ft-repeated demands made upon the members of our Established Church;
such as, to enter upon the service of Christ, to show forth Christ in
one's life, to follow Jesus, etc. These injunctions were brought home to
me times without number through the zeal of my father as a teacher of
others and a liver himself of a Christian life. When demands are made on
a child which are in harmony with child nature, he knows no reluctance
in fulfilling them; and as he receives them entirely and unreservedly,
so also he complies with them entirely and unreservedly. That these
demands were so often repeated convinced me of their intense importance;
but I felt at the same time the difficulty, or indeed, as it seemed to
me, the impossibility of fulfilling them. The inherent contradiction
which I seemed to perceive herein threw me into great depression; but at
last I arrived at the blessed conviction that human nature is such that
it is not impossible for man to live the life of Jesus in its purity,
and to show it forth to the world, if he will only take the right way
towards it.

This thought, which, as often as it comes into my mind, carries me back
even now to the scenes and surroundings of my boyhood, may have been not
improbably amongst the last mental impressions of this period, and it
may fitly close, therefore, the narrative of my mental development at
this age. It became, later, the point whereon my whole life hinged.

From what I have said of my boyish inner life, it might be assumed that
my outer life was a happy and peaceful one. Such an assumption would,
however, not be correct. It seems as if it had always been my fate to
represent and combine the hardest and sharpest contrasts. My outer life
was really in complete contrast with my inner. I had grown up without a
mother; my physical education had been neglected, and in consequence I
had acquired many a bad habit. I always liked to be doing something or
another, but in my clumsy way I made mistakes as to choice of materials,
of time, and of place, and thus often incurred the severe displeasure of
my parents. I felt this, being of a sensitive disposition, more keenly
and more persistently than my parents; the more so as I felt myself
generally to blame in form rather than in substance, and in my inmost
heart I could see there was a point of view from whence my conduct would
seem, in substance at all events, not altogether wrong, still less
blameworthy. The motives assigned to my