d bear for me, that I never dreamed
that life might be a heavy burden, save as I saw it in the poor I was
sent to help; all the joy of those happy years I took, not
ungratefully I hope, but certainly with as glad unconsciousness of
anything rare in it as I took the sunlight. Passionate love, indeed, I
gave to my darling, but I never knew all I owed her till I passed out
of her tender guardianship, till I left my mother's home. Is such
training wise? I am not sure. It makes the ordinary roughnesses of
life come with so stunning a shock, when one goes out into the world,
that one is apt to question whether some earlier initiation into
life's sterner mysteries would not be wiser for the young. Yet it is a
fair thing to have that joyous youth to look back upon, and at least
it is a treasury of memory that no thief can steal in the struggles of
later life. "Sunshine" they called me in those bright days of merry
play and earnest study. But that study showed the bent of my thought
and linked itself to the hidden life; for the Fathers of the early
Christian Church now became my chief companions, and I pored over the
Shepherd of Hernias, the Epistles of Polycarp, Barnabas, Ignatius, and
Clement, the commentaries of Chrysostom, the confessions of Augustine.
With these I studied the writings of Pusey, Liddon, and Keble, with
many another smaller light, joying in the great conception of a
Catholic Church, lasting through the centuries, built on the
foundations of apostles and of martyrs, stretching from the days of
Christ Himself down to our own--"One Lord, one Faith one Baptism," and
I myself a child of that Holy Church. The hidden life grew stronger,
constantly fed by these streams of study; weekly communion became the
centre round which my devotional life revolved, with its ecstatic
meditation, its growing intensity of conscious contact with the
Divine; I fasted, according to the ordinances of the Church;
occasionally flagellated myself to see if I could bear physical pain,
should I be fortunate enough ever to tread the pathway trodden by the
saints; and ever the Christ was the figure round which clustered all
my hopes and longings, till I often felt that the very passion of, my
devotion would draw Him down from His throne in heaven, present
visibly in form as I felt Him invisibly in spirit. To serve Him
through His Church became more and more a definite ideal in my life,
and my thoughts began to turn towards some kind of "religi