inite fault, and not in relation to any physical
cause. The result was sometimes quite startling, and in
particular I recollect that my stepmother and I exchanged
impressions of astonishment at my Father's action when Mrs.
Goodyer, who was one of the 'Saints' and the wife of a young
journeyman cobbler, broke her leg. My Father, puzzled for an
instant as to the meaning of this accident, since Mrs. Goodyer
was the gentlest and most inoffensive of our church members,
decided that it must be because she had made an idol of her
husband, and he reduced the poor thing to tears by standing at
her bed-side and imploring the Holy Spirit to bring this sin home
to her conscience.

When, therefore, I was ill at home with one of my trifling
disorders, the problem of my spiritual state always pressed
violently upon my Father, and this caused me no little mental
uneasiness. He would appear at my bedside, with solemn
solicitude, and sinking on his knees would earnestly pray aloud
that the purpose of the Lord in sending me this affliction might
graciously be made plain to me; and then, rising, and standing by
my pillow, he would put me through a searching spiritual inquiry
as to the fault which was thus divinely indicated to me as
observed and reprobated on high.

It was not on points of moral behaviour that he thus cross-
examined me; I think he disdained such ignoble game as that. But
uncertainties of doctrine, relinquishment of faith in the purity
of this dogma or of that, lukewarm zeal in 'taking up the cross
of Christ', growth of intellectual pride,--such were the
insidious offences in consequence of which, as he supposed, the
cold in the head or the toothache had been sent as heavenly
messengers to recall my straggling conscience to its plain path
of duty.

What made me very uncomfortable on these occasions was my
consciousness that confinement to bed was hardly an affliction at
all. It kept me from the boredom of school, in a fire-lit bedroom
at home, with my pretty, smiling stepmother lavishing luxurious
attendance upon me, and it gave me long, unbroken days for
reading. I was awkwardly aware that I simply had not the
effrontery to 'approach the Throne of Grace' with a request to
know for what sin I was condemned to such a very pleasant
disposition of my hours.

The current of my life ran, during my schooldays, most merrily
and fully in the holidays, when I resumed my outdoor exercises
with those friends in the village o