This struck me as original, but I
had forgotten that it is the doctrine of the Epistle to the Romans.
It is almost incredible to me now, although I was hardly nineteen,
that I should have accepted without question such a terrible
invention, and the only approach to explanation I can give is that
all this belonged to a world totally disconnected from my own, and
that I never thought of making real to myself anything which this
supernatural world contained.
The most important changes in life are not those of one belief for
another, but of growth, in which nothing preceding is directly
contradicted, but something unexpected nevertheless makes its
appearance. On the bookshelf in our dining-room lay a volume of
Wordsworth. One day, when I was about eighteen, I took it out, and
fell upon the lines -
"Knowing that Nature never did betray
"The heart that loved her."
What they meant was not clear to me, but they were a signal of the
approach of something which turned out to be of the greatest
importance, and altered my history.
It was a new capacity. There woke in me an aptness for the love of
natural beauty, a possibility of being excited to enthusiasm by it,
and of deriving a secret joy from it sufficiently strong to make me
careless of the world and its pleasures.
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