This conviction I shared, without a doubt; and, indeed,--in perfect innocency, I hope, but perhaps with a touch of slyness too,--I proposed at the end of the summer holidays that I should stay at home. 'What is the use of my going to school? Let me be with you when we rise to meet the Lord in the air!' To this my Father sharply and firmly replied that it was our duty to carry on our usual avocations to the last, for we knew not the moment of His coming, and we should be together in an instant on that day, how far soever we might be parted upon earth. I was ashamed, but his argument was logical, and, as it proved, judicious. My Father lived for nearly a quarter of a century more, never losing the hope of 'not tasting death', and as the last moments of mortality approached, he was bitterly disappointed at what he held to be a scanty reward of his long faith and patience. But if my own life's work had been, as I proposed, shelved in expectation of the Lord's imminent advent, I should have cumbered the ground until this day.
To school, therefore, I returned with a brain full of strange discords, in a huddled mixture of' Endymion' and the Book of Revelation, John Wesley's hymns and 'Midsummer Night's Dream'.
Few boys of my age, I suppose, carried about with them such a confused throng of immature impressions and contradictory hopes.
I was at one moment devoutly pious, at the next haunted by visions of material beauty and longing for sensuous impressions.
In my hot and silly brain, Jesus and Pan held sway together, as in a wayside chapel discordantly and impishly consecrated to Pagan and to Christian rites. But for the present, as in the great chorus which so marvellously portrays our double nature, 'the folding-star of Bethlehem' was still dominant. I became more and more pietistic. Beginning now to versify, I wrote a tragedy in pale imitation of Shakespeare, but on a Biblical and evangelistic subject; and odes that were parodies of those in 'Prometheus Unbound', but dealt with the approaching advent of our Lord and the rapture of His saints. My unwholesome excitement, bubbling up in this violent way, reached at last a climax and foamed over.
It was a summer afternoon, and, being now left very free in my movements, I had escaped from going out with the rest of my school-fellows in their formal walk in charge of an usher. I had been reading a good deal of poetry, but my heart had translated Apollo and Bacchus into terms of exalted Christian faith. I was alone, and I lay on a sofa, drawn across a large open window at the top of the school-house, in a room which was used as a study by the boys who were 'going up for examination'. I gazed down on a labyrinth of garden sloping to the sea, which twinkled faintly beyond the towers of the town. Each of these gardens held a villa in it, but all the near landscape below me was drowned in foliage. A wonderful warm light of approaching sunset modelled the shadows and set the broad summits of the trees in a rich glow. There was an absolute silence below and around me; a magic of suspense seemed to keep every topmost twig from waving.
Over my soul there swept an immense wave of emotion. Now, surely, now the great final change must be approaching. I gazed up into the tenderly-coloured sky, and I broke irresistibly into speech.
'Come now, Lord Jesus,' I cried, 'come now and take me to be for ever with Thee in Thy Paradise. I am ready to come. My heart is purged from sin, there is nothing that keeps me rooted to this wicked world. Oh, come now, now, and take me before I have known the temptations of life, before I have to go to London and all the dreadful things that happen there!' And I raised myself on the sofa, and leaned upon the window-sill, and waited for the glorious apparition.
This was the highest moment of my religious life, the apex of my striving after holiness. I waited awhile, watching; and then Ifelt a faint shame at the theatrical attitude I had adopted, although I was alone. Still I gazed and still I hoped. Then a little breeze sprang up and the branches danced. Sounds began to rise from the road beneath me. Presently the colour deepened, the evening came on. From far below there rose to me the chatter of the boys returning home. The tea--bell rang,--last word of prose to shatter my mystical poetry. 'The Lord has not come, the Lord will never come,' I muttered, and in my heart the artificial edifice of extravagant faith began to totter and crumble. From that moment forth my Father and I, though the fact was long successfully concealed from him and even from myself, walked in opposite hemispheres of the soul, with 'the thick o' the world between us'.
