hot-house of boyhood and early youth to which a drinking bar was the vestibule of hell, and a music-hall an invention of a personal devil, are necessary to understand the reaction produced in me as I stood in Billy Bingham's "joint." I stood, literally, on the brink of "the downward path." I heard my father's voice, I saw my mother's eyes.... In very definite form I now faced "worldly temptation" they had so often warned me against. Accompanying an almost audible memory of "Get thee behind me, Satan," drove a crowded kaleidoscope of vivid pictures from those sheltered years.
My parents were both people of marked character, with intense convictions; my mother, especially, being a woman of great individuality, of iron restraint, grim humour, yet with a love and tenderness, and a spirit of uncommon sacrifice, that never touched weakness. She possessed powers of mind and judgment, at the same time, of which my father, a public servant--financial secretary to the Post Office--availed himself to the full. She had great personal beauty. A young widow, her first husband having been the 6th Duke of Manchester, also of the evangelical persuasion, she met my father at Kimbolton soon after his return from the Crimean War, where he had undergone that religious change of heart known to the movement as "conversion." From a man of fashion, a leader in the social life to which he was born, he changed with sudden completeness to a leader in the evangelical movement, then approaching its height. He renounced the world, the flesh, the devil and all their works. The case of "Beauty Blackwood," to use the nickname his unusual handsomeness gained for him, was, in its way, notorious. He became a teetotaller and non-*smoker, wrote devotional books, spoke in public, and held drawing-room prayer meetings, the Bible always in his pocket, communion with God always in his heart. His religion was genuine, unfaltering, consistent and sincere. He carried the war into his own late world of fashion. He never once looked back. He knew a vivid joy, a wondrous
peace, his pain being for others only, for those who were
