AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
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Anticipating yet another few years, to a period immediately following my conversion, I was invited to share with
another young man in the work of visiting local Sunday Schools in the interest of The `Regions Beyond' Missionary
movement. Upon objecting `I could never speak at a meeting' the rejoinder was `You come. If the Lord has work
for you to do, you will find it waiting for you'. Sure enough, an agitated superintendent button-holed me on the
doorstep with the question, `Can you play the organ?' I did not know. I could play the piano - but feeling here was
the `work waiting' I pulled out several stops at random, hoped for the best, and found this time that the musical
association was combined most definitely with the Gospel. Although it is evident that a love of music was
ingrained, music has never been permitted to have much place in my ministry. It can often be a snare.
We must now turn back, as this digression has taken us forward some twenty years. At one end of Drummond
Road, where it joins Jamaica Road, were the Herold Schools, which at the time occupied a site on either side of the
road. The infants' department was flattened in a raid, but the upper school is still represented by the Herold's
Institute.
Between 1884 and 1885, that is between the age of four and five years, I attended a private school, but learned
practically nothing, and I believe that my comment was
that it was `soppy'! I was then sent to Herold's Infant School where I remained for about a year. Owing to the
many scrapes I got into even at that early age, my father provided me with a small diary in which the teacher was
asked to write in the morning either the word `good' or `bad'. The first day went off well, but alas the second
afternoon was disfigured by the word `bad'! I remember at the age of five standing outside the house trying to alter
the word `bad' to `good' an experiment in accommodating theology and textual criticism which I discovered did not