The painful custom in the
Church of England of reading indistinctly and in an assumed voice
has alienated simple people in every parish; and the average
preaching is painful. In my country you can still hear a good
sermon. When staying with Lord Haldane's mother--the most
beautiful, humorous and saintly of old ladies--I heard an
excellent sermon at Auchterarder on this very subject, the
dullness of Sundays. The minister said that, however brightly the
sun shone on stained glass windows, no one could guess what they
were really like from the outside; it was from the inside only
that you should judge of them.
Another time I heard a man end his sermon by saying:
"And now, my friends, do your duty and don't look upon the world
with eyes jaundiced by religion."
My mother hardly ever mentioned religion to us and, when the
subject was brought up by other people, she confined her remarks
to saying in a weary voice and with a resigned sigh that God's
ways were mysterious. She had suffered many sorrows and, in
estimating her lack of temperament, I do not think I made enough
allowance for them. No true woman ever gets over the loss of a
child; and her three eldest had died before I was born.
I was the most vital of the family and what the nurses described
as a "venturesome child." Our coachman's wife called me "a little
Turk." Self-willed, excessively passionate, painfully truthful,
bold as well as fearless and always against convention, I was, no
doubt, extremely difficult to bring up.
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