ell
foreseen and limited beforehand. For almost any intellectual
employment in later life, it seems to me that this discipline was
valuable. I am, however, not the less conscious how ludicrous was
the mode in which, in my tenth year, I obtained it.

My spiritual condition occupied my Father's thoughts very
insistently at this time. Closing, as he did, most of the doors
of worldly pleasure and energy upon his conscience, he had
continued to pursue his scientific investigations without any
sense of sin. Most fortunate it was, that the collecting of
marine animals in the tidal pools, and the description of them in
pages which were addressed to the wide scientific public, at no
time occurred to him as in any way inconsistent with his holy
calling. His conscience was so delicate, and often so morbid in
its delicacy, that if that had occurred to him, he would
certainly have abandoned his investigations, and have been left
without an employment. But happily he justified his investigation
by regarding it as a glorification of God's created works. In the
introduction of his _Actinologia Britannica_, written at the time
which I have now reached in this narrative, he sent forth his
labours with a phrase which I should think unparalleled in
connection with a learned and technical biological treatise. He
stated, concerning that book, that he published it 'as one more
tribute humbly offered to the glory of the Triune God, who is
wonderful in counsel, and excellent in working'. Scientific
investigation sincerely carried out in that spirit became a kind
of weekday interpretation of the current creed of Sundays.

The development of my faculties, of which I have spoken, extended
to the religious sphere no less than to the secular, Here, also,
as I look back, I see that I was extremely imitative. I expanded
in the warmth of my Father's fervour, and, on the whole, in a
manner that was satisfactory to him. He observed the richer hold
that I was now taking on life; he saw my faculties branching in
many directions, and he became very anxious to secure my
maintenance in grace. In earlier years, certain sides of my
character had offered a sort of passive resistance to his ideas.
I had let what I did not care to welcome pass over my mind in the
curious density that children adopt in order to avoid receiving
impressions--blankly, dumbly, achieving by stupidity what they
cannot achieve by argument. I think that I had frequently done
this; tha