for which I
still had an instinctive veneration. Yet I could not but observe
the difference between the zeal with which I snatched at a volume
of Carlyle or Ruskin--since these magicians were now first
revealing themselves to me--and the increasing languor with which
I took up Alford for my daily 'passage'. Of course, although I
did not know it, and believed my reluctance to be sinful, the
real reason why I now found the Bible so difficult to read was my
familiarity with its contents. These had the colourless triteness
of a story retold a hundred times. I longed for something new,
something that would gratify curiosity and excite surprise.
Whether the facts and doctrines contained in the Bible were true
or false was not the question that appealed to me; it was rather
that they had been presented to me so often and had sunken into
me so far that, as someone has said, they 'lay bedridden in the
dormitory of the soul', and made no impression of any kind upon
me.

It often amazed me, and I am still unable to understand the fact,
that my Father, through his long life--or until nearly the close
of it--continued to take an eager pleasure in the text of the
Bible. As I think I have already said, before he reached middle
life, he had committed practically the whole of it to memory, and
if started anywhere, even in a Minor Prophet, he could go on
without a break as long as ever he was inclined for that
exercise. He, therefore, at no time can have been assailed by the
satiety of which I have spoken, and that it came so soon to me I
must take simply as an indication of difference of temperament.
It was not possible, even through the dark glass of
correspondence, to deceive his eagle eye in this matter, and his
suspicions accordingly took another turn. He conceived me to have
become, or to be becoming, a victim of 'the infidelity of the
age.'

In this new difficulty, he appealed to forms of modern literature
by the side of which the least attractive pages of Leviticus or
Deuteronomy struck me as even thrilling. In particular, he urged
upon me a work, then just published, called _The Continuity of
Scripture_ by William Page Wood, afterwards Lord Chancellor
Hatherley. I do not know why he supposed that the lucubrations of
an exemplary lawyer, delivered in a style that was like the
trickling of sawdust, would succeed in rousing emotions which the
glorious rhetoric of the Orient had failed to awaken; but Page
Wood had been a Sund