ages as
'The heavens are the works of Thy hands. They shall perish, but
Thou remainest, and they all shall wax old as doth a garment, and
as a vesture shalt Thou fold them up, and they shall be changed;
but Thou art the same, and Thy years shall not fail.' But the
dialectic parts of the Epistle puzzled and confused me. Such
metaphysical ideas as 'laying again the foundation of repentance
from dead works' and 'crucifying the Son of God afresh' were not
successfully brought down to the level of my understanding.

My Father's religious teaching to me was almost exclusively
doctrinal. He did not observe the value of negative education,
that is to say, of leaving Nature alone to fill up the gaps which
it is her design to deal with at a later and riper date. He did
not, even, satisfy himself with those moral injunctions which
should form the basis of infantile discipline. He was in a
tremendous hurry to push on my spiritual growth, and he fed me
with theological meat which it was impossible for me to digest.
Some glimmer of a suspicion that he was sailing on the wrong tack
must, I should suppose, have broken in upon him when we had
reached the eighth and ninth chapters of Hebrews, where,
addressing readers who had been brought up under the Jewish
dispensation, and had the formalities of the Law of Moses in
their very blood, the apostle battles with their dangerous
conservatism. It is a very noble piece of spiritual casuistry,
but it is signally unfitted for the comprehension of a child.
Suddenly by my flushing up with anger and saying, 'Oh how I do
hate that Law,' my Father perceived, and paused in amazement to
perceive, that I took the Law to be a person of malignant temper
from whose cruel bondage, and from whose intolerable tyranny and
unfairness, some excellent person was crying out to be delivered.
I wished to hit Law with my fist, for being so mean and
unreasonable.

Upon this, of course, it was necessary to reopen the whole line
of exposition. My Father, without realizing it, had been talking
on his own level, not on mine, and now he condescended to me. But
without very great success. The melodious language, the divine
forensic audacities, the magnificent ebb and flow of argument
which make the 'Epistle to the Hebrews' such a miracle, were far
and away beyond my reach, and they only bewildered me. Some
evangelical children of my generation, I understand, were brought
up on a work called 'Line upon Line: Here a Lit