The effect upon the children--there were five of us--followed naturally. My father, apart from incurring much public odium owing to his official position, found himself, and us with him, cut off from the amenities of the social life to which we were otherwise born. Ordinary people, “worldly” as he called them, left us alone. A house where no wine was served at dinner, where morning and evening prayers were _de rigueur_, a guest even being asked to “lead in prayer” perhaps, and where at any suitable moment you might be drawn aside and asked “Have _you_ given your soul to Jesus?” was not an attractive house to stay in. We were ostracized. The effect of such disabilities upon us in later life was not considered, for it was hoped each and all of us would consecrate ourselves to God. We were, thus, kept out of the “world” in every possible sense and brought up, though with lavish love and kindness, yet in the narrowest imaginable evangelical path which scents danger in knowledge of any kind not positively helpful to the soul. I, personally, at that time, regarded the temptations of the world with a remote pity, and with a certainty that I should never have the least difficulty in resisting them. Men who smoked and drank and were immoral, who gambled, went to theatres and music-halls and race-meetings, belonged to the submerged and unworthy portion of mankind. I, in this respect at least, was of the elect, quite sure that the weakness of their world could never stain me personally. Yet I never shared the beliefs of my parents with anything like genuine pleasure. I was _afraid_ they were true, not glad. Without wholeheartedly sharing my father’s faith, however, his religious and emotional temperament, with its imperious need of believing _something_, he certainly bequeathed to me.... The evangelical and revivalist movement, at any rate, was the dominant influence in my boyhood’s years. People were sharply divided into souls that were saved and those that were--not saved. Moody and Sankey, the American Revivalists, stayed in our house. I was particularly influenced in this direction by a group of young ’Varsity men who worked with Moody, and who were manly fellows, good cricketers, like the Studd brothers, or Stanley Smith and Montague Beauchamp, men who had rowed in their University boats, and who were far removed from anything effeminate. Of course I thought that what these men did could not be otherwise than fine and worth copying, and I lost no time in attacking everyone I met and asking the most impertinent questions about their souls and fallen natures. By some lucky chance no one kicked me to death--probably because most of my evangelizing work was done at home!