I think, though I say this with sadness, that he represented religion as too much a withdrawal from life for one so young, and did not make it clear to me that my merriment, my joys, my interests, and my ambitions might be hallowed and invigorated. He had himself subordinated life and character so completely to one end, and thrown aside (if he had ever possessed them) the dear prejudices and fiery interests of individuality, that I doubt if he could have thrown his imagination swiftly enough back into all the energetic hopes, the engrossing beckonings of opening manhood. 10 The rest of my school life passed without any important change of view. I became successful in games, popular, active-minded. I won a scholarship at Cambridge with disastrous ease. Then Cambridge life opened before me. I speak elsewhere of my intellectual and social life there, and will pass on to the next event of importance in my religious development. My life had become almost purely selfish. I was not very ambitious of academical honours, though I meant to secure a modest first-class; but I was intensely eager for both social and literary distinction, and submitted myself to the full to the dreamful beauty of my surroundings, and the delicious thrill of artistic pleasures. I have often thought how strangely and secretly the crucial moment, the most agonising crisis of my life drifted upon me. I say deliberately that, looking back over my forty years of life, no day was so fraught for me with fate, no hour so big with doomful issues, as that day which dawned so simply and sped past with such familiar ease to the destined hour—that moment which waved me, led by sociable curiosity, into the darkness of suffering and agony. A new birth indeed! The current of my days fell, as it were, with suddenness, unexpected, unguessed at, into the weltering gulf of despair; that hour turned me in an instant from a careless boy into a troubled man. And yet how easily it might have been otherwise—no, I dare not say that. [Sidenote: THE EVANGELIST]