of the spirit which was now drawing to its end,
in which Scrope had travelled from the confused, unanalyzed formulas and
assumptions and implications of his rectory upbringing to his present
stark and simple realization of God, he had at times made some
remarkable self-identifications. He was naturally much given to analogy;
every train of thought in his mind set up induced parallel currents. He
had likened himself to the Anglican church, to the whole Christian body,
as, for example, in his imagined second conversation with the angel
of God. But now he found himself associating himself with a still more
far-reaching section of mankind. This excess of solicitude was traceable
perhaps in nearly every one in all the past of mankind who had ever had
the vision of God. An excessive solicitude to shield those others from
one's own trials and hardships, to preserve the exact quality of the
revelation, for example, had been the fruitful cause of crippling
errors, spiritual tyrannies, dogmatisms, dissensions, and futilities.
"Suffer little children to come unto me"; the text came into his head
with an effect of contribution. The parent in us all flares out at the
thought of the younger and weaker minds; we hide difficulties, seek to
spare them from the fires that temper the spirit, the sharp edge of
the truth that shapes the soul. Christian is always trying to have a
carriage sent back from the Celestial City for his family. Why, we ask,
should they flounder dangerously in the morasses that we escaped, or
wander in the forest in which we lost ourselves? Catch these souls
young, therefore, save them before they know they exist, kidnap them to
heaven; vaccinate them with a catechism they may never understand, lull
them into comfort and routine. Instinct plays us false here as it plays
the savage mother false when she snatches her fevered child from the
doctor's hands. The last act of faith is to trust those we love to
God....

Hitherto he had seen the great nets of theological overstatement and
dogma that kept mankind from God as if they were the work of purely evil
things in man, of pride, of self-assertion, of a desire to possess and
dominate the minds and souls of others. It was only now that he saw how
large a share in the obstruction of God's Kingdom had been played by the
love of the elder and the parent, by the carefulness, the fussy care,
of good men and women. He had wandered in wildernesses of unbelief, in
dangerous plac