nasty, as this fellow was.  Passion may burn like a devouring flame; and in a few moments, like flame, may bring down a temple to dust and ashes, but it is earnest as flame, and essentially pure.

During the first two years at college my life was entirely external.  My heart was altogether untouched by anything I heard, read, or did, although I myself supposed that I took an interest in them.  But one day in my third year, a day I remember as well as Paul must have remembered afterwards the day on which he went to Damascus, I happened to find amongst a parcel of books a volume of poems in paper boards.  It was called Lyrical Ballads, and I read first one and then the whole book.  It conveyed to me no new doctrine, and yet the change it wrought in me could only be compared with that which is said to have been wrought on Paul himself by the Divine apparition.

Looking over the Lyrical Ballads again, as I have looked over it a dozen times since then, I can hardly see what it was which stirred me so powerfully, nor do I believe that it communicated much to me which could be put in words.  But it excited a movement and a growth which went on till, by degrees, all the systems which enveloped me like a body gradually decayed from me and fell away into nothing.  Of more importance, too, than the decay of systems was the birth of a habit of inner reference and a dislike to occupy myself with anything which did not in some way or other touch the soul, or was not the illustration or embodiment of some spiritual law.

There is, of course, a definite explanation to be given of one effect produced by the Lyrical Ballads.  God is nowhere formally deposed, and Wordsworth would have been the last man to say that he had lost his faith in the God of his fathers.  But his real God is not the God of the Church, but the God of the hills, the abstraction Nature, and to this my reverence was transferred.  Instead of an object of worship which was altogether artificial, remote, never coming into genuine contact with me, I had now one which I thought to be real, one in which literally I could live and move and have my being, an actual fact present before my eyes.  God was brought from that heaven of the books, and dwelt on the downs in the far-away distances, and in every cloud-shadow which wandered across the valley.  Wordsworth unconsciously did for me what every religious reformer has done—he re-created my Supreme Divinity; substituting a new and living spirit for the old deity, once alive, but gradually hardened into an idol.

What days were those of the next few years before increasing age had presented preciser problems and demanded preciser answers; before all joy was darkened by the shadow of on-coming death, and when life seemed infinite!  Those were the days when through the whole long summer’s morning I wanted no companion but myself, provided only I was in the country, and when books were read with tears in the eyes.  Those were the days when mere life, apart from anything which it brings, was exquisite.

In my own college I found no sympathy, but we were in the habit of meeting occasionally the students from other colleges, and amongst them I met with one or two, especially one who had undergone experiences similar to my own.  The friendships formed with these young men have lasted till now, and have been the most permanent of all the relationships of my existence.  I wish not to judge others, but the persons who to me have proved themselves most attractive, have been those who have passed through such a process as that through which I myself passed; those who have had in some form or other an enthusiastic stage in their history, when the story of Genesis and of the Gospels has been rewritten, when God has visibly walked in the garden, and the Son of God has drawn men away from their daily occupations into the divinest of dreams.

I have known men—most interesting men with far greater powers than any which I have possessed, men who have never been trammelled by a false creed, who have devoted themselves to science and acquired a great reputation, who have somehow never laid hold upon me like the man I have just mentioned.  He failed altogether as a minister, and went back to his shop, but the old glow of his youth burns, and will burn, for ever.  When I am with him our conversation naturally turns on matters which are of profoundest importance: with others it may be instructive, but I leave them unmoved, and I trace the difference distinctly to that visitation, for it was nothing else, which came to him in his youth.

The effect which was produced upon my preaching and daily conversation by this change was immediate.  It became gradually impossible for me to talk about subjects which had not some genuine connection with me, or to desire to hear others talk about them.  The artificial, the merely miraculous, the event which had no inner meaning, no matter how large externally it might be, I did not care for.  A little Greek mythological story was of more importance to me than a war which filled the newspapers.  What, then, could I do with my theological treatises?

It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that I immediately became formally heretical.  Nearly every doctrine in the college creed had once had a natural origin in the necessities of human nature, and might therefore be so interpreted as to become a necessity again.  To reach through to that original necessity; to explain the atonement as I believed it appeared to Paul, and the sinfulness of man as it appeared to the prophets, was my object.  But it was precisely this reaching after a meaning which constituted heresy.  The distinctive essence of our orthodoxy was not this or that dogma, but the acceptance of dogmas as communications from without, and not as born from within.

Heresy began, and in fact was altogether present, when I said to myself that a mere statement of the atonement as taught in class was impossible for me, and that I must go back to Paul and his century, place myself in his position, and connect the atonement through him with something which I felt.  I thus continued to use all the terms which I had hitherto used; but an uneasy feeling began to develop itself about me in the minds of the professors, because I did not rest in the “simplicity” of the gospel.  To me this meant its unintelligibility.

I remember, for example, discoursing about the death of Christ.  There was not a single word which was ordinarily used in the pulpit which I did not use—satisfaction for sin, penalty, redeeming blood, they were all there—but I began by saying that in this world there was no redemption for man but by blood; furthermore, the innocent had everywhere and in all time to suffer for the guilty.  It had been objected that it was contrary to our notion of an all-loving Being that He should demand such a sacrifice; but, contrary or not, in this world it was true, quite apart from Jesus, that virtue was martyred every day, unknown and unconsoled, in order that the wicked might somehow be saved.  This was part of the scheme of the world, and we might dislike it or not, we could not get rid of it.  The consequences of my sin, moreover, are rendered less terrible by virtues not my own.  I am literally saved from penalties because another pays the penalty for me.  The atonement, and what it accomplished for man, were therefore a sublime summing up as it were of what sublime men have to do for their race; an exemplification, rather than a contradiction, of Nature herself, as we know her in our own experience.

Now, all this was really intended as a defence of the atonement; but the President heard me that Sunday, and on the Monday he called me into his room.  He said that my sermon was marked by considerable ability, but he should have been better satisfied if I had confined myself to setting forth as plainly as I could the “way of salvation” as revealed in Christ Jesus.  What I had urged might perhaps have possessed some interest for cultivated