"Do 'ee love the Lord?" my Grandmother was for ever asking.

"Yes, Grandmother," I always replied.

Down in my heart I knew it was not true. There was belief in me, and awe; but of that passion for God which I envied in her, no semblance. If it were really love I felt for Him (I put it to myself) "my heart would warm within me whenever I think of Him, as it does when I think of Robbie: or of Mother." When I tried to conjure Him up, all I could ever see was a blurred bearded man on a high grey throne; and if I peered harder for face and features, a dark mist like a rain-cloud always filled the space where they should be.

I knew I could never love Any One Whose face I could never see.

"You do not love Him as you do Robbie," kept saying the accusing voice within. It is true, and the thought horrified me. Until I could feel this greater love, I knew I had not "got religion."

For all my godly upbringing, for all my pious ways, I was no more privileged than ninety-nine of a hundred mere averagely religious grown-ups. Like theirs, my religion was but an affair of education, habit, intellect, morality. The Rapture was withheld. I had not got religion.

I knew my Bible as well as any child in England, and I loved it as well. I believed in all the doctrines of the Saints, not vaguely either, like a normal unreflecting child: but had pondered on them, and within my capabilities thought them out and personally accepted them. No atheist doubts oppressed me. The Tempter had not assailed me, as he had assailed my friend John Bunyan, with "Is Christianity no better than other religions, just one religion among many?" and other such wicked doubts. But I had not got religion.

And fear beset me: fear of other people, of the Devil, of Eternity, and, now as I grew older, of myself. The glimpses I had of the evil natures in me affrighted me. Sometimes in brooding over some wrong done me, my imagination ran riot in fantastic excesses of cruelty and revenge till I drew back appalled at the horrors of which, in thought at any rate, I was capable. I would brood over the unhappiness of my life and the injustice meted out to me every day, till my soul was a dark seething mass of revengefulness and hate. Not till I found myself visualizing the very act of murder did I draw back affrighted.

With the change in my nature that came as I grew into girlhood, a new series of evil visions possessed me. I found myself picturing fleshly and disgraceful things, things I had never heard of nor known to be possible, thrown up from the wells of original sin within. Pleasurable sensations lured me on till I drew back appalled at the sickening deeds that I, godly little Plymouth Sister, conceived myself as doing. Of course they were things I never should really do—oh dear no! that was foul, unimaginable!—but Conscience quoted Matthew five, twenty-eight, and though I stuffed my fingers in my ears she kept dinning it. You have committed it already in your heart.

I had no sense of proportion, and believed myself a very monster of vileness: a vileness, I feared, which would cling and canker till it deformed my soul and body and face; and I saw myself, a loathsome shape, living on for ever with increasing self-loathing through all the pitiless eternal years. My blood froze with fear as my mind's eye stared fascinated at the shameful shape. I screamed as madmen scream.

Madness I often feared. In my imaginings of Eternity, let me one day go but a single step too far, let me suffer the awful ecstasy of fear to hold me but a second too long, and I knew my reason would be fled. So about this time I added to my prayers: "God, save me from going mad."

But fear, though never far away, and the sense of wickedness, though always near the surface, were not masters of every moment. The one thing that never left me was a feeling of unsatisfiedness, incompleteness. The world seemed an empty place, my soul an empty vessel. I had a melancholy sureness that something, the chief thing, the secret of happiness, was lacking me. I believed that this secret could only be discovered in the love of God: that there only could I find, as my Grandmother had found, the peace and delight which pass all understanding. That alone was religion, and I had it not.

"Do 'ee love the Lord?" my Grandmother was for ever asking.

To possess the love of God became the aim of all my prayers and hopes. It alone could save me from my evil self, quell my bad desires, dispel my fears, and fill the aching void. How could I possess it? The conviction seized me one day, how or why I do not know, that I should obtain it in the moment at which I was baptized; not before, and in no other way. Once the idea had come, it would not leave me; to hasten on my public immersion became the chief endeavour of my life.

Grandmother was nothing loth, for it was her own dearest wish. My age, she said, might be raised in objection: I was not yet thirteen. Had I surely faith?—I gave her passionate proofs—then God's requirements were fulfilled. She spoke to Aunt Jael, and both of them to Pentecost Dodderidge, who agreed ardently.

The Brethren do not of course practise infant baptism. However, children of about my age could be, and very occasionally were, baptized, provided they gave surpassing proofs of holiness. Faith, not age, as the Bible shows, is the only test of fitness. But certain of the Saints in our Meeting, influenced whether by "common-sense," or by the rankling notion that none of their children ever had been or ever would be admitted to baptism at such a tender age, began to murmur, and spoke privily to Pentecost against the project. Brother Browning took the bolder course of taking my Grandmother herself to task. Dark doubts beset him, he declared, scriptural doubts; though his real motive was jealousy for Marcus.

"Unscriptural?" said my Grandmother in amaze. "Have you read your acts of the Apostles, Brother Browning? Faith, not years or rank or race is what the Scripture requires. Think of Crispus, Cornelius, the jailor of Philippi, Lydia seller of purple! Turn to your eighth chapter: Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch: 'See, here is water, what doth hinder us to be baptized?' Does Philip answer 'But tell me first your age?' No, he answers: 'If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest.'"

She turned to me. "Child, do you believe with all your heart?"

"Yes, Grandmother."

Turning in triumph to Brother Browning: "The Scripture is satisfied. And," she added, "Mr. Pentecost approves."

Brother Browning was confounded. Nevertheless, but for the affection in which Grandmother was held, and Aunt Jael's prestige, both backed by the insurmountable authority of Pentecost, I am pretty sure that some of the Saints would have resisted further. In face of that Trinity, they were dumb.

So it was settled, and I began a term of "preparation." Grandmother enjoined that I turn my mind wholly on heavenly things. She held devotions with me at all hours, praying sometimes far into the night. Pentecost himself came in to pray with me, while those who had raised objections were invited specially to test my faith. Brother Browning came,—like the Queen of Sheba, to prove me with hard questions. Like Solomon, I emerged triumphant.

As the time drew near, sometimes my excitement could hardly contain itself. My visions of the Moment became more detailed, more delirious, more intense. At the very moment of immersion the old Wicked Me would instantly die and a New Self come into being: in a second, Eve would be driven out and Christ implanted for ever in my soul. At one magical stroke I should possess happiness and be freed from all fear and wickedness and emptiness of heart. The love of God would not enter me slowly, gradually; but would storm me like a victorious army, swallow me like the sea.

As part of my preparation, I was taken by Grandmother to one or two baptisms. Ceremonies were held from time to time, according as there were sufficient candidates. Our Meeting baptized not only for ourselves but also for the Branch Meeting and all the villages around. The number of persons immersed ranged from two or three to a dozen. The ceremony took place in the Taw, following Scripture example; at a spot just beyond the quay and the ships, a few yards from where the Town railway-station for Ilfracombe now stands. Here the river was shallow; you could wade nearly into mid-stream. Robing and re-robing took place at White House, Brother Brawn's tumble-down residence near by. Now that Pentecost was too old, Brother Brawn was our Baptist. The usual time was Lord's Day morning; very early, to avoid a jeering crowd.

At the second of these ceremonies that I was taken to see, a strange incident occurred. Despite the day and hour, we were never quite without a few scoffers, who would stand on the shore a little way away from our company, and shout and mock at the proceedings in the water. On this particular occasion two men who looked like labourers appeared, not on shore, but in a small boat in mid-stream; where they remained cat-calling and jeering while we held our preliminary service on the river bank. Brother Brawn waded out with the convert—a fair-haired young man whose name I do not remember—till the water was about up to their middles. The two men in the boat rowed nearer till they were within a few yards only; but farther out, and therefore in a deeper place. The river was at high tide.

"Look 'ee at the dippers, the sheep dippers!" they cried; then to Brother Brawn, "'Tis too early yet for the dippin', master, 'tis a'most winter still." They used foul words and sneered blasphemously, taking God's name in vain.

We on the shore had noticed a dog with them in the boat, a little terrier, shaggy and brown. When Brother Brawn began the actual act of immersion and dipped the fair-haired young Brother's head under water, one of the men in the boat began a blasphemous imitation. He took the dog by the scruff of the neck, held it over the edge of the boat, and kept dipping its head under the water. After each word of Brother Brawn's he cried out: "I baptize thee, O Brother Dog, i' the name o' the Vather, o' the Zun—"

We were too horrified to speak or move. I know my face was scarlet with shame; and I prayed within: "O God, stop him, strike him low. Stop his mouth. Punish him now." I saw Grandmother was saying a like prayer.

God replied before our eyes. The mocking man, in a misjudged movement, bent over too far with the dog. In a second the boat was overturned, and men and dog were in the water together, struggling and splashing. (Brother Brawn's back was turned; I do not think he knew what was happening.)

Where the boat had overturned it was clearly much deeper, as neither of the men could stand. One managed to swim in safety to the opposite bank. The other, the chief mocker, struggled, rose, disappeared, rose again, and finally disappeared, gurgling and gesticulating horribly.

Those of us on shore were purged with awe and terror. "God is not mocked!" cried Pentecost.

After the service, the dead body was washed ashore; I gazed in dumb horror (thinking too of God's power) at the staring wide-open eyes, the blue face contorted with fear, the soft white foam issuing from the mouth.

The dog was saved. Brother Brawn took it away with him and had it poisoned.

This incident served to tinge with apprehension the hopes with which I looked forward to my own immersion, now very near. Suppose I were drowned: in my own way I was wicked as the labourer, with better chances and less excuse. God could drown me if He wished. The mere physical horror of cold water was another fleck. Nor was Mrs. Cheese behindhand with tales that troubled. She recalled the young woman in a rapid decline who had been baptized one winter morning in the Exe, had been dragged out unconscious, and had died within the hour. She knew of Sisters who had fainted through nervousness or collapsed with the cold. Then there was the Christian wife who was stripped naked and horsewhipped by her infidel husband, a country squire over Chittlehampton way, because she had received public baptism. He flogged her till she was a mass of blood and wounds, till she fell to the ground as one dead; then dragged her up again and dashed her head against a stone wall. She died from ill-usage, a true "gauspel martyr."

My day was fixed: our next baptism, a Sunday in April, a few weeks after my thirteenth birthday.

Clothes were a problem. Female candidates usually donned for the occasion an old cast-off skirt which they could afford to let the water ruin. Pieces of lead were sewn at intervals to the inside of the bottom of the skirt, so that when in the water the air would not get into and blow it upwards.

According to Aunt Jael, the pieces of lead should weigh about four ounces each: just sufficient to keep the skirt pendant and modest. All very well, said my Grandmother, but what good were weights—four ounces or forty ounces—when the skirt, like the child's, reached down to the knees only? There was only one way out of the difficulty: "The child must wear a long skirt for the occasion." A faded black serge of my Grandmother's was unearthed. It fitted me—more or less—though a good couple of inches higher in front than behind; and, helped out by an old black blouse and cape, produced the most grotesque and unlovely Mary the mirror had ever shewn me.

"Changing" was at Brother Brawn's, the White House, near the quay. On the Saturday night preceding the event Grandmother took me down there with my ordinary Lord's Day clothes wrapped up in a paper parcel and laid them out in the back kitchen (the immemorial after-the-event robing room) ready for the morrow. Mistress Brawn, nÉe Clinker, received us with an infantile affectation of patronage: as though we didn't know that Brother Brawn's had been the garmenting-house for forty years and more.

The morrow dawned fine and cold. With Grandmother on my left hand and Aunt Jael on my right, I sallied forth down Bear Street, in full baptismal kit of faded black. What the few early risers we met on our way thought of me I do not know. Nor, I expect, did they.

Though he had relinquished the office of Baptist for several years, Pentecost Dodderidge decided to resume it for this one occasion. It was a supreme honour for me, a high compliment to Aunt Jael and Grandmother, and a real risk and sacrifice on his part: for he was in frail health, and nearing his eighty-fourth year. At the riverside we found him waiting, clad in the black surplice he had always used, his white beard flowing free. Around him the Saints stood clustered; every man and woman in the Meeting must have been there.

All there, whispered the Devil, to see you. You the child-Saint, you the youthful trophy of God's grace. There were other candidates, I knew, mere everyday grown-ups; but I was the "star turn," and I first should enter the water. The moment was very near: "Be ready," whispered Grandmother. My heart beat wildly. The air was sharp and a cold breeze was stirring. How much colder would the water not be! Cold dark water, suppose it should engulph me for ever? How blue the mocking labourer had been. But God would not treat me so: my heart was aching to receive Him. He would come to me, not cast my body to death. How all the Saints were staring. Vanity swelled again. I was the youngest who had ever been baptized in Taw (I heard it whispered near me), the youngest ever privileged to break bread! Were not all the people gazing on me, admiring my piety, specialness, distinction? Ah, publicity, glory! I would walk into the water in the view of all the multitude, like an empress on her way. "Crush that vile vanity!" the Better Me cried savagely: "Chase forth that paltry pride. Only to a clean and humble heart can the Lord of Heaven come. Quick, away with it!" Ere the voice had done speaking, all the pride had fled away. My heart stood empty, sure of its emptiness, hungering for the Holy Spirit, waiting with intense expectation and a hope almost too hard to bear.

"Come, Lord Jesus," I whispered.

Meanwhile around me they had sung a hymn and prayed a prayer; I hardly knew it. Pentecost took my hand. The moment was here: should I die of hope?—my heart was beating so. We waded out together in the cold stream. I must have been looking eastwards for I remember the bright morning sun was in my eyes. I can see again the green fields opposite. I remember too how frail and tiny I felt as Mr. Pentecost's hand held mine, and as he towered above me in the water.

A long way out we halted: I was up to my shoulder nearly, he to his middle. He grasped me, placing his right hand under my left armpit, and the palm of his left hand flat in the middle of my back. He looked to heaven, holding me still upright, and called in a loud voice: "I do baptize thee, my sister, in the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Ghost." On the last word he flung me backwards until for a moment I was wholly under the water.

Now the miracle took place. As I came up again the water streaming from my face was no longer cold, but warm and luminous; not water at all, but light itself. Light suffused me, covered me, poured into me, filled me; a blinding, lilting joy and brightness throbbed and shone through all my body and soul. I shut my eyes in sheer rapture; my ordinary senses faded away; sight and hearing were of another world from this beatific Presence. It seemed as though another person, luminous and divine, had entered into my body. It was God. I knew everything; and everything was well. I remembered all I had ever done, and far away things I had done in distant centuries in other lives I had not known until now. I seemed to remember the future too; for in that moment Time had no meaning; that moment was all Eternity. I understood, with a perfectness of comprehension beside which all my life before seemed darkness that there was no beginning and no end, no time and no space, nothing but God Who transcended them all, and who now possessed me utterly. I thought my heart would burst. The holy exaltation was too hard and beautiful to bear. All round and in me was light and love: the sun and God and I, all the same soul and body, all merged together, all within each other, all One. For that one glorious moment I was God.

A transcendent experience transcends all verbal description: even now I cannot think of it: only feel it, live it again. Nor can explanation impart its quality to others. It is my soul's own mystery, indescribable, incommunicable, in the most literal sense ineffable. I rail at words that they can do so little, then at my own folly that I should seek to describe in finite language the Infinite Mystery of God.

The ecstasy lasted perhaps, in the world's time, a minute: though, in reality, for ever. Then I remember, as I woke to finite experience, a gradual ebbing sensation as the Holy Spirit departed from me. The warmth and radiance faded; the streaming fluid of light was dripping water only. I was conscious of Pentecost again, clasping my hand and leading me ashore. I heard the voices of the Saints raised aloft in a song of triumphal thanks. Then—Grandmother's welcoming arms, benignant Saints, the White House, garment-changing, loud Salvation, dear warm breakfast; all part of a waking dream.

* * * * * * *

The results of Jordan morning were chiefly four.

First, I was left with a certainty of belief in God, a sense of authority in my knowledge of Him, and an ever-present memory of His nearness and reality, that faith without experience could never have furnished. I apprehended once and for all the folly and futility of all intellectual reasoning about God, all attempts to bolster Him up by argument; to prove Him. Vain beatings about the bush! You do not beat about the Burning Bush: you enter within, and there is God.

Second, from that day onwards I could never again be sure that life was real. After the blinding reality of my moment with God, all things around me seemed faded and unsubstantial; they were the shadows of a dream, of the dream that I was, alive. After a while, as my soul travelled back to the habits of normal experience, the notion haunted me less; but it has never completely left me.

Third, having received the knowledge of God, I knew that it was the one thing worth living for. I knew I must show myself worthy of possessing Him, and fit to receive Him again. The sense of perfect holiness I had experienced filled me with a yearning for goodness and purity that was almost morbidly intense. I tried every moment of the day to make myself more like the Holy Spirit, more capable of feeling within me the holiness I had for one moment felt. Conscience was ever at hand: for a long space I obeyed her every bidding. The fact that I was happier put spite and revenge and morbid broodings under better control. Heredity and habit, the taint within and the harsh surroundings without, kept me dismal-Jenny enough: but from the day of my baptism my bouts of misery were less frequent, less prolonged, and less cruel. I had always the memory of that tender triumphant ineffable moment with God.

Fourth, and most curious, I found myself farther away from my Grandmother. We had the same religion, yet different religions; knew the One God, yet different Gods. Or rather the difference was not in Him, but in our two selves, in the two temperaments with which we experienced Him. All my life I had envied my Grandmother's joy and serenity in the Lord; I had obtained a joy as perfect, yet I knew that it was another joy; not greater nor less, but different. Her chief delight was in contemplating the salvation of all souls achieved through the sacrifice on Calvary; mine was the Spirit of God filling and irradiating the heart. Not that I ever doubted that it was through and because of the Cross that the knowledge of the Lord had been vouchsafed me so miraculously; but the emotional result interested me, not the theological cause. In all my earnest strivings to be good it was never the sacrifice of Jesus that spurred me on; but always the memory of the Holy Spirit. I must be clean and good and holy like Him, and worthy to welcome Him again. I have put the distinction between Aunt Jael and Grandmother as this: Aunt Jael was an Old Testament woman, Grandmother a New Testament one. But the real distinction between the three of us was this. God is Triune and One: Aunt Jael revered the First Person, Grandmother loved the Second, and I adored the Third.

Trouble began in this way. Unlike Grandmother, now that I had got religion I took a strong dislike to talking of it. To her "Do 'ee love the Lord?" I could only reply with passionate truth, "Yes, Grandmother"; but I found that (where before my baptism it was the sense of insincerity in my reply that had troubled me) now it was a certain indelicacy in the question itself that offended. "If in my heart"—this is approximately what I felt—"I have the mystery of the love of the Lord, that is a private and sacred bond between Him and me. Whose business is it else? What right have they to pry?" I felt a curious shame, resembling the shame of nakedness, but more intense and spiritual; as the soul is more sensitive than the body.

"Do you contemplate hourly the Cross of Christ?" "Is the Means of Salvation your only joy?" "Do you think always of the blessed Gospel plan?" "Is the Atonement everything to 'ee, my dear?" No worldlyhead, no scoffer could have hated these searching questions as did I. My Grandmother perceived the distaste, and was profoundly puzzled and pained. Her own answer to these questions would have been "Yes," in the weeks after her baptism (she must have said to herself), a fervent triumphant Yes.

One day an incident showed how wide the spiritual breach was becoming, and widened it still further. It was a Saturday morning: I was sitting on the bottom stair of the staircase, pulling on my boots to go for a walk. My Grandmother, coming from the little pantry at the head of the cellar steps, stooped down as she passed, and asked in a loud whisper of intense earnestness: "The Cross, my dear: is it giving you joy now?" She bent and peered, poking her face right into mine. It was so sudden, the irritation and distaste so powerful, that I drew back sharply with a quick gesture of annoyance. There had been no time for dissimulation, and the look on my face was unmistakable. So was the look on hers—pain, and a rare and terrible thing, anger.

"You dare draw back like that? What is it? Du my breath smell bad?"

* * * * * * *

The real crisis, I saw, was yet to come. Now that I had got religion (in my fashion, in God's fashion, for me) I knew that I was never destined to fulfil my Grandmother's purpose: to devote my life to preaching the Gospel in heathen lands. The first moment I thought of this after my baptism I realized with a shivering aversion how much more distasteful my long-decided future was than it had ever appeared before; I realized too in the old authentic way, that it was not God's will or purpose for me; and but for this, I was far too honest, in my new frame of mind, to have let my own distaste count for anything. I reflected how odd it was that through the great central act of my dedication, I had become unable to fulfil its ultimate purpose. But so it was. The same answer came to all my prayers, unspoken and afoot, or cried out on bended knees: His purpose for me was no missionary one, but my best endeavours in an ordinary life in the everyday workaday world. The conflict to come was not with Him, but with Grandmother.

What would she say when the day of decision came, and plans and details of my apostolic career could no longer be evaded or postponed? What would she say? How would she feel? And I, how should I face her scornful accusing eyes? The more I pictured the inevitable instant, the more I feared it.

And the everyday workaday life, where and what would it be? I had still the vaguest ideas on such matters, though I knew I should have to earn money and provide myself with bread: I, the mere dependent, the Charity Child as Aunt Jael so often described me. The question turned itself over and over in my brain. It was from an unexpected quarter that the answer came.