ce. Nothing abides in one tense projection, and my
Father, resolute as he was, had other preoccupations. His
orchids, his microscope, his physiological researches, his
interpretations of prophecy, filled up the hours of his active
and strenuous life, and, out of his sight, I became not indeed
out of his mind, but no longer ceaselessly in the painful
foreground of it. Yet, although the reiteration of his anxiety
might weary him a little as it had wearied me well nigh to groans
of despair, there was not the slightest change in his real
attitude towards the subject or towards me.

I have already had occasion to say that he had nothing of the
mystic or the visionary about him. At certain times and on
certain points, he greatly desired that signs and wonders, such
as had astonished and encouraged the infancy of the Christian
Church, might again be vouchsafed to it, but he did not pretend
to see such miracles himself, nor give the slightest credence to
others who asserted that they did. He often congratulated himself
on the fact that although his mind dwelt so constantly on
spiritual matters it was never betrayed into any suspension of
the rational functions.

Cross-examination by letter slackened, but on occasion of my
brief and usually summer visits to Devonshire I suffered acutely
from my Father's dialectical appetites. He was surrounded by
peasants, on whom the teeth of his arguments could find no
purchase. To him, in that intellectual Abdera, even an unwilling
youth from London offered opportunities of pleasant contest. He
would declare himself ready, nay eager, for argument. With his
mental sleeves turned up, he would adopt a fighting attitude, and
challenge me to a round on any portion of the Scheme of Grace.
His alacrity was dreadful to me, his well-aimed blows fell on
what was rather a bladder or a pillow than a vivid antagonist.

He was, indeed, most unfairly handicapped,--I was naked, he in a
suit of chain armour,--for he had adopted a method which I
thought, and must still think, exceedingly unfair. He assumed
that he had private knowledge of the Divine Will, and he would
meet my temporizing arguments by asseverations,--'So sure as my
God liveth!' or by appeals to a higher authority,--'But what does
_my_ Lord tell me in Paul's Letter to the Philippians?' It was the
prerogative of his faith to know, and of his character to
overpower objection; between these two millstones I was rapidly
ground to powder.

Th