gazine called, if I
remember rightly, the HOME CHURCHMAN, with the combined authority of
print and clerical commendation. It was the most evil thing that ever
came into the house, a very devil, a thin little pamphlet with
one woodcut illustration on the front page of each number; now the
uninviting visage of some exponent of the real and only doctrine and
attitudes, now some coral strand in act of welcoming the missionaries of
God's mysterious preferences, now a new church in the Victorian Gothic.
The vile rag it was! A score of vices that shun the policeman have
nothing of its subtle wickedness. It was an outrage upon the natural
kindliness of men. The contents were all admirably adjusted to keep a
spirit in prison. Their force of sustained suggestion was tremendous.
There would be dreadful intimations of the swift retribution that fell
upon individuals for Sabbath-breaking, and upon nations for weakening
towards Ritualism, or treating Roman Catholics as tolerable human
beings; there would be great rejoicings over the conversion of alleged
Jews, and terrible descriptions of the death-beds of prominent infidels
with boldly invented last words,--the most unscrupulous lying; there
would be the appallingly edifying careers of "early piety" lusciously
described, or stories of condemned criminals who traced their final ruin
unerringly to early laxities of the kind that leads people to give up
subscribing to the HOME CHURCHMAN.

Every month that evil spirit brought about a slump in our mutual love.
My mother used to read the thing and become depressed and anxious for my
spiritual welfare, used to be stirred to unintelligent pestering....

2

A few years ago I met the editor of this same HOME CHURCHMAN. It was
at one of the weekly dinners of that Fleet Street dining club, the
Blackfriars.

I heard the paper's name with a queer little shock and surveyed the
man with interest. No doubt he was only a successor of the purveyor of
discords who darkened my boyhood. It was amazing to find an influence
so terrible embodied in a creature so palpably petty. He was seated some
way down a table at right angles to the one at which I sat, a man of
mean appearance with a greyish complexion, thin, with a square nose,
a heavy wiry moustache and a big Adam's apple sticking out between the
wings of his collar. He ate with considerable appetite and unconcealed
relish, and as his jaw was underhung, he chummed and made the moustache
wave lik