them, and, though by nature deeply suspicious of
the possibility of frequent moral lapses, even in the very elect,
he refused to stoop to anything like espionage.

I owe him a deep debt of gratitude for his beautiful faith in me
in this respect, and now that I was alone in London, at this
tender time of life, 'exposed', as they say, to all sorts of
dangers, as defenceless as a fledgling that has been turned out
of its nest, yet my Father did not, in his uplifted Quixotism,
allow himself to fancy me guilty of any moral misbehaviour, but
concentrated his fears entirely upon my faith.

'Let me know more of your inner light. Does the candle of the
Lord shine on your soul?' This would be the ceaseless inquiry.
Or, again, 'Do you get any spiritual companionship with young
men? You passed over last Sunday without even a word, yet this
day is the most interesting to me in your whole week. Do you find
the ministry of the Word pleasant, and, above all, profitable?
Does it bring your soul into exercise before God? The Coming of
Christ draweth nigh. Watch, therefore and pray always, that you
may be counted worthy to stand before the Son of Man.'

If I quote such passages as this from my Father's letters to me,
it is not that I seek entertainment in a contrast between his
earnestness and the casuistical inattention and provoked
distractedness of a young man to whom the real world now offered
its irritating and stimulating scenes of animal and intellectual
life, but to call out sympathy, and perhaps wonder, at the
spectacle of so blind a Roman firmness as my Father's spiritual
attitude displayed.

His aspirations were individual and metaphysical. At the present
hour, so complete is the revolution which has overturned the
puritanism of which he was perhaps the latest surviving type,
that all classes of religious persons combine in placing
philanthropic activity, the objective attitude, in the
foreground. It is extraordinary how far-reaching the change has
been, so that nowadays a religion which does not combine with its
subjective faith a strenuous labour for the good of others is
hardly held to possess any religious principle worth proclaiming.

This propaganda of beneficence, this constant attention to the
moral and physical improvement of persons who have been
neglected, is quite recent as a leading feature of religion,
though indeed it seems to have formed some part of the Saviour's
original design. It was unknown to the