o pierce the web of appearances about me. It is
hard to measure these things in receding perspective, and now I cannot
trace, so closely has mood succeeded and overlaid and obliterated mood,
the phases by which an utter horror of death was replaced by the growing
realisation of its necessity and dignity. Difficulty of the imagination
with infinite space, infinite time, entangled my mind; and moral
distress for the pain and suffering of bygone ages that made all thought
of reformation in the future seem but the grimmest irony upon now
irreparable wrongs. Many an intricate perplexity of these broadening
years did not so much get settled as cease to matter. Life crowded me
away from it.

I have confessed myself a temerarious theologian, and in that
passage from boyhood to manhood I ranged widely in my search for some
permanently satisfying Truth. That, too, ceased after a time to be
urgently interesting. I came at last into a phase that endures to this
day, of absolute tranquillity, of absolute confidence in whatever that
Incomprehensible Comprehensive which must needs be the substratum of all
things, may be. Feeling OF IT, feeling BY IT, I cannot feel afraid of
it. I think I had got quite clearly and finally to that adjustment long
before my Cambridge days were done. I am sure that the evil in life is
transitory and finite like an accident or distress in the nursery; that
God is my Father and that I may trust Him, even though life hurts so
that one must needs cry out at it, even though it shows no consequence
but failure, no promise but pain....

But while I was fearless of theology I must confess it was comparatively
late before I faced and dared to probe the secrecies of sex. I was
afraid of sex. I had an instinctive perception that it would be a large
and difficult thing in my life, but my early training was all in
the direction of regarding it as an irrelevant thing, as something
disconnected from all the broad significances of life, as hostile
and disgraceful in its quality. The world was never so emasculated in
thought, I suppose, as it was in the Victorian time....

I was afraid to think either of sex or (what I have always found
inseparable from a kind of sexual emotion) beauty. Even as a boy I knew
the thing as a haunting and alluring mystery that I tried to keep away
from. Its dim presence obsessed me none the less for all the extravagant
decency, the stimulating silences of my upbringing....

The plaster Ve