der than myself, and took with them the
vows that bound us to his service. Of what was then said and read I
scarcely remember more than the words of heavenly welcome in the
Epistle, "Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners." It
was like coming home, like stepping a little farther beyond the
threshold in at the open door of our Father's house.

Perhaps I was too young to assume those vows. Had I deferred it a few
years there would have been serious intellectual hindrances. But it was
not the Articles of Faith I was thinking of, although there was a long
list of them, to which we all bowed assent, as was the custom. It was
the homecoming to the "house not made with hands," the gladness of
signifying that I belonged to God's spiritual family, and was being
drawn closer to his heart, with whom none of us are held as "strangers
and foreigners."

I felt that I was taking up again the clue which had been put into my
childish hand at baptism, and was being led on by it into the unfolding
mysteries of life. Should I ever let it slip from me, and lose the way
to the "many mansions" that now seemed so open and so near? I could not
think so. It is well that we cannot foresee our falterings and
failures. At least I could never forget that I had once felt my own and
other lives bound together with the Eternal Life by an invisible thread.

The vague, fitful desire I had felt from my childhood to be something
to the world I lived in, to give it something of the the inexpressible
sweetness that often seemed pouring through me, I knew not whence, now
began to shape itself into a definite outreach towards the Source of
all spiritual life. To draw near to the One All-Beautiful Being,
Christ, to know Him as our spirits may know The Spirit, to receive the
breath of his infinitely loving Life into mine, that I might breathe
out that fragrance again into the lives around me--this was the longing
wish that, half hidden from myself, lay deep beneath all other desires
of my soul. This was what religion grew to mean to me, what it is still
growing to mean, more simply and more clearly as the years go on.

The heart must be very humble to which this heavenly approach is
permitted. It knows that it has nothing in itself, nothing for others,
which it has not received. The loving Voice of Him who gives his
friends his errands to do whispers through them constantly, "Ye are not
your own."

There may be those who would think my narrat