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

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

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,