ABSTRACT
I was born in London in 1865, the youngest child of my parents, separated by some years from the nearest in age to me of my elder brothers and sisters. My father was a well-known London clergyman, who had been among the pioneers of the ' ecclesiological' revival of the 'forties, and the intimate friend at college of the hymnwriter, John Mason Neale, The life of the home in which I was brought up was inspired by the ideals of the Tractarian Movement, but of that movement as transplanted to Cambridge, of which University my father was a graduate and my mother's father had been a professor. My elder brothers were, however, at Christ Church, Oxford, to which (like myself later on) they had proceeded with close scholarships from Westminster School. The religion of my parents combined with a somewhat rigid ecclesiastical theory and with the high standard of morality and duty characteristic of English clerical households a love of beauty and culture which was quite remote alike from Puritan suspicion and from utilitarian contempt of these aspects of life. The requirement or even the approval of such an experience as is called * conversion ' in young people who were already Christian and had not wandered altogether away from the ways of right living had no place in their scheme of piety. It was the more unexpected that, though I had never come under ' Evangelical' influences, either at home or at school (where there was nothing in the ' Broad Church' atmosphere of Dean Stanley's Westminster to suggest the thought of such a spiritual crisis) or at Christ Church in my first year there, I passed, while a freshman, through an experience of this kind, which was a turning-point in my spiritual history. I shall here confine myself to its effects on my intellectual life. It found me sceptical after a youthful fashion, yet with a no less boyish pose of contempt for such heterodoxy as I found current among my contemporaries and a boyish pride in my knowingness about things religious; it left me with a profound conviction of the reality of God and of the duty of open mindedness and intellectual honesty; a belief that it was the first of religious duties to keep one's ears open to any voice, from whatever quarter, which might convey a message from God; a delightful sense of expectation of strange and wonderful things, though it might be stern and severe things, that any such voice might have to tell me. The influence of one to whom I, in common with many young men of my generation at Oxford, owed much in the way of help and encouragement in the spiritual life, Mr. (now Bishop) Charles Gore, told in the same direction; for, although a man already with strong and definite views of his own, he was of the very opposite temper to that which ' compasses sea and land to make a proselyte,' and always showed the most delicate and sympathetic respect for the right to intellectual and spiritual freedom of those with whom he had to do.
