savage native of Fiji had a better chance of
salvation than any cardinal in the Vatican. And even in the
priesthood of the Church of England he believed that while many
were called, few indeed would be found to have been chosen.

I could not sympathize, even in my then state of ignorance, with
so rigid a conception of the Divine mercy. Little inclined as I
was to be sceptical, I still thought it impossible, that a secret
of such stupendous importance should have been entrusted to a
little group of Plymouth Brethren, and have been hidden from
millions of disinterested and pious theologians. That the leaders
of European Christianity were sincere, my Father did not attempt
to question. But they were all of them wrong, _incorrect_; and no
matter how holy their lives, how self-sacrificing their actions,
they would have to suffer for their inexactitude through aeons of
undefined torment. He would speak with a solemn complacency of
the aged nun, who, after a long life of renunciation and
devotion, died at last, 'only to discover her mistake'.

He who was so tender-hearted that he could not bear to witness
the pain or distress of any person, however disagreeable or
undeserving, was quite acquiescent in believing that God would
punish human beings, in millions, for ever, for a purely
intellectual error of comprehension. My Father's inconsistencies
of perception seem to me to have been the result of a curious
irregularity of equipment. Taking for granted, as he did, the
absolute integrity of the Scriptures, and applying to them his
trained scientific spirit, he contrived to stifle, with a
deplorable success, alike the function of the imagination, the
sense of moral justice, and his own deep and instinctive
tenderness of heart.

There presently came over me a strong desire to know what
doctrine indeed it was that the other Churches taught. I
expressed a wish to be made aware of the practices of Rome, or at
least of Canterbury, and I longed to attend the Anglican and the
Roman services. But to do so was impossible. My Father did not,
indeed, forbid me to enter the fine parish church of our village,
or the stately Puginesque cathedral which Rome had just erected
at its side, but I knew that I could not be seen at either
service without his immediately knowing it, or without his being
deeply wounded. Although I was sixteen years of age, and although
I was treated with indulgence and affection, I was still but a
bird fluttering