that the Holy Ghost was shed abroad in my heart; and convinced of a
great many other things which were the merest phrases.

However, the end of it was, that I was proposed for acceptance, and two
deacons were deputed, in accordance with the usual custom, to wait upon
me and ascertain my fitness for membership. What they said and what I
said has now altogether vanished; but I remember with perfect
distinctness the day on which I was admitted. It was the custom to
demand of each candidate a statement of his or her experience. I had
no experience to give; and I was excused on the grounds that I had been
the child of pious parents, and consequently had not undergone that
convulsion which those, not favoured like myself, necessarily underwent
when they were called.

I was now expected to attend all those extra services which were
specially for the church. I stayed to the late prayer-meeting on
Sunday; I went to the prayer-meeting on week-days, and also to private
prayer-meetings. These services were not interesting to me for their
own sake. I thought they were, but what I really liked was clanship
and the satisfaction of belonging to a society marked off from the
great world.

It must also be added that the evening meetings afforded us many
opportunities for walking home with certain young women, who, I am
sorry to say, were a more powerful attraction, not to me only, but to
others, than the prospect of hearing brother Holderness, the travelling
draper, confess crimes which, to say the truth, although they were many
according to his own account, were never given in that detail which
would have made his confession of some value. He never prayed without
telling all of us that there was no health in him, and that his soul