Marks, made a solemn remonstrance to my Father, who, however,
allowed my stepmother to carry out her excellent plan. My health
responded rapidly to this change of regime, but increase of
health did not bring increase of spirituality. My Father, fully
occupied with moulding the will and inflaming the piety of my
stepmother, left me now, to a degree not precedented,
in undisturbed possession of my own devices. I did not lose my
faith, but many other things took a prominent place in my mind.

It will, I suppose, be admitted that there is no greater proof of
complete religious sincerity than fervour in private prayer. If
an individual, alone by the side of his bed, prolongs his
intercessions, lingers wrestling with his divine Companion, and
will not leave off until he has what he believes to be evidence
of a reply to his entreaties--then, no matter what the character
of his public protestations, or what the frailty of his actions,
it is absolutely certain that he believes in what he professes.

My Father prayed in private in what I may almost call a spirit of
violence. He entreated for spiritual guidance with nothing less
than importunity. It might be said that he stormed the citadels
of God's grace, refusing to be baffled, urging his intercessions
without mercy upon a Deity who sometimes struck me as inattentive
to his prayers or wearied by them. My Father's acts of
supplication, as I used to witness them at night, when I was
supposed to be asleep, were accompanied by stretchings out of the
hands, by crackings of the joints of the fingers, by deep
breathings, by murmurous sounds which seemed just breaking out of
silence, like Virgil's bees out of the hive, 'magnis clamoribus'.
My Father fortified his religious life by prayer as an athlete
does his physical life by lung-gymnastics and vigorous rubbings.

It was a trouble to my conscience that I could not emulate this
fervour. The poverty of my prayers had now long been a source of
distress to me, but I could not discover how to enrich them. My
Father used to warn us very solemnly against 'lip-service', by
which he meant singing hymns of experience and joining in
ministrations in which our hearts took no vital or personal part.
This was an outward act, the tendency of which I could well
appreciate, but there was a 'lip-service' even more deadly than
that, against which it never occurred to him to warn me. It
assailed me when I had come alone by my bedside, and had blown