should win hearing for any message I had to bring.

But that knowledge remained a secret all to my own self for many a long
month, for I quickly felt ashamed of that foolish speechifying in an
empty church, and I only recall it now because, in trying to trace out
one's mental growth, it is only fair to notice the first silly striving
after that expression in spoken words, which, later, has become to me one
of the deepest delights of life. And indeed none can know save they who
have felt it what joy there is in the full rush of language which, moves
and sways; to feel a crowd respond to the lightest touch; to see the
faces brighten or graven at your bidding; to know that the sources of
human passion and human emotion gush at the word of the speaker, as the
stream from the riven rock; to feel that the thought that thrills through
a thousand hearers has its impulse from you and throbs back to you the
fuller from a thousand heart-beats; is there any joy in life more
brilliant than this, fuller of passionate triumph, and of the very
essence of intellectual delight?

My pen was busy, and a second pamphlet, dealing with the Johannine
gospel, was written and sent up to Mr. Scott under the same conditions of
anonymity as before, for it was seen that my authorship could in nowise
be suspected, and Mr. Scott paid me for my work. I had also made a
collection of Theistic, but non-Christian, hymns, with a view of meeting
a want felt by Mr. Voysey's congregation at St. George's Hall, and this
was lying idle, while it might be utilised. So it was suggested that I
should take up again my correspondence with Mr. and Mrs. Voysey, and glad
enough was I to do so. During this time my health was rapidly failing,
and in the summer of 1873 it broke down completely. At last I went up to
London to consult a physician, and was told I was suffering from general
nervous exhaustion, which, was accompanied by much disturbance of the