I have just said, ‘in the majority of cases’, because my Father admitted the possibility of exceptions.  The formula was, ’If any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his.’  As a rule, no one could possess the Spirit of Christ, without a conscious and full abandonment of the soul, and this, however carefully led up to, and prepared for with tears and renunciations, was not, could not, be made, except at a set moment of time.  Faith, in an esoteric and almost symbolic sense, was necessary, and could not be a result of argument, but was a state of heart.  In these opinions my Father departed in no ways from the strict evangelical doctrine of the Protestant churches, but he held it in a mode and with a severity peculiar to himself.  Now, it is plain that this state of heart, this voluntary deed of acceptance, presupposed a full and rational consciousness of the relations of things.  It might be clearly achieved by a person of humble cultivation, but only by one who was fully capable of independent thought, in other words by a more or less adult person, The man or woman claiming the privileges of conversion must be able to understand and to grasp what his religious education was aiming at.

It is extraordinary what trouble it often gave my Father to know whether he was justified in admitting to the communion people of very limited powers of expression.  A harmless, humble labouring man would come with a request—­to be allowed to ‘break bread’.  It was only by the use of strong leading questions that he could be induced to mention Christ as the ground of his trust at all.  I recollect an elderly agricultural labourer being closeted for a long time with my Father, who came out at last, in a sort of dazed condition, and replied to our inquiries,—­with a shrug of his shoulders as he said it,—­’I was obliged to put the Name and Blood and Work of Jesus into his very mouth.  It is true that he assented cordially at last, but I confess I was grievously daunted by the poor intelligence!’

But there was, or there might be, another class of persona, whom early training, separation from the world, and the care of godly parents had so early familiarized with the acceptable calling of Christ that their conversion had occurred, unperceived and therefore unrecorded, at an extraordinarily earl age.  It would be in vain to look for a repetition of the phenomenon in those cases.  The heavenly fire must not be expected to descend a second time; the lips are touched with the burning coal once, and once only.  If, accordingly, these precociously selected spirits are to be excluded because no new birth is observed in them at a mature age, they must continue outside in the cold, since the phenomenon cannot be repeated.  When, therefore, there is not possible any further doubt of their being in possession of salvation, longer delay is useless, and worse than useless.  The fact of conversion, though not recorded nor even recollected, must be accepted on the evidence of confession of faith, and as soon as the intelligence is evidently developed, the person not merely may, but should be accepted into communion, although still immature in body, although in years still even a child.  This my Father believed to be my case, and in this rare class did he fondly persuade himself to station me.