of an adult.  There were difficulties in the way of carrying out this scheme, and they were urged upon him, more or less courageously, by the elders of the church.  But he overbore them.  What the difficulties were, and what were the arguments which he used to sweep those difficulties away, I must now explain, for in this lay the centre of our future relations as father and son.

In dealing with the peasants around him, among whom he was engaged in an active propaganda, my Father always insisted on the necessity of conversion.  There must be a new birth and being, a fresh creation in God.  This crisis he was accustomed to regard as manifesting itself in a sudden and definite upheaval.  There might have been prolonged practical piety, deep and true contrition for sin, but these, although the natural and suitable prologue to conversion, were not conversion itself.  People hung on at the confines of regeneration, often for a very long time; my Father dealt earnestly with them, the elders ministered to them, with explanation, exhortation and prayer.  Such persons were in a gracious state, but they were not in a state of grace.  If they should suddenly die, they would pass away in an unconverted condition, and all that could be said in their favour was a vague expression of hope that they would benefit from God’s uncovenanted mercies.

But on some day, at some hour and minute, if life was spared to them, the way of salvation would be revealed to these persons in such an aspect that they would be enabled instantaneously to accept it.  They would take it consciously, as one takes a gift from the hand that offers it.  This act of taking was the process of conversion, and the person who so accepted was a child of God now, although a single minute ago he had been a child of wrath.  The very root of human nature had to be changed, and, in the majority of cases, this change was sudden, patent, and palpable.