A wise man said to me not long ago that the fault of teaching nowadays was that knowledge was all coined into counters; and that the desire of learners seemed to be not to possess themselves of the ore, not to strengthen and toughen the mind by the pursuit, but to possess themselves of as many of these tokens as possible, and to hand them on unchanged and unchangeable to those who came to learn of themselves. This was my difficulty; the shelves teemed with books, the lecturers cried aloud in every College court, like the jackdaws that cawed and clanged about the venerable towers; and for a period I flew with notebook and pen from lecture to lecture, entering admirable maxims, acute verbal distinctions, ingenious parallels in my poor pages. At home I turned through book after book, and imbued myself in the learning of the schools, dreaming that, though the rind was tough, the precious morsels lay succulent within. In this conceit of knowledge I was led to leave my College and to plunge into practical life; what my work was shall presently be related, but I will own that it was a relief. I had begun to feel that though I had learnt the use of the tools, I was no nearer finding the precious metal of which I was in search. The further development of my faith after this cannot be told in detail, but it may be briefly sketched, after a life of some intellectual activity, not without practical employment, which has now extended over many years. [Sidenote: THE FATHER] I began, I think, very far from Christ. The only vital faith that I had at first was an intense instinctive belief in the absolute power, the infinite energies, of the Father; to me he was not only Almighty, as our weak word phrases it, a Being who could, if he would, exert His power, but παντοκρατῶρ—all-conquering, all-subduing. I was led, by a process of mathematical certainty, to see that if the Father was anywhere, He was everywhere; that if He made us and bade us be, He was responsible for the smallest and most sordid details of our life and thought, as well as for the noblest and highest. It cannot indeed be otherwise; every thought and action springs from some cause, in many cases referable to events which took place in lives outside of and anterior to our own. In any case in which a man seems to enjoy the faculty of choice, his choice is in reality determined by a number of previous causes; given all the data, his action could be inevitably predicted. Thus I gradually realised that sin in the moral world, and disease in the physical, are each of them some manifestation of the Eternal Will. If He gives to me the joy of life, the energy of action, did He not give it to the subtle fungus, to the venomous bacteria which, once established in our bodies, are known by the names of cancer and fever? Why all life should be this uneasy battle I know not; but if we can predicate consciousness of any kind to these strange rudiments, the living slime of the pit, is it irreverent to say