250 PRÆTERITA-II

them, at first through much wholesome pain, into such tenor as they were really capable of.

The first thing he did was to stop all pressure in reading. His inaugural sentence was, “When you have got too much to do, don’t do it,”-a golden saying which I have often repeated since, but not enough obeyed.

To Gordon himself, his own proverb was less serviceable. He was a man of quite exceptional power, and there is no saying what he might have done, with any strong motive. Very early, a keen, though entirely benevolent, sense of the absurdity of the world took away his heart in working for it:-perhaps I should rather have said, the density and unmalleability of the world, than absurdity. He thought there was nothing to be done with it, and that after all it would get on by itself. Chiefly, that autumn, in our walks over the Norwood hills, he, being then an ordained, or on the point of being ordained, priest, surprised me greatly by avoiding, evidently with the sense of its being useless bother, my favourite topic of conversation, namely, the torpor of the Protestant churches, and their duty, as it to me appeared, before any thought of missionary work, out of Europe, or comfortable settling to pastoral work at home, to trample finally out the smouldering “diabolic fire” of the Papacy, in all Papal-Catholic lands. For I was then by training, thinking, and the teaching of such small experience as I had, as zealous, pugnacious, and self-sure a Protestant as you please. The first condition of my being so was, of course, total ignorance of Christian history; the second,-one for which the Roman Church is indeed guiltily responsible,-that all the Catholic Cantons of Switzerland, counting Savoy also as a main point of Alpine territory, are idle and dirty, and all Protestant ones busy and clean-a most impressive fact to my evangelical mother, whose first duty and first luxury of life consisted in purity of person and surroundings; while she and my father alike looked on idleness as indisputably Satanic. They failed not, therefore, to look carefully on the map for the bridge, or

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