I had already, as I was compelled to go to church, remarked the distribution of the subject, and could now and then show myself off by a pretty complete recitation of a sermon.  But now, as much was said in the congregation, both for and against the new senior, and many placed no great confidence in his announced didactic sermons, I undertook to write them out more carefully; and I succeeded the better from having made smaller attempts in a seat very convenient for hearing, but concealed from sight.  I was extremely attentive and on the alert:  the moment he said Amen, I hastened from church, and spent a couple of hours in rapidly dictating what I had fixed in my memory and on paper, so that I could hand in the written sermon before dinner.  My father was very proud of this success; and the good friend of the family, who had just come in to dinner, also shared in the joy.  Indeed, this friend was very well disposed towards me, because I had made his “Messiah” so much my own, that in my repeated visits, paid to him with a view of getting impressions of seals for my collection of coats-of-arms, I could recite long passages from it till the tears stood in his eyes.

The next Sunday I prosecuted the work with equal zeal; and, as the mechanical part of it mainly interested me, I did not reflect upon what I wrote and preserved.  During the first quarter these efforts may have continued pretty much the same; but as I fancied at last, in my self-conceit, that I found no particular enlightenment as to the Bible, nor clearer insight into dogmas, the small vanity which was thus gratified seemed to me too dearly purchased for me to pursue the matter with the same zeal.  The sermons, once so many-leaved, grew more and more lean:  and before long I should have relinquished this labor altogether, if my father, who was a fast friend to completeness, had not, by words and promises, induced me to persevere till the last Sunday in Trinity; though, at the conclusion, scarcely more than the text, the statement, and the divisions were scribbled on little pieces of paper.

My father was particularly pertinacious on this point of completeness.  What was once undertaken had to be finished, even if the inconvenience, tedium, vexation, nay, uselessness, of the thing begun were plainly manifested in the mean time.  It seemed as if he regarded completeness as the only end, and perseverance as the only virtue.  If in our family circle, in the long winter evenings, we had begun to read a book aloud, we were compelled to finish, though we were all in despair about it, and my father himself was the first to yawn.  I still remember such a winter, when we had thus to work our way through Bower’s “History of the Popes.”  It was a terrible time, as little or nothing that occurs in ecclesiastical affairs can interest children and young people.  Still, with all my inattention and repugnance, so much of that reading remained in my mind that I was able, in after times, to take up many threads of the narrative.