On entering the college I signed the Thirty-nine Articles, excepting two or three at most; for the Countess, so far as her theology went, was always Anglican. One of her chaplains was William Romaine, the famous incumbent of St. Anne’s, Blackfriars, who on his first Good Friday in that church administered to five hundred communicants. The book I was directed to study by the theological professor after admission, was a book on the Atonement, by somebody named Williams. He justified the election of a minority to heaven and a majority to hell on the ground that God owed us nothing, and being our Maker, might do with us what He pleased. This struck me as original, but I had forgotten that it is the doctrine of the Epistle to the Romans. It is almost incredible to me now, although I was hardly nineteen, that I should have accepted without question such a terrible invention, and the only approach to explanation I can give is that all this belonged to a world totally disconnected from my own, and that I never thought of making real to myself anything which this supernatural world contained. The most important changes in life are not those of one belief for another, but of growth, in which nothing preceding is directly contradicted, but something unexpected nevertheless makes its appearance. On the bookshelf in our dining-room lay a volume of Wordsworth. One day, when I was about eighteen, I took it out, and fell upon the lines— “Knowing that Nature never did betray The heart that loved her.” What they meant was not clear to me, but they were a signal of the approach of something which turned out to be of the greatest importance, and altered my history. It was a new capacity. There woke in me an aptness for the love of natural beauty, a possibility of being excited to enthusiasm by it, and of deriving a secret joy from it sufficiently strong to make me careless of the world and its pleasures. Another effect which Wordsworth had upon me, and has had on other people, was the modification, altogether unintentional on his part, of religious belief. He never dreams of attacking anybody for his creed, and yet it often becomes impossible for those who study him and care for him to be members of any orthodox religious community. At any rate it would have been impossible in the town of Bedford. His poems imply a living God, different from the artificial God of the churches. The revolution wrought by him goes far deeper, and is far more permanent than any which is the work of Biblical critics, and it was Wordsworth and not German research which caused my expulsion from New College, of which a page or two further on. For some time I had no thought of heresy, but the seed was there, and was alive just as much as the seed-corn is alive all the time it lies in the earth apparently dead.