great preachers of the
seventeenth century, whether Catholic or Protestant, and it
offered but a shadowy attraction to my Father, who was the last
of their disciples. When Bossuet desired his hearers to listen to
the _cri de misere l'entour de nous, qui devrait nous fondre le
coeur_, he started a new thing in the world of theology. We may
search the famous 'Rule and Exercises of Holy Living' from cover
to cover, and not learn that Jeremy Taylor would have thought
that any activity of the district-visitor or the Salvation lassie
came within the category of saintliness.

My Father, then, like an old divine, concentrated on thoughts
upon the intellectual part of faith. In his obsession about me,
he believed that if my brain could be kept unaffected by any of
the seductive errors of the age, and my heart centred in the
adoring love of God, all would be well with me in perpetuity. He
was still convinced that by intensely directing my thoughts, he
could compel them to flow in a certain channel, since he had not
begun to learn the lesson, so mournful for saintly men of his
complexion, that 'virtue would not be virtue, could it be given
by one fellow creature to another'. He had recognized, with
reluctance, that holiness was not hereditary, but he continued to
hope that it might be compulsive. I was still 'the child of many
prayers', and it was not to be conceded that these prayers could
remain unanswered.

The great panacea was now, as always, the study of the Bible, and
this my Father never ceased to urge upon me. He presented to me a
copy of Dean Alford's edition of the Greek New Testament, in four
great volumes, and these he had had so magnificently bound in
full morocco that the work shone on my poor shelf of sixpenny
poets like a duchess among dairy maids. He extracted from me a
written promise that I would translate and meditate upon a
portion of the Greek text every morning before I started for
business. This promise I presently failed to keep, my good
intentions being undermined by an invincible _ennui_; I concealed
the dereliction from him, and the sense that I was deceiving my
Father ate into my conscience like a canker. But the dilemma was
now before me that I must either deceive my Father in such things
or paralyse my own character.

My growing distaste for the Holy Scriptures began to occupy my
thoughts, and to surprise as much as it scandalized me. My desire
was to continue to delight in those sacred pages,