ptation to social
pleasures of the ordinary kind. His real delight was in quieter meetings
with his own family--with Stephens, and Diceys, and Garratts, and above
all, I think, with Henry and John Venn. At their houses, or in the
country walks where he could unfold his views to young men, whose
company he always enjoyed, he could pour out his mind in unceasing
discourse, and be sure of a congenial audience.

Our household must thus be regarded as stamped with the true evangelical
characteristics--and yet with a difference. The line between saints and
sinners or the Church and the world was not so deeply drawn as in some
cases. We felt, in a vague way, that we were, somehow, not quite as
other people, and yet I do not think that we could be called Pharisees.
My father felt it a point of honour to adhere to the ways of his youth.
Like Jonadab, the son of Rechab, as my brother observes, he would drink
no wine for the sake of his father's commandments (which, indeed, is
scarcely a felicitous application after what I have just said). He wore
the uniform of the old army, though he had ceased to bear unquestioning
allegiance. We never went to plays or balls; but neither were we taught
to regard such recreations as proofs of the corruption of man. My father
most carefully told us that there was nothing intrinsically wrong in
such things, though he felt strongly about certain abuses of them. At
most, in his favourite phrase, they were 'not convenient.' We no more
condemned people who frequented them than we blamed people in Hindostan
for riding elephants. A theatre was as remote from us as an elephant.
And therefore we grew up without acquiring or condemning such tastes.
They had neither the charm of early association nor the attraction of
forbidden fruit. To outsiders the household must have been pervaded by
an air of gravity, if not of austerity. But we did not feel it, for it
became the law of our natures, not a law imposed by external sanctions.
We certainly had a full allowance of sermons and Church services; but we
never, I think, felt them to be forced upon us. They were a part, and
not an unwelcome part, of the order of nature. In another respect we
differed from some families of the same creed. My father's fine taste
and his sensitive nature made him tremblingly alive to one risk. He
shrank from giving us any inducement to lay bare our own religious
emotions. To him and to our mother the needless revelation of the deeper