This sketch of C— H— is written against my death. Ever since God took him down from his cross there has murmured in my conscience the phrase, ‘You must tell the world of him before you die.’ To leave his story untold would be to meet death with unpaid debts. To tell his story will be a royal preparation to go where he went even if in my cowardice, I cannot follow his hero way of going.

His father, who held high office in his native town of M------, thought to prepare him for citizenship of England by sending him to Oxford. I am not sure he ever won, or even sought to win, academic honours. It was Oxford of the playing fields and playing honours that made him captive. Perhaps with fine medieval chivalry he could not brook the sacrilege of a liberal education used as a mere preparation for a business career. An instinct, the very soul of scholarship, forbade him to make the higher serve the lower even at the risk of losing kindred or friends.

It was in the playing fields, where honour, and not gain, is youth’s only prize that C— H— learned to follow his leader, Jesus Christ. Perhaps it befell him as it befell the youth Edmund—who in these same playing fields of Oxford saw Jesus of Nazareth as a fair, smiling boy! Be that as it may, when C— H— heard the call of Christ beckoning him out of the playing fields of Oxford and of life into the Church and into the cloister he did not lag in following his leader.