ints on which he did not indeed doubt, but which it would none the
less be interesting to consider; such for example as the perfectibility
of the regenerate Christian, and the meaning of the mysterious central
chapters of the Epistle to the Romans. He was engaged in these
researches though still only a boy, when an event occurred which gave the
first real shock to his faith.

He was accustomed to teach in a school for the poorest children every
Sunday afternoon, a task for which his patience and good temper well
fitted him. On one occasion, however, while he was explaining the effect
of baptism to one of his favourite pupils, he discovered to his great
surprise that the boy had never been baptized. He pushed his inquiries
further, and found that out of the fifteen boys in his class only five
had been baptized, and, not only so, but that no difference in
disposition or conduct could be discovered between the regenerate boys
and the unregenerate. The good and bad boys were distributed in
proportions equal to the respective numbers of the baptized and
unbaptized. In spite of a certain impetuosity of natural character, he
was also of a matter-of-fact and experimental turn of mind; he therefore
went through the whole school, which numbered about a hundred boys, and
found out who had been baptized and who had not. The same results
appeared. The majority had not been baptized; yet the good and bad
dispositions were so distributed as to preclude all possibility of
maintaining that the baptized boys were better than the unbaptized.

The reader may smile at the idea of any one's faith being troubled by a
fact of which the explanation is so obvious, but as a matter of fact my
brother was seriously and painfully shocked. The teacher to whom he
applied for a solution of the difficulty was not a man of any real power,
and reported my brother to the rector for having disturbed the school by
his inquiries. The rector was old and self-opinionated; the difficulty,
indeed, was plainly as new to him as it had been to my brother, but
instead of saying so at once, and referring to any recognised theological
authority, he tried to put him off with words which seemed intended to
silence him rather than to satisfy him; finally he lost his temper, and
my brother fell under suspicion of unorthodoxy.

This kind of treatment did not answer with my brother. He alludes to it
resentfully in the introductory chapter of his book. He became