at God spoke to us through all of these things.

But if I began to drift into an analysis of my father's abilities, I
should never stop. It would take a book to describe them. And yet mark
this, with them all his name is as dead to the world to-day as though he
had never been. Light reflected from a hundred facets dissipates itself
in space and is lost; that concentrated in one tremendous ray pierces to
the stars.

Now I am going to be frank about myself, for without frankness what
is the value of such a record as this? Then it becomes simply another
convention, or rather conventional method of expressing the octoroon
kind of truths with which the highly civilised races feed themselves,
as fastidious ladies eat cakes and bread from which all but the smallest
particle of nourishment has been extracted.

The fact is, therefore, that I inherited most of my father's abilities,
except his love for flint instruments which always bored me to
distraction, because although they are by association really the most
human of things, somehow to me they never convey any idea of humanity.
In addition I have a practical side which he lacked; had he possessed it
surely he must have become an archbishop instead of dying the vicar of
an unknown parish. Also I have a spiritual sense, mayhap mystical would
be a better term, which with all this religion was missing from my
father's nature.

For I think that notwithstanding his charity and devotion he never quite
got away from the shell of things, never cracked it and set his teeth in
the kernel which alone can feed our souls. His keen intellect, to take
an example, recognised every one of the difficulties of our faith and
flashed hither and thither in the darkness, seeking explanation, seeking
light, trying to reconcile, to explain. He was not great enough to
put all this aside and go straight to the informing Soul beneath that
strives to express itself everywhere, even through those husks which are
called the World, the Flesh and the Devil, and as yet does not always
quite succeed.

It is this boggling over exteriors, this peering into pitfalls, this
desire to prove that what such senses as we have tell us is impossible,
is in fact possible, which causes the overthrow of many an earnest,
seeking heart and renders its work, conducted on false lines, quite
nugatory. These will trust to themselves and their own intelligence and
not be content to spring from the cliffs of human experience i