The main difference in my lot as a communicant from that of a mere dweller in the tents of righteousness was that I was expected to respond with instant fervour to every appeal of conscience.  When I did not do this, my position was almost worse than it had been before, because of the livelier nature of the responsibility which weighed upon me.  My little faults of conduct, too, assumed shapes of terrible importance, since they proceeded from one so signally enlightened.  My Father was never tired of reminding me that, now that I was a professing Christian, I must remember, in everything I did, that I was an example to others.  He used to draw dreadful pictures of supposititious little boys who were secretly watching me from afar, and whose whole career, in time and in eternity, might be disastrously affected if I did not keep my lamp burning.

The year which followed upon my baptism did not open very happily at the Room.  Considerable changes had now taken place in the community.  My Father’s impressive services, a certain prestige in his preaching, the mere fact that so vigorous a person was at the head of affairs, had induced a large increase in the attendance.  By this time, if my memory does not fail me as to dates, we had left the dismal loft over the stables, and had built ourselves a perfectly plain, but commodious and well-arranged chapel in the centre of the village.  This greatly added to the prosperity of the meeting.  Everything had combined to make our services popular, and had attracted to us a new element of younger people.  Numbers of youthful masons and carpenters, shop-girls and domestic servants, found the Room a pleasant trysting-place, and were more or less superficially induced to accept salvation as it was offered to them in my Father’s searching addresses.  My Father was very shrewd in dealing with mere curiosity or idle motive, and sharply packed off any youths who simply came to make eyes at the girls, or any ‘maids’ whose only object was to display their new bonnet-strings.  But he was powerless against a temporary sincerity, the simulacrum of a true change of heart.  I have often heard him say,—­of some young fellow who had attended our services with fervour for a little while, and then had turned cold and left us,—­’and I thought that the Holy Ghost had wrought in him!’ Such disappointments grievously depress an evangelist.

Religious bodies are liable to strange and unaccountable fluctuations.  At the beginning of the third year since our arrival, the congregation seemed to be in a very prosperous state, as regards attendance, conversions and other outward signs of activity.  Yet it was quite soon after this that my Father began to be harassed by all sorts of troubles, and the spring of 1860 was a critical moment in the history of the community.  Although he loved to take a very high tone about the Saints, and involved them sometimes in a cloud of laudatory metaphysics, the truth was that they were