The rest of my school life passed without any important change of view. I became successful in games, popular, active-minded. I won a scholarship at Cambridge with disastrous ease.

Then Cambridge life opened before me. I speak elsewhere of my intellectual and social life there, and will pass on to the next event of importance in my religious development.

My life had become almost purely selfish. I was not very ambitious of academical honours, though I meant to secure a modest first-class; but I was intensely eager for both social and literary distinction, and submitted myself to the full to the dreamful beauty of my surroundings, and the delicious thrill of artistic pleasures.

I have often thought how strangely and secretly the crucial moment, the most agonising crisis of my life drifted upon me. I say deliberately that, looking back over my forty years of life, no day was so fraught for me with fate, no hour so big with doomful issues, as that day which dawned so simply and sped past with such familiar ease to the destined hour—that moment which waved me, led by sociable curiosity, into the darkness of suffering and agony. A new birth indeed! The current of my days fell, as it were, with suddenness, unexpected, unguessed at, into the weltering gulf of despair; that hour turned me in an instant from a careless boy into a troubled man. And yet how easily it might have been otherwise—no, I dare not say that.

It had been like any other day. I had been to the dreary morning service, read huskily by a few shivering mortals in the chilly chapel; I had worked, walked in the afternoon with a friend, and we had talked of our plans—all we meant to do and be. After hall, I went to have some coffee in the rooms of a mild and amiable youth, now a church dignitary in the Colonies. I sat, I remember, on a deep sofa, which I afterwards bought and still possess. Our host carelessly said that a great Revivalist was to address a meeting that night. Some one suggested that we should go. I laughingly assented. The meeting was held in a hall in a side street; we went smiling and talking, and took our places in a crowded room. The first item was the appearance of an assistant, who accompanied the evangelist as a sort of precentor—an immense bilious man, with black hair, and eyes surrounded by flaccid, pendent, baggy wrinkles—who came forward with an unctuous gesture, and took his place at a small harmonium, placed so near the front of the platform that it looked as if both player and instrument must inevitably topple over; it was inexpressibly ludicrous to behold. Rolling his eyes in an affected manner, he touched a few simple cords, and then a marvellous transformation came over the room. In a sweet, powerful voice, with an exquisite simplicity combined with irresistible emotion, he sang “There were Ninety-and-Nine.” The man was transfigured. A deathly hush came over the room, and I felt my eyes fill with tears; his physical repulsiveness slipped from him, and left a sincere impulsive Christian, whose simple music spoke straight to the heart.

Then the preacher himself—a heavy-looking, commonplace man, with a sturdy figure and no grace of look or gesture—stepped forward. I have no recollection how he began, but he had not spoken half-a-dozen sentences before I felt as though he and I were alone in the world. The details of that speech have gone from me. After a scathing and indignant invective on sin, he turned to draw a picture of the hollow, drifting life, with feeble, mundane ambitions—utterly selfish, giving no service, making no sacrifice, tasting the moment, gliding feebly down the stream of time to the roaring cataract of death. Every word he said burnt into my soul. He seemed to me to probe the secrets of my innermost heart; to be analysing, as it were, before the Judge of the world, the arid and pitiful constituents of my most secret thought. I did not think I could have heard him out ... his words fell on me like the stabs of a knife. Then he made a sudden pause, and in a peroration of incredible dignity and pathos he drew us to the feet of the crucified Saviour, showed us the bleeding hand and the dimmed eye, and the infinite heart behind. “Just accept Him,” he cried; “in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, you may be His—nestling in His arms—with the burden of sin and selfishness resting at His feet.”

Even as he spoke, pierced as I was to the heart by contrition and anguish, I knew that this was not for me.... He invited all who would be Christ’s to wait and plead with him. Many men—even, I was surprised to see, a careless, cynical companion of my own—crowded to the platform, but I went out into the night, like one dizzied with a sudden blow. I was joined, I remember, by a tutor of my college, who praised the eloquence of the address, and was surprised to find me so little responsive; but my only idea was to escape and be alone: I felt like a wounded creature, who must crawl into solitude. I went to my room, and after long and agonising prayers for light, an intolerable weariness fell on me, and I slept.

I awoke at some dim hour of the night in the clutch of insupportable fear; let me say at once that with the miserable weeks that followed there was mingled much of physical and nervous suffering, far more, indeed, than I then knew, or was permitted to know. I had been reading hard, and throwing myself with unaccustomed energy into a hundred new ideas and speculations. I had had a few weeks before a sudden attack of sleeplessness, which should have warned me of overstrain. But now every nervous misery known to man beset me—intolerable depression, spectral remorse, nocturnal terrors. My work was neglected. I read the Bible incessantly, and prayed for the hour together. Sometimes my depression would leave me for a few hours, like a cat playing with a mouse, and leap upon me like an evil spirit in the middle of some social gathering or harmless distraction, striking the word from my lips and the smile from my face.

For some weeks this lasted, and I think I was nearly mad. Two strange facts I will record. One day, beside myself with agitation, seeing no way out—for my prayers seemed to batter, as it were, like waves against a stony and obdurate cliff, and no hope or comfort ever slid into my soul—I wrote two letters: one to an eminent Roman Catholic, in whose sermons I had found some encouragement, and one to the elder friend I have above spoken of. In two days I received the answers. That from the Romanist hard, irritated, and bewildered—my only way was to submit myself to true direction, and he did not see that I had any intention of doing this; that it was obvious that I was being plagued for some sin which I had not ventured to open to him. I burnt the letter with a hopeless shudder. The other from my old friend, appointing a time to meet me, and saying that he understood, and that my prayers would avail.

I went soon after to see him, in a dark house in a London square. He heard me with the utmost patience, bade me believe that I was not alone in my experience; that in many a life there was—there must be—some root of bitterness that must flower before the true seed could be sown, and adding many other manly and tender things.

He gave me certain directions, and though I will confess that I could not follow them for long—the soul must find her own path, I think, among the crags—yet he led me into a calmer, quieter, more tranquil frame of mind; he taught me that I must not expect to find the way all at once, that long coldness and habitual self-deceit must be slowly purged away. But I can never forget the infinite gratitude I owe him for the loving and strenuous way in which he brought me out into a place of liberty with the tenderness of a true father in God.

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