There was one opportunity, however, I did not miss, and this was Caleb Morris. About him also I have written, but for the sake of continuity I will repeat some of it. He had singular influence, not only over me, but over nearly every young man whom he met. He was originally an Independent minister in Wales, where the people are mostly Dissenters, but he came to London when he had not passed middle life, and took charge of the church in Fetter Lane. He was tall, broad-shouldered, handsome, erect, but was partly disabled by a strangely nervous temperament which, with an obscure bodily trouble, frequently prevented him from keeping his engagements. Often and often messengers had to be dispatched late on Sunday morning to find a substitute for him at Fetter Lane, and people used to wait in the portico of the chapel until the service had well begun, and then peep through the door to see who was in the pulpit. He was the most eloquent speaker I ever heard. I never shall forget his picture of the father, in the parable of the prodigal son, watching for his child’s return, all his thoughts swallowed up in one—_Will he come back to-day_? When he did come—no word of rebuke. The hardest thing in the world is to be completely generous in forgiveness. The most magnanimous of men cannot resist the temptation—_but at the same time you must see_, _my dearest_, _don’t you_? Almost equally difficult, but not quite, is the simple confession without an extenuating word, _I have sinned against Heaven_. The father does not hear. _Bring forth the best robe and put it on him_, _and put a ring on his hand and shoes on his feet_. A ring on his hand! Shoes on his feet we can understand, but there is to be a ring, honour, ennoblement! . . . The first movement of repentance was—_I will arise and go to my father_. The omissions in Morris’s comment were striking. There was no word of the orthodox machinery of forgiveness. It was through Morris that the Bible became what it always has been to me. It has not solved directly any of the great problems which disturb my peace, and Morris seldom touched them controversially, but he uncovered such a wealth of wonder and beauty in it that the problems were forgotten. Lord Bacon was Morris’s hero, both for his method and his personal character. These were the days before the researches of Spedding, when Bacon was supposed to be a mass of those impossible paradoxes in which Macaulay delighted. To Morris, Bacon’s _Submission_ and his renunciation of all defence were sufficient. With what pathos he repeated Bacon’s words when the Lords asked him whether the subscription to the _Submission_ was in his own hand. “My Lords, it is my act, my hand, my heart. I beseech your Lordships, be merciful to a broken reed.” [Picture: Portrait of Mark Rutherford at the age of twenty-four]