IN the previous chapter I have dwelt on some of the lighter
conditions of our life at this time; I must now turn to it in a
less frivolous aspect. As my tenth year advanced, the development
of my character gave my Father, I will not say anxiety, but
matter for serious reflection. My intelligence was now perceived
to be taking a sudden start; visitors drew my Father's attention
to the fact that I was 'coming out so much'. I grew rapidly in
stature, having been a little shrimp of a thing up to that time,
and I no longer appeared much younger than my years. Looking
back, I do not think that there was any sudden mental
development, but that the change was mainly a social one. I had
been reserved, timid and taciturn; I had disliked the company of
strangers. But with my tenth year, I certainly unfolded, so far
as to become sociable and talkative, and perhaps I struck those
around me as grown 'clever', because I said the things which I
had previously only thought. There was a change, no doubt, yet I
believe that it was mainly physical, rather than mental. My
excessive fragility--or apparent fragility, for I must have been
always wiry--decreased; I slept better, and therefore, grew less
nervous; I ate better, and therefore put on flesh. If I preserved
a delicate look--people still used to say in my presence, 'That
dear child is not long for this world!'--it was in consequence of
a sort of habit into which my body had grown; it was a
transparency which did not speak of what was in store for me, but
of what I had already passed through.
The increased activity of my intellectual system now showed
itself in what I behove to be a very healthy form, direct
imitation. The rage for what is called 'originality' is pushed to
such a length in these days that even children are not considered
promising, unless they attempt things preposterous and
unparalleled. From his earliest hour, the ambitious person is
told that to make a road where none has walked before, to do
easily what it is impossible for others to do at all, to create
new forms of thought and expression, are the only recipes for
genius; and in trying to escape on all sides from every
resemblance to his predecessors, he adopts at once an air of
eccentricity and pretentiousness. This continues to be the
accepted view of originality; but, in spite of this conventional
opinion, I hold that the healthy sign of an activity of mind in
early youth is not to be striving after unheard-of miracles, but
to imitate closely and carefully what is being said and done in
the vicinity. The child of a great sculptor will hang about the
studio, and will try to hammer a head out of a waste piece of
marble with a nail; it does not follow that he too will be a
sculptor. The child of a politician will sit in committee with a
row of empty chairs, and will harangue an imaginary senate from
behind the curtains. I, the son of a man who looked through a
microscope and painted what he saw there, would fair observe for
myself, and paint my observations. It did not follow, alas! that
I was built to be a miniature-painter or a savant, but the
activity of a childish intelligence was shown by my desire to
copy the results of such energy as I saw nearest at hand.
In the secular direction, this now took the form of my preparing
little monographs on seaside creatures, which were arranged,
tabulated and divided as exactly as possible on the pattern of
those which my Father was composing for his _Actinologia
Britannica_. I wrote these out upon sheets of paper of the same
size as his printed page, and I adorned them with water-colour
plates, meant to emulate his precise and exquisite illustrations.
One or two of these ludicrous pastiches are still preserved, and
in glancing at them now I wonder, not at any skill that they
possess, but at the perseverance and the patience, the evidence
of close and persistent labour. I was not set to these tasks by
my Father, who, in fact, did not much approve of them. He was
touched, too, with the 'originality' heresy, and exhorted me not
to copy him, but to go out into the garden or the shore and
describe something new, in a new way. That was quite impossible;
I possessed no initiative. But I can now well understand why my
Father, very indulgently and good-temperedly, deprecated these
exercises of mine. They took up, and, as he might well think,
wasted, an enormous quantity of time; and they were, moreover,
parodies, rather than imitations, of his writings, for I invented
new species, with sapphire spots and crimson tentacles and amber
bands, which were close enough to his real species to be
disconcerting. He came from conscientiously shepherding the
flocks of ocean, and I do not wonder that my ring-straked,
speckled and spotted varieties put him out of countenance. If I
had not been so innocent and solemn, he might have fancied I was
mocking him.
These extraordinary excursions into science, falsely so called,
occupied a large part of my time. There was a little spare room
at the back of our house, dedicated to lumber and to empty
portmanteaux. There was a table in it already, and I added a
stool; this cheerless apartment now became my study. I spent so
many hours here, in solitude and without making a sound, that my
Father's curiosity, if not his suspicion, was occasionally
aroused, and he would make a sudden raid on me. I was always
discovered, doubled up over the table, with my pen and ink, or
else my box of colours and tumbler of turbid water by my hand,
working away like a Chinese student shut up in his matriculating
box.
It might have been done for a wager, if anything so simple had
ever been dreamed of in our pious household. The apparatus was
slow and laboured. In order to keep my uncouth handwriting in
bounds, I was obliged to rule not lines only, but borders to my
pages. The subject did not lend itself to any flow of language,
and I was obliged incessantly to borrow sentences, word for word,
from my Father's published books. Discouraged by everyone around
me, daunted by the laborious effort needful to carry out the
scheme, it seems odd to me now that I persisted in so strange and
wearisome an employment, but it became an absorbing passion, and
was indulged in to the neglect of other lessons and other
pleasures.
My Father, as the spring advanced, used to come up to the
Boxroom, as my retreat was called, and hunt me out into the
sunshine. But I soon crept back to my mania. It gave him much
trouble, and Miss Marks, who thought it sheer idleness, was
vociferous in objection. She would gladly have torn up all my
writings and paintings, and have set me to a useful task. My
Father, with his strong natural individualism, could not take
this view. He was interested in this strange freak of mine, and
he could not wholly condemn it. But he must have thought is a
little crazy, and it is evident to me now that it led to the
revolution in domestic policy by which he began to encourage any
acquaintance with other young people as much as he had previously
discouraged it. He saw that I could not be allowed to spend my
whole time in a little stuffy room making solemn and ridiculous
imitations of Papers read before the Linnaean Society. He was
grieved, moreover, at the badness of my pictures, for I had no
native skill; and he tried to teach me his own system of
miniature-painting as applied to natural history. I was forced,
in deep depression of spirits, to turn from my grotesque
monographs, and paint under my Father's eye, and, from a finished
drawing of his, a gorgeous tropic bird in flight. Aided by my
habit of imitation, I did at length produce some thing which
might have shown promise, if it had not been wrung from me, touch
by touch, pigment by pigment, under the orders of a task-master.
All this had its absurd side, but I seem to perceive that it had
also its value. It is, surely, a mistake to look too near at hand
for the benefits of education. What is actually taught in early
childhood is often that part of training which makes least
impression on the character, and is of the least permanent
importance. My labours failed to make me a zoologist, and the
multitude of my designs and my descriptions have left me
helplessly ignorant of the anatomy of a sea-anemone. Yet I cannot
look upon the mental discipline as useless. It taught me to
concentrate my attention, to define the nature of distinctions,
to see accurately, and to name what I saw. Moreover, it gave me
the habit of going on with any piece of work I had in hand, not
flagging because the interest or picturesqueness of the theme had
declined, but pushing forth towards a definite goal, well
foreseen and limited beforehand. For almost any intellectual
employment in later life, it seems to me that this discipline was
valuable. I am, however, not the less conscious how ludicrous was
the mode in which, in my tenth year, I obtained it.
My spiritual condition occupied my Father's thoughts very
insistently at this time. Closing, as he did, most of the doors
of worldly pleasure and energy upon his conscience, he had
continued to pursue his scientific investigations without any
sense of sin. Most fortunate it was, that the collecting of
marine animals in the tidal pools, and the description of them in
pages which were addressed to the wide scientific public, at no
time occurred to him as in any way inconsistent with his holy
calling. His conscience was so delicate, and often so morbid in
its delicacy, that if that had occurred to him, he would
certainly have abandoned his investigations, and have been left
without an employment. But happily he justified his investigation
by regarding it as a glorification of God's created works. In the
introduction of his _Actinologia Britannica_, written at the time
which I have now reached in this narrative, he sent forth his
labours with a phrase which I should think unparalleled in
connection with a learned and technical biological treatise. He
stated, concerning that book, that he published it 'as one more
tribute humbly offered to the glory of the Triune God, who is
wonderful in counsel, and excellent in working'. Scientific
investigation sincerely carried out in that spirit became a kind
of weekday interpretation of the current creed of Sundays.
The development of my faculties, of which I have spoken, extended
to the religious sphere no less than to the secular, Here, also,
as I look back, I see that I was extremely imitative. I expanded
in the warmth of my Father's fervour, and, on the whole, in a
manner that was satisfactory to him. He observed the richer hold
that I was now taking on life; he saw my faculties branching in
many directions, and he became very anxious to secure my
maintenance in grace. In earlier years, certain sides of my
character had offered a sort of passive resistance to his ideas.
I had let what I did not care to welcome pass over my mind in the
curious density that children adopt in order to avoid receiving
impressions--blankly, dumbly, achieving by stupidity what they
cannot achieve by argument. I think that I had frequently done
this; that he had been brought up against a dead wall; although
on other sides of my nature I had been responsive and docile. But
now, in my tenth year, the imitative faculty got the upper hand,
and nothing seemed so attractive as to be what I was expected to
be. If there was a doubt now, it lay in the other direction; it
seemed hardly normal that so young a child should appear so
receptive and so apt.
My Father believed himself justified, at this juncture, in making
a tremendous effort. He wished to secure me finally,
exhaustively, before the age of puberty could dawn, before my
soul was fettered with the love of carnal things. He thought that
if I could now be identified with the 'saints', and could stand
on exactly their footing, a habit of conformity would be secured.
I should meet the paganizing tendencies of advancing years with
security if I could be forearmed with all the weapons of a
sanctified life. He wished me, in short, to be received into the
community of the Brethren on the terms of an adult. There were
difficulties in the way of carrying out this scheme, and they
were urged upon him, more or less courageously, by the elders of
the church. But he overbore them. What the difficulties were, and
what were the arguments which he used to sweep those difficulties
away, I must now explain, for in this lay the centre of our
future relations as father and son.
In dealing with the peasants around him, among whom he was
engaged in an active propaganda, my Father always insisted on the
necessity of conversion. There must be a new birth and being, a
fresh creation in God. This crisis he was accustomed to regard as
manifesting itself in a sudden and definite upheaval. There might
have been prolonged practical piety, deep and true contrition for
sin, but these, although the natural and suitable prologue to
conversion, were not conversion itself. People hung on at the
confines of regeneration, often for a very long time; my Father
dealt earnestly with them, the elders ministered to them, with
explanation, exhortation and prayer. Such persons were in a
gracious state, but they were not in a state of grace. If they
should suddenly die, they would pass away in an unconverted
condition, and all that could be said in their favour was a vague
expression of hope that they would benefit from God's
uncovenanted mercies.
But on some day, at some hour and minute, if life was spared to
them, the way of salvation would be revealed to these persons in
such an aspect that they would be enabled instantaneously to
accept it. They would take it consciously, as one takes a gift
from the hand that offers it. This act of taking was the process
of conversion, and the person who so accepted was a child of God
now, although a single minute ago he had been a child of wrath.
The very root of human nature had to be changed, and, in the
majority of cases, this change was sudden, patent, and palpable.
I have just said, 'in the majority of cases', because my Father
admitted the possibility of exceptions. The formula was, 'If any
man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his.' As a rule,
no one could possess the Spirit of Christ, without a conscious
and full abandonment of the soul, and this, however carefully led
up to, and prepared for with tears and renunciations, was not,
could not, be made, except at a set moment of time. Faith, in an
esoteric and almost symbolic sense, was necessary, and could not
be a result of argument, but was a state of heart. In these
opinions my Father departed in no ways from the strict
evangelical doctrine of the Protestant churches, but he held it
in a mode and with a severity peculiar to himself. Now, it is
plain that this state of heart, this voluntary deed of
acceptance, presupposed a full and rational consciousness of the
relations of things. It might be clearly achieved by a person of
humble cultivation, but only by one who was fully capable of
independent thought, in other words by a more or less adult
person, The man or woman claiming the privileges of conversion
must be able to understand and to grasp what his religious
education was aiming at.
It is extraordinary what trouble it often gave my Father to know
whether he was justified in admitting to the communion people of
very limited powers of expression. A harmless, humble labouring
man would come with a request--to be allowed to 'break bread'. It
was only by the use of strong leading questions that he could be
induced to mention Christ as the ground of his trust at all. I
recollect an elderly agricultural labourer being closeted for a
long time with my Father, who came out at last, in a sort of
dazed condition, and replied to our inquiries,--with a shrug of
his shoulders as he said it,--'I was obliged to put the Name and
Blood and Work of Jesus into his very mouth. It is true that he
assented cordially at last, but I confess I was grievously
daunted by the poor intelligence!'
But there was, or there might be, another class of persona, whom
early training, separation from the world, and the care of godly
parents had so early familiarized with the acceptable calling of
Christ that their conversion had occurred, unperceived and
therefore unrecorded, at an extraordinarily earl age. It would be
in vain to look for a repetition of the phenomenon in those
cases. The heavenly fire must not be expected to descend a second
time; the lips are touched with the burning coal once, and once
only. If, accordingly, these precociously selected spirits are to
be excluded because no new birth is observed in them at a mature
age, they must continue outside in the cold, since the phenomenon
cannot be repeated. When, therefore, there is not possible any
further doubt of their being in possession of salvation, longer
delay is useless, and worse than useless. The fact of conversion,
though not recorded nor even recollected, must be accepted on the
evidence of confession of faith, and as soon as the intelligence
is evidently developed, the person not merely may, but should be
accepted into communion, although still immature in body,
although in years still even a child. This my Father believed to
be my case, and in this rare class did he fondly persuade himself
to station me.
As I have said, the congregation,--although docile and timid, and
little able, as units, to hold their own against their minister--
behind his back were faintly hostile to this plan. None of their
own children had ever been so much as suggested for membership,
and each of themselves, in ripe years, had been subjected to
severe cross-examination. I think it was rather a bitter pill for
some of them to swallow that a pert little boy of ten should be
admitted, as a grown-up person, to all the hard-won privileges of
their order. Mary Grace Burmington came back from her visits to
the cottagers, reporting disaffection here and there, grumblings
in the rank and file. But quite as many, especially of the women,
enthusiastically supported my Father's wish, gloried aloud in the
manifestations of my early piety, and professed to see in it
something of miraculous promise. The expression 'another Infant
Samuel' was widely used. I became quite a subject of contention.
A war of the sexes threatened to break out over me; I was a
disturbing element at cottage breakfasts. I was mentioned at
public prayer-meetings, not indeed by name but, in the
extraordinary allusive way customary in our devotions, as 'one
amongst us of tender years' or as 'a sapling in the Lord's
vineyard'.
To all this my Father put a stop in his own high-handed fashion.
After the morning meeting, one Sunday in the autumn of 1859, he
desired the attention of the Saints to a personal matter which
was, perhaps, not unfamiliar to them by rumour. That was, he
explained, the question of the admission of his, beloved little
son to the communion of saints in the breaking of bread. He
allowed--and I sat there in evidence, palely smiling at the
audience, my feet scarcely touching the ground--that I was not
what is styled adult; I was not, he frankly admitted, a grown-up
person. But I was adult in a knowledge of the Lord; I possessed
an insight into the plan of salvation which many a hoary head
might envy for its fullness, its clearness, its conformity with
Scripture doctrine. This was a palpable hit at more than one
stumbler and fumbler after the truth, and several hoary heads
were bowed.
My Father then went on to explain very fully the position which I
have already attempted to define. He admitted the absence in my
case of a sudden, apparent act of conversion resulting upon
conviction of sin. But he stated the grounds of his belief that I
had, in still earlier infancy, been converted, and he declared
that if so, I ought no longer to be excluded from the privileges
of communion. He said, moreover, that he was willing on this
occasion to waive his own privilege as a minister, and that he
would rather call on Brother Fawkes and Brother Bere, the leading
elders, to examine the candidate in his stead. This was a master-
stroke, for Brothers Fawkes and Bere had been suspected of
leading the disaffection, and this threw all the burden of
responsibility on them. The meeting broke up in great amiability,
and my Father and I went home together in the very highest of
spirits. I, indeed, in my pride, crossed the verge of
indiscretion by saying: 'When I have been admitted to fellowship,
Papa, shall I be allowed to call you "beloved Brother"?' My
Father was too well pleased with the morning's work to be
critical. He laughed, and answered: 'That, my Love, though
strictly correct, would hardly, I fear, be thought judicious!'
It was suggested that my tenth birthday, which followed this
public announcement by a few days, would be a capital occasion
for me to go through the ordeal. Accordingly, after dark (for our
new lamp was lighted for the first time in honour of the event),
I withdrew alone into our drawing-room, which had just, at
length, been furnished, and which looked, I thought, very smart.
Hither came to me, first Brother Fawkes, by himself; then Brother
Bere, by himself; and then both together, so that you may say, if
you are pedanticaly inclined, that I underwent three successive
interviews. My Father, out of sight somewhere, was, of course,
playing the part of stage manager.
I felt not at all shy, but so highly strung that my whole nature
seemed to throb with excitement. My first examiner, on the other
hand, was extremely confused. Fawkes, who was a builder in a
small business of his own, was short and fat; his complexion,
which wore a deeper and more uniform rose-colour than usual, I
observed to be starred with dew-drops of nervous emotion, which
he wiped away at intervals with a large bandana handkerchief. He
was so long in coming to the point, that I was obliged to lead
him to it myself, and I sat up on the sofa in the full lamplight,
and testified my faith in the atonement with a fluency that
surprised myself. Before I had done, Fawkes, a middle-aged man
with the reputation of being a very stiff employer of labour, was
weeping like a child.
Bere, the carpenter, a long, thin and dry man, with a curiously
immobile eye, did not fall so easily a prey to my fascinations.
He put me through my paces very sharply, for he had something of
the temper of an attorney mingled with his religiousness.
However, I was equal to him, and he, too, though he held his own
head higher, was not less impressed than Fawkes had been, by the
surroundings of the occasion. Neither of them had ever been in
our drawing-room since it was furnished, and I thought that each
of them noticed how smart the wallpaper was. Indeed, I believe I
drew their attention to it. After the two solitary examinations
were over, the elders came in again, as I have said, and they
prayed for a long time. We all three knelt at the sofa, I between
them. But by this time, to my great exaltation of spirits there
had succeeded an equally dismal depression. It was my turn now to
weep, and I dimly remember any Father coming into the room, and
my being carried up to bed, in a state of collapse and fatigue,
by the silent and kindly Miss Marks.
On the following Sunday morning, I was the principal subject
which occupied an unusually crowded meeting. My Father, looking
whiter and yet darker than usual, called upon Brother Fawkes and
Brother Bere to state to the assembled saints what their
experiences had been in connexion with their visits to 'one' who
desired to be admitted to the breaking of bread. It was
tremendously exciting to me to hear myself spoken of with this
impersonal publicity, and I had no fear of the result.
Events showed that I had no need of fear. Fawkes and Bere were
sometimes accused of a rivalry, which indeed broke out a few
years later, and gave my Father much anxiety and pain. But on
this occasion their unanimity was wonderful. Each strove to
exceed the other in the tributes which they paid to any piety. My
answers had been so full and clear, my humility (save the mark!)
had been so sweet, my acquaintance with Scripture so amazing, my
testimony to all the leading principles of salvation so distinct
and exhaustive, that they could only say that they had felt
confounded, and yet deeply cheered and led far along their own
heavenly path, by hearing such accents fall from the lips of a
babe and a suckling. I did not like being described as a
suckling, but every lot has its crumpled rose-leaf, and in all
other respects the report of the elders was a triumph. My Father
then clenched the whole matter by rising and announcing that I
had expressed an independent desire to confess the Lord by the
act of public baptism, immediately after which I should be
admitted to communion 'as an adult'. Emotion ran so high at this,
that a large portion of the congregation insisted on walking with
us back to our garden-gate, to the stupefaction of the rest of
the villagers.
My public baptism was the central event of my whole childhood.
Everything, since the earliest dawn of consciousness, seemed to
have been leading up to it. Everything, afterwards, seemed to be
leading down and away from it. The practice of immersing
communicants on the sea-beach at Oddicombe had now been
completely abandoned, but we possessed as yet no tank for a
baptismal purpose in our own Room. The Room in the adjoining
town, however, was really quite a large chapel, and it was amply
provided with the needful conveniences. It was our practice,
therefore, at this time, to claim the hospitality of our
neighbours. Baptisms were made an occasion for friendly relations
between the two congregations, and led to pleasant social
intercourse. I believe that the ministers and elders of the two
meetings arranged to combine their forces at these times, and to
baptize communicants from both congregations.
The minister of the town meeting was Mr. S., a very handsome old
gentleman, of venerable and powerful appearance. He had snowy
hair and a long white beard, but from under shaggy eyebrows there
blazed out great black eyes which warned the beholder that the
snow was an ornament and not a sign of decrepitude. The eve of my
baptism at length drew near; it was fixed for October 12, almost
exactly three weeks after my tenth birthday. I was dressed in old
clothes, and a suit of smarter things was packed up in a carpet-
bag. After nightfall, this carpet-bag, accompanied by my Father,
myself, Miss Marks and Mary Grace, was put in a four-wheeled cab,
and driven, a long way in the dark, to the chapel of our friends.
There we were received, in a blaze of lights, with a pressure of
hands, with a murmur of voices, with ejaculations and even with
tears, and were conducted, amid unspeakable emotion, to places of
honour in the front row of the congregation.
The scene was one which would have been impressive, not merely to
such hermits as we were, but even to worldly persons accustomed
to life and to its curious and variegated experiences. To me it
was dazzling beyond words, inexpressibly exciting, an initiation
to every kind of publicity and glory. There were many candidates,
but the rest of them,--mere grownup men and women,--gave thanks
aloud that it was their privilege to follow where I led. I was
the acknowledged hero of the hour. Those were days when newspaper
enterprise was scarcely in its infancy, and the event owed
nothing to journalistic effort; in spite of that, the news of
this remarkable ceremony, the immersion of a little boy of ten
years old 'as an adult', had spread far and wide through the
county in the course of three weeks. The chapel of our hosts was,
as I have said, very large; it was commonly too large for their
needs, but on this night it was crowded to the ceiling, and the
crowd had come--as every soft murmur assured me--to see _me_.
There were people there who had travelled from Exeter, from
Dartmouth, from Totnes, to witness so extraordinary a ceremony.
There was one old woman of eighty-five who had come, my
neighbours whispered to me, all the way from Moreton-Hampstead,
on purpose to see me baptized. I looked at her crumpled
countenance with amazement, for there was no curiosity, no
interest visible in it. She sat there perfectly listless, looking
at nothing, but chewing between her toothless gums what appeared
to be a jujube.
In the centre of the chapel-floor a number of planks had been
taken up and revealed a pool which might have been supposed to be
a small swimming-bath. We gazed down into this dark square of
mysterious waters, from the tepid surface of which faint swirls
of vapour rose. The whole congregation was arranged, tier above
tier, about the four straight sides of this pool; every person
was able to see what happened in it without any unseemly
struggling or standing on forms. Mr. S. now rose, an impressive
hieratic figure, commanding attention and imploring perfect
silence. He held a small book in his hand, and he was preparing
to give out the number of a hymn, when an astounding incident
took place.
There was a great splash, and a tall young woman was perceived to
be in the baptismal pool, her arms waving above her head, and her
figure held upright in the water by the inflation of the air
underneath her crinoline which was blown out like a bladder, as
in some extravagant old fashion-plate. Whether her feet touched
the bottom of the font I cannot say, but I suppose they did so.
An indescribable turmoil of shrieks and cries followed on this
extraordinary apparition. A great many people excitedly called
upon other people to be calm, and an instance was given of the
remark of James Smith that
He who, in quest of quiet, 'Silence!' hoots
Is apt to make the hubbub he imputes.
The young woman, in a more or less fainting condition, was
presently removed from the water, and taken into the sort of tent
which was prepared for candidates. It was found that she herself
had wished to be a candidate and had earnestly desired to be
baptized, but that this had been forbidden by her parents. On the
supposition that she fell in by accident, a pious coincidence was
detected in this affair; the Lord had pre-ordained that she
should be baptized in spite of all opposition. But my Father, in
his shrewd way, doubted. He pointed out to us, next morning,
that, in the first place, she had not, in any sense, been
baptized, as her head had not been immersed; and that, in the
second place, she must have deliberately jumped in, since, had
she stumbled and fallen forward, her hands and face would have
struck the water, whereas they remained quite dry. She belonged,
however, to the neighbour congregation, and we had no
responsibility to pursue the inquiry any further.
Decorum being again secured, Mr. S., with unimpaired dignity,
proposed to the congregation a hymn, which was long enough to
occupy them during the preparations for the actual baptism. He
then retired to the vestry, and I (for I was to be the first to
testify) was led by Miss Marks and Mary Grace into the species of
tent of which I have just spoken. Its pale sides seemed to shake
with the jubilant singing of the saints outside, while part of my
clothing was removed and I was prepared for immersion. A sudden
cessation of the hymn warned us that to Minister was now ready,
and we emerged into the glare of lights and faces to find Mr. S.
already standing in the water up to his knees. Feeling as small
as one of our microscopical specimens, almost infinitesimally
tiny as I descended into his Titanic arms, I was handed down the
steps to him. He was dressed in a kind of long surplice,
underneath which--as I could not, even in that moment, help
observing--the air gathered in long bubbles which he strove to
flatten out. The end of his noble beard he had tucked away; his
shirt-sleeves were turned up at the wrist.
The entire congregation was now silent, so silent that the
uncertain splashing of my feet as I descended seemed to deafen
one. Mr. S., a little embarrassed by my short stature, succeeded
at length in securing me with one palm on my chest and the other
between my shoulders. He said, slowly, in a loud, sonorous voice
that seemed to enter my brain and empty it, 'I baptize thee, my
Brother, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy
Ghost!' Having intoned this formula, he then gently flung me
backwards until I was wholly under the water, and then--as he
brought me up again, and tenderly steadied my feet on the steps
of the font, and delivered me, dripping and spluttering, into the
anxious hands of the women, who hurried me to the tent--the whole
assembly broke forth in a thunder of song, a paean of praise to
God for this manifestation of his marvellous goodness and mercy.
So great was the enthusiasm, that it could hardly be restrained
so as to allow the other candidates, the humdrum adults who
followed in my wet and glorious footsteps, to undergo a ritual
about which, in their case, no one in the congregation pretended
to be able to take even the most languid interest.
My Father's happiness during the next few weeks it is not
pathetic to me to look back upon. His sternness melted into a
universal complaisance. He laughed and smiled, he paid to my
opinions the tribute of the gravest considerations, he indulged--
utterly unlike his wont--in shy and furtive caresses. I could
express no wish that he did not attempt to fulfill, and the only
warning which he cared to give me was one, very gently expressed,
against spiritual pride.
This was certainly required, for I was puffed out with a sense of
my own holiness. I was religiously confidential with my Father,
condescending with Miss Marks (who I think had given up trying to
make it all out), haughty with the servants, and insufferably
patronizing with those young companions of my own age with whom I
was now beginning to associate.
I would fain close this remarkable episode on a key of solemnity,
but alas! If I am to be loyal to the truth, I must record that
some of the other little boys presently complained to Mary Grace
that I put out my tongue at them in mockery, during the service
in the Room, to remind them that I now broke bread as one of the
Saints and that they did not.