to love me when I was naughty, but I could not tell about God.  And yet I knew that, with His terrible power of knowing everything, He was well aware that I did not love Him.  It was best to forget about Him as much as possible, for it spoiled one’s pleasure to think about it.  All the little amusements and idle businesses that were so dear to me, He probably disapproved of them all, and was only satisfied when I was safe at my lessons or immured in church.  Sunday was the sort of day He liked, and how I detested it!—­the toys put away, little ugly books about the Holy Land to read, an air of deep dreariness about it all.  Thus does religion become a weariness from the outset.

How slowly, and after what strange experience, by what infinite delay of deduction, does the love of God dawn upon the soul!  Even then how faint and subtle an essence it is!  In deep anxiety, under unbearable strain, in the grip of a dilemma of which either issue seems intolerable, in weariness of life, in hours of flagging vitality, the mighty tide begins to flow strongly and tranquilly into the soul.  One did not make oneself; one did not make one’s sorrows, even when they arose from one’s own weakness and perversity.  There was a meaning, a significance about it all; one was indeed on pilgrimage; and then comes the running to the Father’s knee, and the casting oneself in utter broken weakness upon the one Heart that understands perfectly and utterly, and which does, which must, desire the best and truest.  “Give me courage, hope, confidence,” says the desolate soul.

     “I can endure Thy bitterest decrees,
      If certain of Thy Love.”

How would one amend all this if one had the power?  Alas! it could only be by silencing all stupid and clumsy people, all rigid parents, all diplomatic priests, all the horrible natures who lick their lips with a fierce zest over the pains that befall the men with whom they do not agree.  I would teach a child, in defiance even of reason, that God is the one Power that loves and understands him through thick and thin; that He punishes with anguish and sorrow; that He exults in forgiveness and mercy; that He rejoices in innocent happiness; that He loves courage, and brightness, and kindness, and cheerful self-sacrifice; that things mean, and vile, and impure, and cruel, are things that He does not love to punish, but sad and soiling stains that He beholds with shame and tears.  This, it seems to me, is the Gospel teaching about God, impossible only because of the hardness of our hearts.  But if it were possible, a child might grow to feel about sin, not that it was a horrible and unpardonable failure, a thing to afflict oneself drearily about, but that it was rather a thing which, when once spurned, however humiliating, could minister to progress, in a way in which untroubled happiness could not operate—­to be forgotten, perhaps, but certainly to be forgiven; a privilege rather than a hindrance, a gate rather than a barrier; a shadow