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[58] 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.
The Evangelist
It had been like any other day. I had been to the dreary morning service, read huskily by a few shivering mortals in the chilly chapel; I had worked, walked in the afternoon with a friend, and we had talked of our plans—all we meant to do and be. After hall, I went to have some coffee in the rooms of a mild and amiable youth, now a church dignitary in the Colonies. I sat, I remember, on a deep sofa, which I afterwards bought and still possess. Our host carelessly said that a great Revivalist was to address a meeting that night. Some one suggested that we should go. I laughingly assented. The meeting was held[59] in a hall in a side street; we went smiling and talking, and took our places in a crowded room. The first item was the appearance of an assistant, who accompanied the evangelist as a sort of precentor—an immense bilious man, with black hair, and eyes surrounded by flaccid, pendent, baggy wrinkles—who came forward with an unctuous gesture, and took his place at a small harmonium, placed so near the front of the platform that it looked as if both player and instrument must inevitably topple over; it was inexpressibly ludicrous to behold. Rolling his eyes in an affected manner, he touched a few simple cords, and then a marvellous transformation came over the room. In a sweet, powerful voice, with an exquisite simplicity combined with irresistible emotion, he sang “There were Ninety-and-Nine.” The man was transfigured. A deathly hush came over the room, and I felt my eyes fill with tears; his physical repulsiveness slipped from him, and left a sincere impulsive Christian, whose simple music spoke straight to the heart.
Then the preacher himself—a heavy-looking, commonplace man, with a sturdy figure and no grace of look or gesture—stepped forward.[60] I have no recollection how he began, but he had not spoken half-a-dozen sentences before I felt as though he and I were alone in the world. The details of that speech have gone from me. After a scathing and indignant invective on sin, he turned to draw a picture of the hollow, drifting life, with feeble, mundane ambitions—utterly selfish, giving no service, making no sacrifice, tasting the moment, gliding feebly down the stream of time to the roaring cataract of death. Every word he said burnt into my soul. He seemed to me to probe the secrets of my innermost heart; to be analysing, as it were, before the Judge of the world, the arid and pitiful constituents of my most secret thought. I did not think I could have he............