I had a religious bringing-up. I was made familiar with the Bible and the offices of religion; only the natural piety was wanting. I am quite certain I had no sense of religion as a child—I do not think I had any morality. Like many children, I was ruled by associations rather than by principles. I was sensitive to disapproval; and being timid by nature, I was averse to being found out; being moreover lacking in vitality, I seldom experienced the sensation of being brought face to face with temptation—rebellion, anger, and sensual impulse were unknown to me; but while I was innocent, I was unconscientious and deceitful, not so much deliberately as instinctively.

The sense of religion I take to be, in its simplest definition, the consciousness of the presence of the Divine Being, and the practice of religion to be the maintenance of conscious union or communion with the Divine. These were entirely lacking to me. I accepted the fact of God’s existence as I accepted the facts of history and geography. But my conception of God, if I may speak plainly and without profanity, was derived from the Old Testament, and was destitute of attractiveness. I conceived of Him as old, vindictive, unmerciful, occupied in tedious matters, hostile to all gaiety and juvenility; totally uninterested in the human race, except in so far that He regarded their transgressions with morbid asperity and a kind of gloomy satisfaction, as giving Him an opportunity of exercising coercive discipline. He was never represented to me as the Giver of the simple joys of life—of light and warmth, of food and sleep, as the Creator of curious and sweet-smelling flowers, of aromatic shrubs, of waving trees, of horned animals and extravagant insects. Considering how entirely creatures of sense children are, it has seemed to me since that it would be well if their simplest pleasures, the material surroundings of their lives, were connected with the idea of God—if they felt that what they enjoyed was sent by Him; if it were said of a toy that “God sends you this;” or of some domestic festivity that “God hopes that you will be happy to-day,”—it appears to me that we should have less of that dreary philosophy which connects “God’s will” only with moments of bereavement and suffering. If we could only feel with Job, that God, who sends us so much that is sweet and wholesome, has equally the right to send us what is evil, we could early grow to recognise that, when the greater part of our lives is made up of what is desirable or interesting, and when we cling to life and the hope of happiness with so unerring an instinct, it is probable, nay, certain, that our afflictions must be ultimately intended to minister to the fulness of joy.

Certainly religious practices, though I enjoyed them in many ways, had no effect on conduct; indeed, I never thought of them as having any concern with conduct. Religious services never seemed to me in childhood to be solemnities designed for the hallowing of life, or indeed as having any power to do so, but merely as part of the framework of duty, as ceremonies out of which it was possible to derive a certain amount of interest and satisfaction.

Church was always a pleasure to me; I liked the mise-en-scÈne, the timbered roof, the fallen day, the stained glass, the stone pillars, the comfortable pew, the rubricated prayer-book, the music, the movements of the minister—these all had a definite Æsthetic effect upon me; moreover, it was a pleasure to note, with the unshrinking gaze of childhood, the various delightful peculiarities of members of the congregation: the old man with apple-red cheeks, in his smock-frock, who came with rigid, creaking boots to his place; the sexton, with his goat-like beard; the solicitor, who emitted sounds in the hymns like the lowing of a cow; the throaty tenor, who had but one vowel for all; the dowager in purple silk, who sat through the Psalms and inspected her prayer-book through a gold eye-glass as though she were examining some natural curiosity. All these were, in childish parlance, “so funny.” And Church was thus a place to which I went willingly and joyfully; the activity of my observation saved me from the tedium with which so many children regard it.

This vacuous Æstheticism in the region of religion continued with me through my school days. Of purpose and principle there was no trace. I do indeed remember one matter in which I had recourse to prayer. At my private school, a big suburban establishment, I was thrust into a large dormitory, a shrinking and bewildered atom, fresh from the privacies and loving attentions of the nursery, and required to undress and go to bed before the eyes of fifty boys. It was a rude introduction to the world, and it is strange to reflect upon the helpless despair with which a little soul can be filled under circumstances which to maturer thoughts appear almost idyllic. But while I crouched miserably upon my bed, as I prepared to slip between the sheets—of which the hard texture alone dismayed me—I was struck by a shoe, mischievously, but not brutally thrown by a bigger boy some yards away. Is it amusing or pathetic to reflect that night after night I prayed that this might not be repeated, using a suffrage of the Litany about our persecutors and slanderers, which seemed to me dismally appropriate?

At the public school to which I was shortly transferred, where I enjoyed a tranquil and uneventful existence, religion was still a sentiment. Being one of the older foundations we had a paid choir, and the musical service was a real delight to me. I loved the dark roof and the thunders of the organ; even now I can recollect the thrill with which I looked day after day at the pure lines of the Tudor building, the innumerable clustered shafts that ran from pavement to roof. I cared little for the archÆology and history of the place, but the grace of antiquity, the walls of mellow brick, the stone-crop that dripped in purple tufts among the mouldering stones of the buttress, the very dust that clung to the rafters of the ancient refectory—all these I noted with secret thrills of delight.

Still no sense of reality touched me; life was but a moving pageant, in which I played as slight a part as I could contrive to play. I was inoffensive; my work was easy to me. I had some congenial friends, and dreamed away the weeks in a gentle indolence set in a framework of unengrossing duties.

About my sixteenth year I made friends with a high-church curate whom I met in the holidays, who was indeed distantly related to me; he was attached to a large London church, which existed mainly for ornate services, and I used to go up from school occasionally to see him, and even spent a few days in his house at the beginning or end of the holidays. Looking back, he seems to me now to have been a somewhat inert and sentimental person, but I acquired from him a real love of liturgical things, wrote out with my own hand a book of Hours, carefully rubricated—though I do not recollect that I often used it—and became more ceremonial than ever. I had long settled that I was to take Orders, and I well recollect the thrill with which on one of these visits I saw my friend ascend the high stone pulpit of the tall church, with flaring lights, in a hood of a strange pattern, which he assured me was the antique shape. The sermon was, I even now recollect, deplorable both in language and thought, but that seemed to me a matter of entire indifference; the central fact was that he stood there vested with due solemnity, and made rhetorical motions with an easy grace.

At this time, too, at school, I took to frequenting the service of the cathedral in the town whenever I was able, and became a familiar figure to vergers and clergy. I have no doubt that were I to be made a bishop, this fact would be cited as an instance of early piety, but the truth was that it was, so to speak, a mere amusement. I can honestly say that it had no sort of effect on my life, which ran indolently on, side by side with the ritual preoccupation, unaffected by it, and indeed totally distinct from it. My confirmation came in the middle of these diversions; the solid and careful preparation that I received I looked upon as so much tedious lecturing to be decorously borne, and beside a dim pleasure in the ceremony, I do not think it had any influence of a practical kind. Once, indeed, there did pass a breath of vital truth over my placid and self-satisfied life, like a breeze over still water. There came to stay with us in the holidays an elderly clergyman, a friend of my mother’s, a London rector, whose whole life was sincerely given to helping souls to the light, and who had escaped by some exquisite lucidity of soul the self-consciousness—too often, alas, the outcome of the adulation which is the shadow of holy influence. He had the gift of talking simply and sweetly about spiritual things—indeed nothing else interested him; conversation about books or politics he listened to with a gentle urbanity of tolerance; yet when he talked himself, he never dogmatised, but appealed with a wistful smile to his hearers to confirm the experiences which he related. Me, though an awkward boy, he treated with the most winning deference, and on the morning of his departure asked me with delightful grace to accompany him on a short walk, and opened to me the thought of the hallowing presence of Christ in daily life. It seems to me now that he was inviting my confidence, but I had none to give him; so with a memorable solemnity he bade me, if I ever needed help in spiritual things, to come freely to him; I remember that he did so without any sense of patronage, but as an older disciple, wrestling with the same difficulties, and only a little further ahead in the vale of life. Lastly he took me to his room, knelt down beside me, and prayed with exquisite simplicity and affection that I might be enriched with the knowledge of Christ, and then laid his hand upon my head with a loving benediction. For days and even weeks that talk and that benediction dwelt with me; but the time had not come, and I was to be led through darker waters; and though I prayed for many days intensely that some revelation of truth might come to me, yet the seed had fallen on shallow soil, and was soon scorched up again by the genial current of my daily life.

I think, though I say this with sadness, that he represented religion as too much a withdrawal from life for one so young, and did not make it clear to me that my merriment, my joys, my interests, and my ambitions might be hallowed and invigorated. He had himself subordinated life and character so completely to one end, and thrown aside (if he had ever possessed them) the dear prejudices and fiery interests of individuality, that I doubt if he could have thrown his imagination swiftly enough back into all the energetic hopes, the engrossing beckonings of opening manhood.

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