I would evade the queries, and write
about other things; sometimes I would turn upon the tormentor,
and urge that my tender youth might be let alone. It little
mattered what form of weakness I put forth by way of baffling my
Father's direct, firm, unflinching strength. To an appeal against
the bondage of a correspondence of such unbroken solemnity I
would receive--with what a paralysing promptitude!--such a reply
as this:--

'Let me say that the 'solemnity' you complain of has only been the
expression of tender anxiousness of a father's heart, that his
only child, just turned out upon the world, and very far out of
his sight and hearing, should be walking in God's way. Recollect
that it is not now as it was when you were at school, when we had
personal communication with you at intervals of five days--we
now know absolutely nothing of you, save from your letters, and
if they do not indicate your spiritual prosperity, the deepest
solicitudes of our hearts have nothing to feed on. But I will try
henceforth to trust you, and lay aside my fears; for you are
worthy of my confidence; and your own God and your father's God
will hold you with His right hand.'

Over such letters as these I am not ashamed to say that I
sometimes wept; the old paper I have just been copying shows
traces of tears shed upon it more than forty years ago, tears
commingled of despair at my own feebleness, distraction, at my
want of will, pity for my Father's manifest and pathetic
distress. He would 'try henceforth to trust' me, he said. Alas!
the effort would be in vain; after a day or two, after a hollow
attempt to write of other things, the importunate subject would
recur; there would intrude again the inevitable questions about
the Atonement and the Means of Grace, the old anxious fears lest
I was 'yielding' my intimacy to agreeable companions who were not
'one with me in Christ', fresh passionate entreaties to be
assured, in every letter, that I was walking in the clear light
of God's presence.

It seems to me now profoundly strange, although I knew too little
of the world to remark it at the time, that these incessant
exhortations dealt, not with conduct, but with faith. Earlier in
this narrative I have noted how disdainfully, with what an
austere pride, my Father refused to entertain the subject of
personal shortcomings in my behaviour. There were enough of them
to blame, Heaven knows, but he was too lofty-minded a gentleman
to dwell upon