his great surprise that the boy had never been baptised. He pushed
his inquiries further, and found that out of the fifteen boys in his
class only five had been baptised, and, not only so, but that no
difference in disposition or conduct could be discovered between the
regenerate boys and the unregenerate. The good and bad boys were
distributed in proportions equal to the respective numbers of the
baptised and unbaptised. In spite of a certain impetuosity of
natural character, he was also of a matter-of-fact and experimental
turn of mind; he therefore went through the whole school, which
numbered about a hundred boys, and found out who had been baptised
and who had not. The same results appeared. The majority had not
been baptised; yet the good and bad dispositions were so distributed
as to preclude all possibility of maintaining that the baptised boys
were better than the unbaptised.

The reader may smile at the idea of any one's faith being troubled by
a fact of which the explanation is so obvious, but in truth my
brother was seriously and painfully shocked. The teacher to whom he
applied for a solution of the difficulty was not a man of any real
power, and reported my brother to the rector for having disturbed the
school by his inquiries. The rector was old and self-opinionated;
the difficulty, indeed, was plainly as new to him as it had been to
my brother, but instead of saying so at once, and referring to any
recognised theological authority, he tried to put him off with words
which seemed intended to silence him rather than to satisfy him;
finally he lost his temper, and my brother fell under suspicion of
unorthodoxy.

This kind of treatment might answer with some people, but not with my
brother. He alludes to it resentfully in the introductory chapter of