The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford | Page 9

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 was a mass of putrefying sores; but everybody thought the better
of him for his self-humiliation. One actual indiscretion, however,
brought home to him would have been visited by suspension or

expulsion.

CHAPTER II
--PREPARATION

It was necessary that an occupation should be found for me, and after
much deliberation it was settled that I should "go into the ministry." I
had joined the church, I had "engaged in prayer" publicly, and although
I had not set up for being extraordinarily pious, I was thought to be as
good as most of the young men who professed to have a mission to
regenerate mankind.
Accordingly, after some months of preparation, I was taken to a
Dissenting College not very far from where we lived. It was a large
old-fashioned house with a newer building annexed, and was
surrounded with a garden and with meadows. Each student had a
separate room, and all had their meals together in a common hall.
Altogether there were about forty of us. The establishment consisted of
a President, an elderly gentleman who had an American degree of
doctor of divinity, and who taught the various branches of theology. He
was assisted by three professors, who imparted to us as much Greek,
Latin, and mathematics as it was considered that we ought to know.
Behold me, then, beginning a course of training which was to prepare
me to meet the doubts of the nineteenth century; to be the guide of men;
to advise them in their perplexities; to suppress their tempestuous lusts;
to lift them above their petty cares, and to lead them heavenward!
About the Greek and Latin and the secular part of the college discipline
I will say nothing, except that it was generally inefficient. The
theological and Biblical teaching was a sham. We had come to the
college in the first place to learn the Bible. Our whole existence was in
future to be based upon that book; our lives were to be passed in
preaching it. I will venture to say that there was no book less
understood either by students or professors. The President had a course
of lectures, delivered year after year to successive generations of his
pupils, upon its authenticity and inspiration. They were altogether
remote from the subject; and afterwards, when I came to know what the
difficulties of belief really were, I found that these essays, which were

supposed to be a triumphant confutation of the sceptic, were a mere
sword of lath. They never touched the question, and if any doubts
suggested themselves to the audience, nobody dared to give them
tongue, lest the expression of them should beget a suspicion of heresy.
I remember also some lectures on the proof of the existence of God and
on the argument from design; all of which, when my mind was once
awakened, were as irrelevant as the chattering of sparrows. When I did
not even know who or what this God was, and could not bring my lips
to use the word with any mental honesty, of what service was the
"watch argument" to me? Very lightly did the President pass over all
these initial difficulties of his religion. I see him now, a gentleman with
lightish hair, with a most mellifluous voice and a most pastoral manner,
reading his prim little tracts to us directed against the "shallow infidel"
who seemed to deny conclusions so obvious that we were certain he
could not be sincere, and those of us who had never seen an infidel
might well be pardoned for supposing that he must always be wickedly
blind.
About a dozen of these tracts settled the infidel and the whole mass of
unbelief from the time of Celsus downwards. The President's task was
all the easier because he knew nothing of German literature; and,
indeed, the word "German" was a term of reproach signifying
something very awful, although nobody knew