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look back over the memories it calls up with entire composure and confidence. There was nothing that I remember to have given me serious pain or dread in the course of my spiritual Pilgrimage. I left the orthodox City which had long been my home without agonies. I fell into no very deep or broad Sloughs of Despond on my way. It was never the City of Destruction to me at any time, though it has proved to too many to be the City of Obstruction. And I have long enjoyed a vision of the Delectable Mountains where the weary are at rest. There is nothing to give me pain in recalling so easy and uneventful a tramp. And I trust that I shall cause no pain in others in the telling my simple tale. It shall be told in as few words as I can find. And I shall not intrude on the reader any other part of my personal experiences and memories except those which describe how I myself have issued from the state when —

Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,

Chè la diritta via era smarrita.

BOYHOOD-HOME-SCHOOL

It was my happy lot to have been brought up until my nineteenth year at home, in the house of parents who lavished on myself and my brothers every good influence that family life can give. They were truly and unaffectedly devout to the last day of their long lives, took the deepest interest in their children's education, and impressed on them every act of practical religion. My father was a stanch High Churchman of moderate views, who never omitted to read family prayers, which he did with admirable feeling, was a regular communicant, and followed with keen judgment the religious movements of the time. His partner in business, my own

godfather, gave his time and his fortune to ardent support of the High Church cause. He would constantly send me the manuals and books of devotion of that school. I read them with pleasure and a somewhat guarded assent.

As a small boy I lived in the "thirties" in a lonely country side in Middlesex, then untainted by railways or modern buildings. I can recall the quiet village church, the Sunday Hymns and Catechism, and the simple sermons of our worthy vicar. It was a red-letter day with us when Archbishop Howley visited us, and preached in lawn sleeves and a short wig, and I felt sorry for our good neighbours, the Quakers, who enjoyed no such privilege of hearing the Word of God from consecrated lips.

When we removed to London I was sent to what was then an eminently Church school, that of King's College in Somerset House; and there our course of teaching embraced to an unusual degree, the whole of the Bible, the Church Catechism and Articles, with abundant Scripture "proofs" and texts, such books as Paley's Evidences, Pearson On the Creed, Ecclesiastical History of the first three centuries, the Testament in Greek, and even the Hebrew grammar and passages from the Psalms in the original.

I can call to mind no time of my boyish life when I was not familiar with the whole of the Bible and Prayer-Book, with the books of Archdeacon Paley, Bishop Wilberforce, Edward Burton, William Adams, and other theologians of the old school. In London I listened with interest to the sermons of our pastor, the Rev. James Shergold Boone, a Christ Church man of remarkable eloquence, and of much philosophic acumen. And I was fascinated by sermons from time to time from Bishop Wilberforce, Bishop Blomfield, Henry Melvill, Frederick Robertson, and most of the famous preachers of the "forties." Till my nineteenth year, I was brought

up in a thoroughly ecclesiastical "atmosphere," which satisfied at the time my sympathies, as well as my mind. If ever a young man was destined to be a Churchman of the "High-and-Dry" type, I think I may claim to have had that early preparation.

All this, of course, was the ordinary experience of any average youth in a respectable family within the Established Church. I mention it only to show that I received in early life all the advantages of religious training, perhaps in somewhat unusual fulness. How did all this act, or react, on my own spiritual growth? I will try to state this as fairly as I can, looking back on it now without regret and without contempt.

I understand that I was considered at home a fairly "good" boy; healthy, docile, and happy, but somewhat unusually sensitive and shy. I must have had at one time a very lively conscience and a turn for introspection. I remember the intense agony I felt as a child when, in a passion with my nurse, I had wished she might "be damned." The dear old thing's horror at my impiety convinced me that I had committed "the sin against the Holy Ghost," as I suppose she told me I had. For three whole days I felt that the earth would open and swallow me up, and I was even afraid that my mother might incur sin, if she kissed so hopeless a miscreant. As days passed by without any catastrophe, my spirits revived, and I fear I began to think that strong language could not be so very wicked as to merit an eternity of torment.

The sound sense of our parents spared us from visions of Hell, of demons, and divine "judgments," and of all the ghastly machinery by which in Calvinistic families children are tortured. Such cruel books as The Fairchild Family and the whole literature of devildom and of everlasting fire were kept from us. Apollyon in my pictorial Pilgrim's

Progress, "with fire and smoke issuing from his belly," seemed to me as childish as Giant Pope, mumbling in his cave, biting his nails and grinning at Pilgrims. The more I consider it, the more I see how detestable is the crime by which children have supernatural terrors inflicted on them. Our own children have never had a shadow of it cast on their tender souls; and I observe how free they have all been from dread of dark places, of being left alone at night, and from all the bogeydom which breaks the heart of so many young things.

When I went to King's College School in 1844, at the age of twelve, the religious world was in the throes of the Tractarian movement and the impending conversion of leading Anglican priests. There was an earnest Puseyite party in the school itself, into which young as I was I was a good deal thrown. Alfred Bailey and Henry Parry Liddon were both soon to be students of Christ Church and favourite disciples of Dr. Pusey. In the sixth form I sat beside Liddon who, some years my senior, was precisely the same as a schoolboy that he became when priest and canon-with the same pensive earnestness and sweet unworldliness, the same Catholic religiosity and rigid dogmatism. I was afterwards, in my sixteenth year, second Monitor of the school along with Martin H. Irving, only son of Edward Irving, founder of the "Catholic Apostolic Church." My close friend was the late Sir Charles Cookson, also somewhat my senior; who, as a schoolboy, was an ardent ritualist and follower of Pusey, and was himself the son of an eminent clergyman. I was thus thrown before I was fifteen into daily association with several men of great ability, older than myself, whose keenest interests lay in the theological movement and who were Churchmen with a strong ritualist cast.

At the proper age I was "confirmed" by Bishop Blomfield,

up in a thoroughly ecclesiastical "atmosphere," which satisfied at the time my sympathies, as well as my mind. If ever a young man was destined to be a Churchman of the "High-and-Dry" type, I think I may claim to have had that early preparation.

All this, of course, was the ordinary experience of any average youth in a respectable family within the Established Church. I mention it only to show that I received in early life all the advantages of religious training, perhaps in somewhat unusual fulness. How did all this act, or react, on my own spiritual growth? I will try to state this as fairly as I can, looking back on it now without regret and without contempt.

I understand that I was considered at home a fairly "good" boy; healthy, docile, and happy, but somewhat unusually sensitive and shy. I must have had at one time a very lively conscience and a turn for introspection. I remember the intense agony I felt as a child when, in a passion with my nurse, I had wished she might "be damned." The dear old thing's horror at my impiety convinced me that I had committed "the sin against the Holy Ghost," as I suppose she told me I had. For three whole days I felt that the earth. would open and swallow me up, and I was even afraid that my mother might incur sin, if she kissed so hopeless a miscreant. As days passed by without any catastrophe, my spirits revived, and I fear I began to think that strong language could not be so very wicked as to merit an eternity of torment.

The sound sense of our parents spared us from visions of Hell, of demons, and divine "judgments," and of all the ghastly machinery by which in Calvinistic families children are tortured. Such cruel books as The Fairchild Family and the whole literature of devildom and of everlasting fire were kept from us. Apollyon in my pictorial Pilgrim's

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