ps. I cannot recall anything but an
intellectual surrender; there was never joy in the act of
resignation, never the mystic's rapture at feeling his phantom
self, his own threadbare soul, suffused, thrilled through, robed
again in glory by a fire which burns up everything personal and
individual about him.

Through thick and thin I clung to a hard nut of individuality,
deep down in my childish nature. To the pressure from without I
resigned everything else, my thoughts, my words, my
anticipations, my assurances, but there was something which I
never resigned, my innate and persistent self. Meek as I seemed,
and gently respondent, I was always conscious of that innermost
quality which I had learned to recognize in my earlier days in
Islington, that existence of two in the depths who could speak to
one another in inviolable secrecy.

'This a natural man may discourse of, and that very knowingly, and
give a kind of natural credit to it, as to a history that may be
true; but firmly to believe that there is divine truth in all
these things, and to have a persuasion of it stronger than of the
very thing we see with our eyes; such an assent as this is the
peculiar work of the Spirit of God, and is certainly saving
faith.'

This passage is not to be found in the writings of any
extravagant Plymouth Brother, but in one of the most solid
classics of the Church, in Archbishop Leighton's _Commentary on
the First Epistle of Peter_. I quote it because it defines, more
exactly than words of my own could hope to do, the difference
which already existed, and in secrecy began forthwith to be more
and more acutely accentuated between my Father and myself. He did
indeed possess this saving faith, which could move mountains of
evidence, and suffer no diminution under the action of failure or
disappointment. I, on the other hand--as I began to feel dimly
then, and see luminously now--had only acquired the habit of
giving what the Archbishop means by 'a kind of natural credit' to
the doctrine so persistently impressed upon my conscience. From
its very nature this could not but be molten in the dews and
exhaled in the sunshine of life and thought and experience.

My Father, by an indulgent act for the caprice of which I cannot
wholly account, presently let in a flood of imaginative light
which was certainly hostile to my heavenly calling. My
instinctive interest in geography has already been mentioned.
This was the one branch of knowle