and the subtler penalties—the degradation, the growth of callousness to finer pleasures, the loss of sensitiveness to all that is most nobly attractive in woman—are too feeble to withstand temptation when it lies in ambush like a garrotter, and has the reason stunned in a moment.

The only thing that can be done is to make the conscience of a boy generally tender, so that he shrinks instinctively from the monstrous injustice of contributing for the sake of his own pleasure to the ruin of another.  As soon as manhood dawns, he must also have his attention absorbed on some object which will divert his thoughts intellectually or ideally; and by slight yet constant pressure, exercised not by fits and starts, but day after day, directly and indirectly, his father must form an antipathy in him to brutish, selfish sensuality.  Above all, there must be no toying with passion, and no books permitted, without condemnation and warning, which are not of a heroic turn.  When the boy becomes a man he may read Byron without danger.  To a youth he is fatal.

Before leaving this subject I may observe, that parents greatly err by not telling their children a good many things which they ought to know.  Had I been taught when I was young a few facts about myself, which I only learned accidentally long afterwards, a good deal of misery might have been spared me.

Nothing particular happened to me till I was about fourteen, when I was told it was time I became converted.  Conversion, amongst the Independents and other Puritan sects, is supposed to be a kind of miracle wrought in the heart by the influence of the Holy Spirit, by which the man becomes something altogether different to what he was previously.  It affects, or should affect, his character; that is to say, he ought after conversion to be better in every way than he was before; but this is not considered as its main consequence.  In its essence it is a change in the emotions and increased vividness of belief.  It is now altogether untrue.  Yet it is an undoubted fact that in earlier days, and, indeed, in rare cases, as late as the time of my childhood, it was occasionally a reality.

It is possible to imagine that under the preaching of Paul sudden conviction of a life misspent may have been produced with sudden personal attachment to the Galilean who, until then, had been despised.  There may have been prompt release of unsuspected powers, and as prompt an imprisonment for ever of meaner weaknesses and tendencies; the result being literally a putting off of the old, and a putting on of the new man.  Love has always been potent to produce such a transformation, and the exact counterpart of conversion, as it was understood by the apostles, may be seen whenever a man is redeemed from vice by attachment to some woman whom he worships, or when a girl is reclaimed from idleness and vanity by becoming a mother.

But conversion, as it was understood by me and as it is now understood, is altogether unmeaning.  I knew that I had to be “a child of God,” and after a time professed myself to be one, but I cannot call to mind that I was anything else than I always had been, save that I was perhaps a little more hypocritical; not in the sense that I professed to others what I knew I did not believe, but in the sense that I professed it to myself.  I was obliged to declare myself convinced of sin; convinced of the efficacy of the atonement; convinced that I was forgiven; convinced that the Holy Ghost was shed abroad in my heart; and convinced of a great many other things which were the merest phrases.

However, the end of it was, that I was proposed for acceptance, and two deacons were deputed, in accordance with the usual custom, to wait upon me and ascertain my fitness for membership.  What they said and what I said has now altogether vanished; but I remember with perfect distinctness the day on which I was admitted.  It was the custom to demand of each candidate a statement of his or her experience.  I had no experience to give; and I was excused on the grounds that I had been the child of pious parents, and consequently had not undergone that convulsion which those, not favoured like myself, necessarily underwent when they were called.

I was now expected to attend all those extra services which were specially for the church.  I stayed to the late prayer-meeting on Sunday; I went to the prayer-meeting on week-days, and also to private prayer-meetings.  These services were not interesting to me for their own sake.  I thought they were, but what I really liked was clanship and the satisfaction of belonging to a society marked off from the great world.

It must also be added that the evening meetings afforded us many opportunities for walking home with certain young women, who, I am sorry to say, were a more powerful attraction, not to me only, but to others, than the prospect of hearing brother Holderness, the travelling draper, confess crimes which, to say the truth, although they were many according to his own account, were never given in that detail which would have made his confession of some value.  He never prayed without telling all of us that there was no health in him, and that his soul was a mass of putrefying sores; but everybody thought the better of him for his self-humiliation.  One actual indiscretion, however, brought home to him would have been visited by suspension or expulsion.

CHAPTER II
PREPARATION

It was necessary that an occupation should be found for me, and after much deliberation it was settled that I should “go into the ministry.”  I had joined the church, I had “engaged in prayer” publicly, and although I had not set up for being extraordinarily pious, I was thought to be as good as most of the young men who professed to have a mission to regenerate mankind.

Accordingly, after some months of preparation, I was taken to a Dissenting College not very far from where we lived.  It was a large old-fashioned house with a newer building annexed, and was surrounded with a garden and with meadows.  Each student had a separate room, and all had their meals together in a common hall.  Altogether there were about forty of us.  The establishment consisted of a President, an elderly gentleman who had an American degree of doctor of divinity, and who taught the various branches of theology.  He was assisted by three professors, who imparted to us as much Greek, Latin, and mathematics as it was considered that we ought to know.  Behold me, then, beginning a course of training which was to prepare me to meet the doubts of the nineteenth century; to be the guide of men; to advise them in their perplexities; to suppress their tempestuous lusts; to lift them above their petty cares, and to lead them heavenward!

About the Greek and Latin and the secular part of the college discipline I will say nothing, except that it was generally inefficient.  The theological and Biblical teaching was a sham.  We had come to the college in the first place to learn the Bible.  Our whole existence was in future to be based upon that book; our lives were to be passed in preaching it.  I will venture to say that there was no book less understood either by students or professors.  The President had a course of lectures, delivered year after year to successive generations of his pupils, upon its authenticity and inspiration.  They were altogether remote from the subject; and afterwards, when I came to know what the difficulties of belief really were, I found that these essays, which were supposed to be a triumphant confutation of the sceptic, were a mere sword of lath.  They never touched the question, and if any doubts suggested themselves to the audience, nobody dared to give them tongue, lest the expression of them should beget a suspicion of heresy.

I remember also some lectures on the proof of the existence of God and on the