My elder sister, Helen Amelia (Ella) was born April 21, 1873. I was born November 20, 1874, at 50, Trafalgar Road, Greenwich, at that time a quiet, refined suburban district of south-east London. My mother died eight days after my birth, in her thirty-second year. She gave me my names while delirious two days after my birth, saying, "Get my dear little George Henry a little loaf; buy him a little loaf."

Left with two infants, my father wisely married again. Second marriages are often disastrous: his was prospered with the abundant blessing of the Lord. He met Harriet Pettman, as he had met my mother, at a spiritual gathering. I believe it was at the wedding of her sister Fanny to Mr. Edward Musgrove, and I am told that I, perhaps a year old, took to her at once, showing this by pulling one of her side curls out to its full length. It is said that it was my happiness in her arms that made my father think she might make me a good second mother. They were married on April 13, 1876, and for forty-six years, until my father's death in 1922 they enjoyed unbroken fellowship, natural and spiritual, creating and maintaining such a godly home as enabled the Spirit of God to quicken each of seven children in early life.

Though I owe not my natural life to my stepmother, I owe to her under God everything else that a mother can give, and also my spiritual life. As she was the only mother I knew I shall henceforth write of her simply as my mother.

Her grandfather had architectural duties in Canterbury Cathedral. He fell from a high scaffold on to the Cathedral pavement near where his little son Thomas was playing, and was killed. The boy was found to be musical; in due time he became Cathedral organist; and was a professor of the Royal Academy of Music. I have heard that Queen Victoria being in his neighbourhood submitted to him a composition of hers for correction. He was a good singer, could play any instrument, and could sleep through any amount of playing by others, until a discord was struck, when he would wake with a snap. Mischievous grandchildren sometimes tested this idiosyncrasy. But he remained long without feeling his need of the Saviour of sinners; always at the established church as organist, but far from God. Late in life he was induced to hear Sankey sing. His comment was characteristic of the finished technician: "He has a good voice, but no crotchets or quavers! " By the mercy of God there was hope in his death.

His wife, on the other hand, was a sweet saint. I remember her distinctly, for in very early days I used often to be at Ramsgate, where they lived. They had thirteen children. In those wiser days of long ago children were sent to bed early. When all were in bed Mrs. Pettman every night went to each bedside and prayed. Those prayers were of necessity answered. All her children were converted to God. The conversion of Thomas was very striking. When a young man, already a church organist but unsaved, he came under deep conviction of sin, and for a long time could find no peace of mind. One evening, as he was walking towards the cliffs, possibly with thoughts of suicide as a way of ending the inward misery, a drunkard lurched against him and he caught the words the sot was mumbling: "Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me? Hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise Him, who is the health of my countenance, and my God" (Ps. 42:5,11; 43:5). By hope he was saved from despair, and before long entered into peace with God through faith in Jesus Christ our Lord. He lived to be a blessing to many others. For many years he held beach services for children at Broadstairs.

The days of divine superintendence are not passed. Who but the Almighty could use a drunken drunkard to save a soul from death? Who else caused the two to meet in a big town late at night? In his youth the drunkard had been taught to memorize Scripture, but who but God brought to the muddled brain just such words as would cheer the troubled heart?

I shall mention only one other member of this family, Stanley. He was, I think, the eldest son, and it was correspondingly a bitter disappointment to his father that he was utterly nonmusical, while the other twelve were all highly gifted. He went through deep exercises of heart in breaking from the Church of England, in which he was reared, so as to be free from its formalities, routine, and ritual, in order to worship God as the Father in spirit and in truth. All the family did so in turn, my mother included.

It was in such a circle, with such manifestations of the power of God in her loved ones, that she was reared who was deeply, eternally to influence myself. It was with such trials and at such cost that she "grew up into Christ", instead of remaining a Christian dwarf, one of the myriads of cases of arrested spiritual development which cannot but abound in every religious system crippled by the tight swaddling-bands of humanly devised forms, rules, and creeds. In due time she had five children, Emily Elizabeth, Samuel, Selina, Margaret Sophia (Daisy), Elsie Harriet. It speaks volumes for her character and home influence that we all grew together as only one family, and have continued thus in heart. And it spoke much for the physical inheritance mentioned in Chapter I and the training, that we seven continued an unbroken circle until the youngest died in her sixtyfourth year in 1949.

Amid the haze of the remote past one glimpse is distinct. My earliest recollection is of my sister and myself, both very young, delighting in the small garden of a small house, and picking nasturtium seeds to be used for "caper" sauce with boiled mutton.

Which is not so trifling a memory for the beginning of a human life as the superficial may think. The pleasure and the usefulness of a garden, what is it but a faded yet clear reflection of that golden beginning of all human history when "Jehovah God planted a garden ... and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground made Jehovah God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food" (Gen. 2:8, 9)? "There he put the man": not in a barren desert, not in a hovel in a slum, not in the dreary restriction of a tenement flat, but in a garden. And the divine order is very significant; first beauty, then utility; first trees "pleasant to the sight", then those that are "good for food". The mighty worker who wrote down the narrative caught this truth, and in the prayer of Moses, the man of God, in this petition: "Let the beauty of Jehovah our God be upon us: and establish Thou the work of our hands upon us" (Ps. 90:17). First character, then service; first likeness to God, then work that God can bless. First failure in proud self-effort, then forty years of retirement in a desert to develop the beauty of meekness; then strength, activity, authority, a life-work established for evermore.

The heavenly city is pictured as a garden city, and on earth "the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose" (Isa. 35:1). That house was at Brockley, then a newly-planted suburb well away from London on the south-east. But the glimpse is brief. Whether it was too far from the busy city, or, which is more probable, from the evening and Sunday gospel work, I cannot say; but my next memories are of a sadly different district.

At the Jamaica Road end of St. James' Road, Bermondsey, stands a row of tall narrow houses of the type mentioned in Lord Brougham's caustic comparison of a certain tall man to those high houses of which the upper storeys are the least well-furnished. No. 11 became our home. The solitary redeeming feature was that the house being high allowed us, from the upstairs windows, to look over the houses opposite into the churchyard, then a sort of public space, of no small value to such a locality. It was said that George Whitefield preached in that Church.

The whole neighbourhood is dingy and dreary at all times, but especially in the dull and wet weather of winter. Interminable rows of small and dirty brick dwellings, grimy factories, gloomy warehouses, insufferably muddy roads, heavy skies, and foggy days, are the unpleasant memories stamped indelibly on my memory. Once I fell flat on my face in that greasy black mud, and went home a grievous spectacle, especially, no doubt, to whoever had to clean my clothes. Happily at that time they were small. Southwark Park, a quarter of an hour or so from our house, is the only relief in the shaded landscape of those days. Blessed be the man that first proposed city parks.

I was now six years of age and went to my first school, in Jamaica Road. It was kept by one Loudon, as I remember the name. He was a survival - let us hope the last - of that type of schoolmaster Dickens somewhere described, whose principal, if not sole, means of training youth was a long and thick cane. I saw him give an elder boy fifty strokes on the hand at one time. A tall youth (named Robinson, if I recollect aright) fled from the desk, and was chased round the large schoolroom by the angry master, who slashed at him right and left whenever near enough to his victim. To the rest of us it was a fearsome scene of deepest fascination (who knew but it would be his turn next?) and yet of suppressed amusement and satisfaction; for Robinson, by manag-ing to keep two forms away from the pursuing fury, contrived for a while to keep out of reach, and the swinging blows were wasted. But at last the quarry was run to earth, and the demoralizing incident ended, painfully enough for Robinson. My life has a few strange features difficult of explanation: one is that I never tasted that cane.

To all eternity No. 11 St. James' Road will be memorable. When I was about seven-and-a-half years of age a most momentous event took place which neither can be nor needs to be repeated. I was converted, born again from above, born of God. The experience was so real and thorough, and its effects so enduring, that it is as vivid after more than seventy years as if it had just happened.

I was recovering from an illness, scarlatina I think. My mother sat by my bed and talked with me, quietly and simply; and as she spoke the Spirit of Truth spoke by her and made the truth effective. She said nothing more than I had heard from infancy, but what new and powerful influence it exerted! She spoke of sin: I felt myself the veriest sinner under the sun. No particular sins were mentioned, but there rose before me childish falsehoods, petty pilferings, anger, disobedience. I saw these as guilt, as wickedness, as making me obnoxious to the holy God and His holy wrath. I had not been brought up in a morbid, prudish, restrained manner, constantly checked, reproved, restricted, but in a simple, healthy, happy atmosphere. There can be no accounting for this sudden, intelligent, overwhelming perception of the true nature of sin by a child of seven but as a fulfilment of the words of the Son of God, "When He, the Spirit of truth, is come He shall convict the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment" (John 16:8).

My mother spoke of God, His holiness, His anger against sin, and the coming judgment. Her words were few, but oh, the solemnity they caused to settle upon my heart. She went on to remind me of His infinite love, love so mighty that He sent into the world His only and beloved Son on purpose to save sinners, for though He hates sin He loves the sinner. And I thought and felt what a wonderful, amazing thing it is that the great and holy God, who made the stars and this great earth, loved a naughty, sinful little boy like me. If I but shut my eyes, and lean back in my chair in thought, again I feel the hot tears that trickled down my cheeks as the sense of this overwhelming love of God melted my heart.

She said a little about the cross of Christ; how the Son of God in love to me took my place and bore my sin and its divinely appointed punishment, death. I saw this CLEARLY. It was made spiritually plain to my mind, as by a divine illumination. In the intervening years I have reflected upon the doctrine of the atonement, have read Dale, Denny, and others, have precisionized some ideas, have theorized somewhat, and, as a consequence, can talk about the subject as on that day on my bed would naturally have been impossible: but as regards spiritual apprehension of the death of Christ and its value to the sinner I have learned nothing further, for I learned then all one needs to know, perhaps all a finite being can know, and it is all in this word: "Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures.... He loved me, and gave Himself up [to justice] for me" (I Cor. 15:3 ; Gal. 2:20).

My mother added that if only I was truly sorry that I had sinned God would forgive me for Christ's sake. I could not doubt this; I saw the worthiness of Christ and the sufficiency of His death, as the meritorious cause, the only cause, the adequate cause, why God should pardon me. As a little child can do, I gratefully accepted the promised pardon. I knew I was truly sorry, and I was only too thankful to think that the dreadful doom of the sinner, which I so richly deserved, would never be my fate, for God had loved me, Christ had delivered me by dying for me, i was saved!

Yes, I was saved, and I knew it. There stole over my troubled heart a quiet, solemn, happy peace: I had "peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ" (Rom. 5:1), my heart had been "sprinkled from a consciousness of evil" (Heb. 10:22); that is to say, the Holy Spirit had enabled me, by faith in what God says on the matter, to see that the blood Christ shed, the life He surrendered, had met fully the claims of the law of God against me on account of my sins. God was satisfied; I was satisfied.

In the long intervening years I have met many spiritual dangers and had many spiritual vicissitudes. It was years before I learned that Christ saves His people from their sins as well as from the punishment of them. My experience of heart holiness came long after, and my moral life was long a secret sorrow to me. Also, I have faced atheistic and other doubts by meeting with infidels, higher critics, and the like, and by reading their writings, so as to master their position, and be able to help them. But not for one moment has that deep, settled peace through the blood of Christ been disturbed. I have grown in intelligence, but not in confidence. At that first moment I rested the whole weight of my salvation from wrath upon Christ, and therefore found complete rest; I am still doing this at this moment, and therefore still have that complete rest. It is in leaning the entire weight upon the bed that the body finds rest; Christ said, "Come unto Me, and I will rest you." That day, in earliest life, blessed be God,

Happy indeed is the grown man who still sleeps as a little child. This I do in Christ as regards my salvation, and all other concerns of time and eternity. A weary woman said, "Blessed be the man that invented beds!" The Christian says, "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ."

And it all took place in fifteen minutes! I was brought through conviction, illumination, faith, assurance; a rational, logical, indispensable process in the divine miracle of regeneration. Nor need the suddenness and completeness of the transaction be a wonder. GOD was the worker, and He does wonders; and "I know that whatsoever God doeth it shall be for ever" (Eccl. 3:14). His work endures.

I rose in due time from my bed, and went my way as a natural, healthy boy, getting into mischief, enjoying fun and games and lessons, outwardly little different from other boys. Nor for years did I say anything about that momentous hour. But I knew a real event had happened; and if it was at all true, as my fond mother used to say, that "George never gave her any trouble", this can be attributed only to that renewing of his inner man which God then commenced. A foremost agnostic of that period said that to him the doctrines which Christians believe were incomprehensible. How then came it to pass that they suddenly became comprehensible to a tiny child of seven and permanently and beneficially effective' through a long life? The infidel can give no explanation. Human skill could not effect this miracle. It is a divine work wrought by the Spirit of God Himself, and every such case is an irrefutable confirmation of the Book which teaches those doctrines and promises that the Spirit shall use them in such manner.

Of course I believe whole-heartedly in the conversion of children. Thank God a thousand times for Sunday schools; but Christian parents should so live with God in the home, so pray, so speak with their little ones, that these may not need the Sunday school teacher or other worker to lead them to Christ. It is their parents' own peculiar duty and joy, and if they cannot do this blessed service, let them inquire seriously why they cannot.

Of these Bermondsey years but few incidents remain in my memory. But I recall an alarming interview when my elder sister and I were accosted in Southwark Park by a formidable man, a school attendance officer, who demanded to know why we were not at school. He seemed satisfied with our assurance that we had sickness in the house. On another occasion my next youngest sister, Emily, still a little child, ran after me across the road outside our house and straight in front of a large dray and two of the magnificent horses more common then than now. With commendable and desperate promptitude the driver reined them in and she escaped. I remember well the severe winter of 1881, when for weeks the streets were filled with snow so deep that the passages cut across the roads were higher than my head. But I do not remember that I felt cold.

In 1882 a memorable change took place. We moved into the country. It was no small sacrifice to our father. It severed him from the spiritual work in the slums he loved so well, and the constant intercourse with Christian friends so long valued. And it meant that he had an extra hour a day to spend in trains to and from the city. But he felt that Bermondsey was not the place to rear five young children, so he took "Priestland", a house in Station Road, Sidcup, in Kent, ten miles from town. He changed the name to "Prestlands", which led the house agent to startle someone by the information that "Mr. Lang had lost an I".

The garden was full of long grass, in which we children raced about with sheer delight. There were two plum trees. They did not bear as freely as we should have liked, nor did the plums usually get fully ripe; the reader may guess why. The district was still far from developed, and on the other side of the road were a tiny brook, a hedge, and wide fields flanked by Longlands woods. The field nearest was a strawberry field and the fruit was ripe. Mother sent one of us with sixpence and an ordinary tea basin, which was brought back full. A larger vessel was sent each day until the largest pie dish came back full for sixpence. Halcyon days! It was the summit of the Victorian era. Would that they might return to this selfish, stricken, godless land, robbed of freedom by political theorists.

On Sundays and Wednesdays we walked to the nearest Exclusive meeting, two-and-a-half miles distant at Chislehurst. Usually I went three times on Sunday. We were not required to go to the afternoon conversational Bible reading, but my sister and I chose to go. Thus I generally walked that day fifteen miles, and thought nothing of it. In those more natural times no healthy children jibbed at walking. It was that or stay at home. I remember distinctly when the low safety-bicycle appeared on the roads, and I wondered why the tyres were so big, thinking they must be heavy to push, until I learned they were filled with air. But bicycles were a luxury of the rich, so most walked, which was far healthier.

After perhaps two years, others of the Exclusive fraternity came to the district and a meeting was commenced. One of these was a cocoa merchant named Wells. He bought two small plots of building land, to put on one a hall to be let to the meeting, and on the other a house as an investment. He employed an old countryman, named Comber, to put the close oak palings around the plots. He was a quaint old fellow, with one eye that looked the wrong way. But he was a true Christian, a Baptist. The owner of the next adjoining plot watched the old man put in the boundary post and considered it was a foot over on his land. Comber said: "Well, sir, that's where Mr. Wells told me to put it." The other replied: "I am very surprised at a religious man like Mr. Wells breaking the law. Does not the law say, `Thou shalt not remove thy neighbour's landmark'?" (Deut. 19:14; 27:17). To this, with a sly hit at a well-known tendency to an abuse of Christian liberty, Comber replied: "Ah, sir, but if you was to talk to Mr. Wells like that he'd say he wasn't under law but under grace!"

One family that moved to Sidcup, and helped to increase the meeting, was the Musgroves, the relatives before mentioned, Mrs. Musgrove being my mother's sister. Aunt Fanny had a remarkable conversion as a girl. She was one of the sweetest women I have known. There were six children, the two eldest boys, Edward and Howard, being a little my seniors. We were great chums and roamed the countryside far and wide. There were soon no lanes or woods or commons for miles around we did not know. This developed a sense of locality and an absence of fear which have been helpful in later wanderings in many lands. In those boyhood years I would often roam the woods at night. Thus did God order those early years with a view to later years.

My cousin Edward was no ordinary companion. He was quiet and unobtrusive, but able. It was forty or more years later that I learned casually that at college he had taken gold medals in Greek and German. He was a splendid swimmer, an excellent photographer, and a competent electrician, at one time an observer of thunderstorms for the Meteorological Society. One day in his room (which usually reeked with strange chemical fumes) he told me that it had occurred to him to take a photograph by the light of a Crooke's tube. There stood in position a tiny statuette, and behind it, for a background, a slab of inch board. I He handed me the negative and asked me what I saw in it. I answered that it showed the pattern of the wall-paper behind the board. "Yes", he said, "isn't it funny?" This was a few years before Rontgen's announcement of X-rays. Had my cousin followed up the matter they might have been known as the Musgrove rays.

Though usually silent he was a rare storyteller. Our families and visitors frequently spent Saturday afternoons and Bank holidays in extensive rambles through the charming country. Passing a tumble-down cottage, Edward would hold the company fascinated by a tale of some dreadful tragedy that had taken place in that cottage years before. At the close of the narrative there would be added quietly, "Of course, it never happened." Under God I owe much to his influence, and shall illustrate this later.

The Sunday School at the hall included a class for bigger boys, in which description I was included though actually small for my age. It was thought I would never grow, though finally I reached five feet nine. I fear I was not too amenable, nor was the class leader attractive. One afternoon he was dealing with the brazen serpent, and his involved remarks led me to ask how a brazen thing was not made of brass, which was how I had understood him. Probably i had often asked perverse questions and he felt this was another such, whereupon he said testily that he would have no more of my rudeness and ordered me to leave the school. But that time I was conscious of being quite sincere and I left with a sense of injustice on his part, and never returned. Shortly the class was transferred to the house of a good man, Lieutenant Ireland, R.N., who won our love and helped us.

It was perhaps not surprising, though quite inexcusable, that one Sunday afternoon another lad and I played truant from Sunday School. One sin leads to another. A robin sang sweetly on a hedge; I seized a stone, swung round and flung it, and the pretty creature fell mangled and dead. It was a wanton, wicked deed, which I mourn to this day. Though a believer in Christ as my Saviour I was not yet indwelt by His Spirit. This explains why many Christians do many things not worthy of His name, which fact does not prove that they do not truly believe in Him. As related above I had been well taught the truth of redemption and pardon and had received Christ as my personal Redeemer, but no such instruction as to the Holy Spirit as Sanctifier and Indweller had reached my heart (even if it had been taught in my hearing), and I had not received Him by faith. Let Christian parents and teachers take this to heart and be as careful to instruct children upon the latter theme as the former. For communion with God depends upon the water of the laver as much as on the blood at the altar; holiness requires the Spirit of Christ as well as Christ; power in service calls for Pentecost after Calvary. And faith must be exercised for benefiting by each, which requires instruction upon both, seeing that faith cometh by hearing and one cannot believe what one had not heard, and heard with intelligence and personal application.

There happened one day an event which might have shrouded our home with gloom. "Prestland" was a four-storeyed house with a well stair-case from attic to basement. My sister Emily, six or seven years of age, was sliding down the banister from the attic and fell down the well. I was at the bottom when she arrived. Her head struck the foot of an old-fashioned wooden perambulator. It was salvation that it was there or she might have struck an iron pipe which projected from the cupboard under the stairs. After a few moments Emily rose and ran off to play, seemingly unhurt. But some seven years later facial paralysis appeared, the effect of the blow, as was considered. By the blessing of God, the leading homoeopath of England, Dr. J. Compton Burnett, remedied this affection, and during the sixty-five or more intervening years my dear sister has lived a strenuous and usetul llfe and is still active. The life spared in childhood has been well employed unto full age, and God, the Preserver of all men, is glorified.

Later, the youngest of us, Elsie, still almost an infant, was found clinging to the banister rail ready to drop down the well. She was rescued, but father decided that such a house was not suitable for a young family and we removed to Handen Road, Lee.

My schooling illustrates the secret superintendence of God over the development of a boy.

My first school at Sidcup was a preparatory school for boys kept by Miss Langridge. I was eight years old. The chief item I remember was the learning of poetry. Each term some lengthy poem had to be memorized and to be repeated at the end of the term. One such piece was the first canto of The Lady of the Lake, perhaps 600 lines. This practice developed a strong and tenacious memory, a faculty mighty for good or evil. It also fostered a love of poetry, which a little later prompted attempts to write in verse.

When about ten or eleven years old I was sent to a school kept by a Mr. Swan at Milton Villa, Church Road, Bexleyheath, Kent. This was four miles from Sidcup. I walked there, had a midday meal at school, and walked home. One can think with sadness of what the ordinary boy of today would say were it proposed that he should walk four miles to school, but then boys in decent homes did what their parents directed, and were all the happier for the discipline.

My first day at school, the first question was whether I was to be put in class III or class II. I know not whether to regard it as a Divine providence, but the test was how to ask in French the question, How do you do? It is fact that this was the one and only phrase in French that I knew. I was exalted to class II.

That day a boy inquired where I lived, and learning it was Sidcup offered the blunt remark: "You're a fool. Coming all that way he would have let you get here at half-past-nine instead of nine." But the instinct of a regenerate heart told me instantly that this was bad advice. All the terms I went to Milton Villa I was never late. The virtue of punctuality had been formed by us children having to be at the breakfast table at 6.30 a.m., summer and winter, and by the example of our dear father who left at 7.10 to catch the 7.20 train to London (never without reading a Scripture and praying with us), so as to be at his office by 8.30 to open the heavy j mail of the the wholesale house where he was chief of the counting house. The habits of far too many young people today are deplorable. At school, at college, in one of the services, they are compelled to be punctual; but the moment holidays or furloughs start they lapse into complete disregard of time and of the courtesy due to others, and waste hours of the morning in bed. It shows an absence of morals in doing what is wise and right; they are in time only so long as they must be so, not at all because it is good and right. Yet of all the things we use time is easily the most valuable, for some of it must be expended en every other act. Some words of Gladstone to the students of St. Andrews University made in me a lasting impression. I give them from memory: "Gentlemen, let me recommend to you thrift of time. It will repay you with a usury beyond your utmost expectations."

On one occasion when walking from Bexleyheath to Bexley, I encountered a gang of rough street boys who ambushed me. Just as I was about to answer cheekily something arresting happened. There rang in my heart words I had no recollection of having heard or read, but which from their style and tone I felt must come from the Bible: A soft answer turneth away wrath, but grievous words stir up anger (Prov. 15:1).

That reverence for the Word of God which characterized my home and training caused me at once to change my tactics. I answered quietly, explaining that I came from Sidcup, not Bexley, and was allowed to go home without damage, but with the lesson indelibly fixed in my heart that it is as wise as it is right to obey the Word of God immediately.

In ancient times a lad of about fifteen years was dying of thirst under a shrub in the desert south of Palestine. We read that "God hath heard the voice of the lad where he is" and sent guidance and deliverance (Gen. 21:12-19). Three thousand and seven hundred years pass, but what is that to the Eternal? Again He looked down on a small lad in trouble and gave guidance and deliverance. I know not whether it was His own good Spirit who spoke those words into my mind or whether He spoke through an angel, as to Hagar about Ishmael that day in the desert; but I know that that experience has been a determining factor throughout the subsequent sixty years. It has been with me a ceaseless expectation, something that I have simply and without effort taken for granted, that the God of Abraham will work, will speak, will guide, will help, and that the Bible is the medium He chooses to use for His messages. Further illustrations will be given in these pages. I have met many sceptics, honest or dishonest, and have read much infidel literature, by avowed opponents of the faith or by less candid modernists posing as Christians; but their subtleties and sophistries have never deceived or troubled my soul. I know the God they say does not exist; I have heard His Voice in the Book they decry, and not once but many, many times.

For a short while I went to school in Sidcup under a clergyman who took a few private pupils. From July to September he went to Archangel, on the White Sea, as chaplain to the British who traded or called there. In consequence we had but a few days of holiday at Christmas and Easter but three months in the summer. After my cousins had returned to school the remaining six weeks dragged heavily. Idleness is wearisome as well as hurtful. My father, thinking rightly that so much waste time was harmful, took me up to the counting house of which he was chief, where I stamped letters, ran errands, and did such minor items as might be entrusted to a boy of eleven years. The discipline involved was beneficial. No doubt it was needful that legislation should prohibit children being employed in some of the arduous and hurtful work they formerly did, as in mines and chimneys. But it has been pushed to an extreme. Country boys and girls are not harmed by picking stones off fields. I was decidedly the better for learning to be respectful to seniors, to be methodical and punctual, to keep books and papers in order, to be tidy. These habits have helped me greatly in my; later literary work on a considerable scale, done often under difficulties of travel and other interruptions, as well as on its business side of personally selling my books by post, with the keeping of stocks and accounts and the doing up of parcels. Thus the God I was to serve began my training betimes.

This preparation can be traced down to detail. My father could not know, what God foreknew, that I was to be a long distance traveller and to find my way about many great and foreign cities, but he helped towards this. A daily walk in the heart of London was between Cannon Street Station and Falcon Square, near the G.P.O., Aldersgate Street. After I had several times done the journey by his side, he told me one afternoon to go ahead and find my own way. That first time he had once at a corner to call from behind and keep me on the right road, but after that I was safe though alone, and it was not long before I knew well the courts, alleys, and short cuts of that central area of the City.

When, after being in the office for six weeks, I was returning to school, William Olney told my father to give me £2 pocket money. I felt very wealthy ; but my wise father did not leave me to waste all these riches on boyish fancies, but bought for me sundry useful articles, leaving me the smaller part. This early lesson in the wise use of money was invaluable. It set me on the healthy line of not indulging idle whims but of using money profitably, and this carried with it salvation from the pernicious misuse of money for self-indulgence. In consequence, I have been able without hardship to live in many lands at a minimum cost, as, for example, in Heliopolis, Egypt, where I lived alone for six months at the rate of sixteen shillings a week, excluding rent. A chief secret of healthy and happy living is to do without. Profoundly true and practical are Wesley's words: "We should be continually labouring to cut off all the useless things that surround us; our God usually retrenches the superfluities of our souls in the same proportion as we do those of our bodies" (A Plain Account of Christian Perfection). Such conditions as jealousy, bitterness, greed, bad temper, depression are "superfluities of the soul", states plainly superfluous to our true wellbeing, indeed destructive of it. Selfish indulgence of the body fosters these and must be discontinued before they can be retrenched.

At that time the Rev. Gilbert McCall, a Congregational Minister, opened a school in Longlands Road, Sidcup. His boys had the special advantage of being under a man who knew how to teach us to teach ourselves. One day he drew on the blackboard a hexagon and said: "Now boys, by putting in three lines you can turn that into a cube. I have something I want to do, so I will leave you. When one of you has seen how to do it, come and tell me." Thus he put us on our honour not to lark about in his absence; no one abused this confidence, and at the same time he left us to use our brains.

Another day he said: "When you get out into life, you will meet two sorts of men. One will chum up to you the first day, tell you his secrets, and will want you to tell him yours. Do not make friends with such; they will abuse your trust. The other fellow will stand off for a time till he is sure you are worthy of his friendship. Cultivate his acquaintance."

He once dropped a hint that often stood me in good stead in the burning heat of the tropics. On a summer day he asked for a drink from my bottle of lemonade. He took one mouthful. I begged him to take more, but he said, "No; if you take a little and do not gulp it down but let it trickle slowly over the mouth and throat it will moisten the membranes better than drinking much liquid quickly." I have often found this to be true. When the soldiers came straight from England to the deserts of Egypt in 1914, they were given a small flask of water to last for a day's route march. The new lads would use this up in the first hour or so, and they had to learn economy by hard experience; but Mr. McCall's hint saved me from this trouble, and I have made a thermos of water last over many an hour on the deserts.

Mr. McCall was an excellent mechanic in wood and metal. He had made a locomotive, perhaps three-feet-six long, which I have seen working well. He built an excellent model of a parish church, with tower, buttresses, and glass windows complete. Technical colleges were not yet known, but we boys were made at home in his workshop and he taught us to use tools. This I have found of great value in many lands, as well as in home repairs.

He took us into the playground with a looking-glass and a triangle and showed us how to take the elevation of the schoolhouse. He then repeated the workings on the blackboard and we had to reproduce them to scale on paper and colour the picture. A local builder acted as judge. Another boy took the prize for colouring, but my drawing was given first place for accuracy. This proved a determining factor in my life. I still use the book won then, Every Man His Own Mechanic.

Though a Christian, I was no little cherub in disguise. A Frenchman taught us French, a rather nervy little man. The class was full and I was seated on a music stool right under the teacher. The stool squeaked, of which I took full advantage by twisting about. It got on his nerves and he reproved me sharply. I demurely turned to the boy behind me and looked reprovingly at him. "No, sir, it is you, you I mean; you will leave the class." Another lad, one of the best-behaved in the school, was also ejected. We sauntered into the playground and saw the Head busy putting up a greenhouse. It spoke much for our confidence in him that we did not slink away but went to him. By our being there in classtime he must have known that something was amiss, yet he made no inquiry, but pleasantly asked us to help in the work. In my case at least this treatment made me regret my misconduct more than if he had chastised me.

It was of God that at this susceptible age I was under the influence of Mr. McCall, this wise Christian teacher. I owe him much. He taught but did not force his pupils. There were examinations, but he had little belief in them; he considered "cramming" for them to be injurious and the passing of examinations by this means to be fallacious as a test of knowledge and ability. He said it was like stuffing string into a box and getting it out again, if you could. There is something in this simile, for if knowledge so gained is recovered by the memory it is too often like tangled string, confused and troublesome.

We had a mathematical master of some quality. His name was Widdeson. He would work on the blackboard a long problem in algebra; when the board was full, he would rub all out and continue the working without the earlier figures. Not being myself specially good at figures I watched this feat with due reverence. But that he could teach was shown by the fact that by the time I was thirteen I had turned into algebra all the forty odd problems of Euclid's first book, and proved the geometry by the algebra. Yet as I reflect I see that, though I had learned how to do it, I did not really understand what I was doing, with the inevitable consequence that, not having occasion later to use algebra, I shortly forgot completely how to do this. It is an example of our Lord's words on vastly more important subjects, that "When anyone heareth the word of the kingdom, and understandeth it not, then cometh the evil one, and snatcheth away that which hath been sown in his heart" (Matt. 13:19).

This early taught me a most important lesson as a preacher, even that the truth must be made thoroughly intelligible to the mind of the hearer. C. G. Finney has told us that he never put any pressure on the will of his hearers to obey the call of the gospel until he felt assured that they clearly understood the message, with the nature and results of the step of trusting the Saviour. He would go over and under, round and through his subjects, and repeat the process, until he felt sure they were fully informed as to what he proposed they should do. Only then did he seek to persuade to action and to bow the will to obey the command of God to believe on His Son. There would have been fewer weak converts and much less backsliding had this been the regular practice of evangelists. A lawyer, an infidel, was persuaded to hear Finney because of the latter being a lawyer. Asked what he thought of his preaching he gave the illuminating reply: "The man does not preach: he explains what other people preach."

I was now rather more than thirteen years of age. A second local builder saw the drawing of the schoolhouse and at once offered to take me into his office. It had not been intended that I should leave school so young, but the family was growing, my father consented, and God was over it.

The small boy (for I was still diminutive for my age) now sat at an office desk instead of a school desk. The former experience in my father's counting house prevented any feeling of strangeness. I now made tracing copies of plans for houses, kept the prime cost ledger, gained elementary knowledge of building construction, of materials, -wages, and of working men. All knowledge is useful to one who has the gumption to apply it.

In the summer work started at 6 a.m., in the winter at 7 a.m. Our regular early rising at home made these hours quite easy. The office was ten or twelve minutes away. I went home to breakfast and dinner. Work ceased at 5 p.m. Neither myself nor any one of whom I heard in those days was hurt by working nine hours a day. Life at that time furthered habits of diligence, routine, exactness, and punctuality.

The chief purpose of God in this two and a half years of my life is clear. My sole office companion was the clerk of the yard, a gentlemanly man named Hunt, of perhaps thirty years of age. He was ever kind and considerate to his youthful junior, and did all he could to help me gain proficiency. I remember him gratefully. But he was an atheist and, for those days, a pretty advanced Socialist. Almost daily we discussed religion. He was, I think, rather interested that a boy of fourteen could face up to his arguments. It declares the soundness of my conversion, the illumination of my mind by the Spirit of truth, and the profound value of children being early saturated with the words of the Bible, that my faith was not in the least weakened by those discussions, while my knowledge was greatly extended as to the arguments of infidels and the views of Socialists. This proved invaluable when a little later I was serving in the gospel in working-class districts, and had to encounter such at open-air meetings and personally.

From: George Henry Lang "An Ordered Life" (Paternoster Press 1959)