I should do myself an injustice, however, if I described my attitude to faith at this time as wanting in candour.  I did very earnestly desire to follow where my Father led.  That passion for imitation, which I have already discussed, was strongly developed at this time, and it induced me to repeat the language of pious books in godly ejaculations which greatly edified my grown-up companions, and were, so far as I can judge, perfectly sincere.  I wished extremely to be good and holy, and I had no doubt in my mind of the absolute infallibility of my Father as a guide in heavenly things.  But I am perfectly sure that there never was a moment in which my heart truly responded, with native ardour, to the words which flowed so readily, in such a stream of unction, from my anointed lips.  I cannot recall anything but an intellectual surrender; there was never joy in the act of resignation, never the mystic’s rapture at feeling his phantom self, his own threadbare soul, suffused, thrilled through, robed again in glory by a fire which burns up everything personal and individual about him.

Through thick and thin I clung to a hard nut of individuality, deep down in my childish nature.  To the pressure from without I resigned everything else, my thoughts, my words, my anticipations, my assurances, but there was something which I never resigned, my innate and persistent self.  Meek as I seemed, and gently respondent, I was always conscious of that innermost quality which I had learned to recognize in my earlier days in Islington, that existence of two in the depths who could speak to one another in inviolable secrecy.

’This a natural man may discourse of, and that very knowingly, and give a kind of natural credit to it, as to a history that may be true; but firmly to believe that there is divine truth in all these things, and to have a persuasion of it stronger than of the very thing we see with our eyes; such an assent as this is the peculiar work of the Spirit of God, and is certainly saving faith.’

This passage is not to be found in the writings of any extravagant Plymouth Brother, but in one of the most solid classics of the Church, in Archbishop Leighton’s Commentary on the First Epistle of Peter.  I quote it because it defines, more exactly than words of my own could hope to do, the difference which already existed, and in secrecy began forthwith to be more and more acutely accentuated between my Father and myself.  He did indeed possess this saving faith, which could move mountains of evidence, and suffer no diminution under the action of failure or disappointment.  I, on the other hand—­as I began to feel dimly then, and see luminously now—­had only acquired the habit of giving what the Archbishop means by ‘a kind of natural credit’ to the doctrine so persistently impressed upon my conscience.  From its very nature this could not but be molten in the dews and exhaled in the sunshine of life and thought and experience.