these persons in
such an aspect that they would be enabled instantaneously to
accept it. They would take it consciously, as one takes a gift
from the hand that offers it. This act of taking was the process
of conversion, and the person who so accepted was a child of God
now, although a single minute ago he had been a child of wrath.
The very root of human nature had to be changed, and, in the
majority of cases, this change was sudden, patent, and palpable.

I have just said, 'in the majority of cases', because my Father
admitted the possibility of exceptions. The formula was, 'If any
man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his.' As a rule,
no one could possess the Spirit of Christ, without a conscious
and full abandonment of the soul, and this, however carefully led
up to, and prepared for with tears and renunciations, was not,
could not, be made, except at a set moment of time. Faith, in an
esoteric and almost symbolic sense, was necessary, and could not
be a result of argument, but was a state of heart. In these
opinions my Father departed in no ways from the strict
evangelical doctrine of the Protestant churches, but he held it
in a mode and with a severity peculiar to himself. Now, it is
plain that this state of heart, this voluntary deed of
acceptance, presupposed a full and rational consciousness of the
relations of things. It might be clearly achieved by a person of
humble cultivation, but only by one who was fully capable of
independent thought, in other words by a more or less adult
person, The man or woman claiming the privileges of conversion
must be able to understand and to grasp what his religious
education was aiming at.

It is extraordinary what trouble it often gave my Father to know
whether he was justified in admitting to the communion people of
very limited powers of expression. A harmless, humble labouring
man would come with a request--to be allowed to 'break bread'. It
was only by the use of strong leading questions that he could be
induced to mention Christ as the ground of his trust at all. I
recollect an elderly agricultural labourer being closeted for a
long time with my Father, who came out at last, in a sort of
dazed condition, and replied to our inquiries,--with a shrug of
his shoulders as he said it,--'I was obliged to put the Name and
Blood and Work of Jesus into his very mouth. It is true that he
assented cordially at last, but I confess I was grievously
daunted by the poo