without his immediately knowing it, or without his being deeply wounded.  Although I was sixteen years of age, and although I was treated with indulgence and affection, I was still but a bird fluttering in the net-work of my Father’s will, and incapable of the smallest independent action.  I resigned all thought of attending any other services than those at our ‘Room’, but I did no longer regard this exclusion as a final one.  I bowed, but it was in the house of Rimmon, from which I now knew that I must inevitably escape.  All the liberation, however, which I desired or dreamed of was only just so much as would bring me into communion with the outer world of Christianity without divesting me of the pure and simple principles of faith.

Of so much emancipation, indeed, I now became ardently desirous, and in the contemplation of it I rose to a more considerable degree of religious fervour than I had ever reached before or was ever to experience later.  Our thoughts were at this time abundantly exercised with the expectation of the immediate coming of the Lord, who, as my Father and those who thought with him believed, would suddenly appear, without the least warning, and would catch up to be with Him in everlasting glory all whom acceptance of the Atonement had sealed for immortality.  These were, on the whole, not numerous, and our belief was that the world, after a few days’ amazement at the total disappearance of these persons, would revert to its customary habits of life, merely sinking more rapidly into a moral corruption due to the removal of these souls of salt.  This event an examination of prophecy had led my Father to regard as absolutely imminent, and sometimes, when we parted for the night, he would say with a sparkling rapture in his eyes, ’Who knows?  We may meet next in the air, with all the cohorts of God’s saints!’

This conviction I shared, without a doubt; and, indeed,—­in perfect innocency, I hope, but perhaps with a touch of slyness too,—­I proposed at the end of the summer holidays that I should stay at home.  ’What is the use of my going to school?  Let me be with you when we rise to meet the Lord in the air!’ To this my Father sharply and firmly replied that it was our duty to carry on our usual avocations to the last, for we knew not the moment of His coming, and we should be together in an instant on that day, how far soever we might be parted upon earth.  I was ashamed, but his argument was logical, and, as it proved, judicious.  My Father lived for nearly a quarter of a century more, never losing the hope of ‘not tasting death’, and as the last moments of mortality approached, he was bitterly disappointed at what he held to be a scanty reward of his long faith and patience.  But if my own life’s work had been, as I proposed, shelved in expectation of the Lord’s imminent advent, I should have cumbered the ground until this day.