GILCOMSTON CHURCH SCHOOL.

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them had often a peculiar trick that I could not work out: no more could the master, until he took them to his own room in the evening, and consulted a Bonnycastle Key. With such a master, my progress in algebra, at least during the three years, was but small. I could do all that he could, before I was long with him. It occurred to him, however, to try me with Euclid, and, accordingly, I set to work committing to memory the Definitions, Axioms, and Postulates. I then entered upon the Propositions, which I also committed verbatim, until I reached the pons asinorum; when it was evident that I was working by force of memory alone, and had not the smallest comprehension of the geometrical processes. An abler teacher might have put me on the right track; but Straith simply dropped the attempt as premature—in which he was perfectly right. The faculty for Algebra does not involve the comprehension of the demonstrative processes of Geometry. What I could not do at nine or ten, was found perfectly easy at fourteen, by mere brain growth.

It was here that I began Latin. I was put through the Rudiments, and found the memory work not at all congenial-but still I did it; and, in the conjugations of the verbs, I soon hit on the device of shortening the labour by marking agreements and differences. Before leaving the school,

I had the rudiments pretty well by heart, and had begun to translate short sentences from an easy collection; but I had not entered on any classical text, still less on Latin composition. The grounding, however, gave me a start for the future.

In June, 1829, when I had completed my eleventh year, I left school for good-now to enter upon some employment for a maintenance. But it is necessary to go back and advert to other influences of an educational kind that were at work during those eleven years, although I cannot precisely date them.

My home readings were guided by the books within my reach, and were purely voluntary. My father had accumulated a small collection of works, chiefly theological, but with some variation of interest. The Pilgrim's Progress was one; and, since avowed romance was discouraged, it operated to give something of romantic interest, and its wonderful originality of conception, and felicity of designation, were not thrown away upon me. I must have read it many times over. Another of my father's books was the Scots Worthiesthe lives and dying testimonies of the Scotch martyrs in the religious persecutions. An appendix, entitled "God's Judgments on Persecutors," proved still more attractive owing to

the vindictive and malevolent interest that it awakened. A third work that delighted me extremely was a composition by an eighteenth century clergyman of the English Church, M'Gowan, entitled Dialogues of Devils. The devils were personifications of the vices (Ararus, Infidelis, and so on), who recited their various operations among mankind. It was a piece of clever satire upon prevailing usages. The author, being intensely evangelical, indulged in a furious onset upon the rising Unitarianism, as represented by Priestley. Under the title of The Arians' and Socinians' Monitor he gave a picture of Priestley in hell; and the horrors of that description afforded me unmingled satisfaction, while, no doubt, planting a prejudice against the Unitarian sect. I was also much interested in a little brochure, called The Hieroglyphic Bible, consisting of short Biblical narratives with pictures interspersed as substitutes for the occurring names. Of these last, the most notable was a figure of God as a naked old man in sitting posture-I suppose suggested by some design of a pagan deity, or, more likely, by "the Ancient of Days" of Daniel. This figure has haunted me ever since when the name of God is pronounced, if I do not forcibly exclude it from consciousness.

The sermons of Ebenezer and Ralph Erskine

were my father's favourites; and he must have exercised pressure to make me read them at a very early age. I am told that I had committed to memory some impressive passages from Ralph Erskine, and was often called upon to declaim them to people at large,—a display which my father put a stop to. I must then have been very young, -perhaps, between four and five.

I have a much better recollection of my readings in Watson's Body of Divinity. Watson was one of the Nonconformists excluded from the Church by the Act of Uniformity. He had an easy, sententious style, with the peculiarity of quoting frequently from the Latin fathers; and, although he supplied an English rendering, he also gave the original Latin. It must have been after my indoctrination in Latin grammar that I used to practise upon these quotations, by comparing word for word the translation and the original. Moreover, I liked Watson's easy-going and somewhat epigrammatic style, and his freedom from Calvinistic fierceness.

Going back for the commencement of my religious history, which had made some steps before my twelfth year, I can remember my occasional fits of anguish from the fear of hell, and the possibility of being cut off before making my peace with the Almighty. My father gave us seasonably

HOME EDUCATION IN RELIGION.

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his strong religious views in a very imperious fashion. There never was anything kindly or attractive about those religious lectures and inculcations; on the contrary, his style of lecturing was most forbidding, and, but for the fear that there was something serious in the matter, we (or I at least) should have kept up a secret hostility to the whole procedure. It was after breakfast on Sunday mornings, and just before going to church, that he gave us all a long-winded sermon apropos of some psalm or chapter in the diet of family worship. His most iterated theme was a denunciation of one and all of us, as in a headlong career to hell, without any reservation. For this state of things, he could think of no possible solution, but that God should either plunge us into deep affliction or cast us into hell. Luckily, a more merciful tone was observed both in the sermons that we listened to, and in the books we read, Calvinistic though they were; and I was quite disposed to take religion seriously from early years, and to excogitate a view that I could act out, somehow or other, in practice. I carefully concealed from my parents, and from everybody, the seriousness that I actually felt in the matter of religion, and continued the same attitude of reserve and concealment through all my early years.

The real obstruction of my religious progress