ed Holland's choice of a profession I have not sought
to enquire. Probably he was moved by the thought that in Holy Orders
he would have the best chance of using the powers, of which by
this time he must have become conscious, for the glory of God and
the service of man. I have been told that the choice was in some
measure affected by a sermon of Liddon's on the unpromising subject
of Noah;[*] and beyond doubt the habitual enjoyment of Liddon's
society, to which, as a brother-Student, Holland was now admitted,
must have tended in the same direction.

[Footnote *: Preached at St. Mary the Virgin, Oxford, on the 11th
of March, 1870.]

Perhaps an even stronger influence was that of Edward King, afterwards
Bishop of Lincoln, and then Principal of Cuddesdon, in whom the
most persuasive aspects of the priestly character were beautifully
displayed, and who made Cuddesdon a sort of shrine to which all
that was spiritual and ardent in young Oxford was irresistibly
attracted. Preaching, years afterwards, at a Cuddesdon Festival,
Holland uttered this moving panegyric of the place to which he owed
so much: "Ah! which of us does not know by what sweet entanglement
Cuddesdon threw its net about our willing feet? Some summer Sunday,
perhaps, we wandered here, in undergraduate days, to see a friend;
and from that hour the charm was at work. How joyous, how enticing,
the welcome, the glad brotherhood! So warm and loving it all seemed,
as we thought of the sharp skirmishing of our talk in College;
so buoyant and rich, as we recalled the thinness of our Oxford
interests. The little rooms, like college rooms just shrinking
into cells; the long talk on the summer lawn; the old church with
its quiet country look of patient peace; the glow of the evening
chapel; the run down the hill under the stars, with the sound of
Compline Psalms still ringing in our hearts--ah! happy, happy day!
It was enough. The resolve that lay half slumbering in our souls
took shape; it leapt out. We would come to Cuddesdon when the time
of preparation should draw on!" Readers of this glowing passage
have naturally imagined that the writer of it must himself have
been a Cuddesdon man, but this is a delusion; and, so far as I
know, Holland's special preparation for Ordination consisted of
a visit to Peterborough, where he essayed the desperate task of
studying theology under Dr. Westcott.

In September, 1872, he was ordained deacon by Bishop Mackarness, in
Cuddes