I had a religious bringing-up. I was made familiar with the Bible and the offices of religion; only the natural piety was wanting. I am quite certain I had no sense of religion as a child—I do not think I had any morality. Like many children, I was ruled by associations rather than by principles. I was sensitive to disapproval; and being timid by nature, I was averse to being found out; being moreover lacking in vitality, I seldom experienced the sensation of being brought face to face with temptation—rebellion, anger, and sensual impulse were unknown to me; but while I was innocent, I was unconscientious and deceitful, not so much deliberately as instinctively. The sense of religion I take to be, in its simplest definition, the consciousness of the presence of the Divine Being, and the practice of religion to be the maintenance of conscious union or communion with the Divine. These were entirely lacking to me. I accepted the[48] fact of God’s existence as I accepted the facts of history and geography. But my conception of God, if I may speak plainly and without profanity, was derived from the Old Testament, and was destitute of attractiveness. I conceived of Him as old, vindictive, unmerciful, occupied in tedious matters, hostile to all gaiety and juvenility; totally uninterested in the human race, except in so far that He regarded their transgressions with morbid asperity and a kind of gloomy satisfaction, as giving Him an opportunity of exercising coercive discipline. He was never represented to me as the Giver of the simple joys of life—of light and warmth, of food and sleep, as the Creator of curious and sweet-smelling flowers, of aromatic shrubs, of waving trees, of horned animals and extravagant insects. Considering how entirely creatures of sense children are, it has seemed to me since that it would be well if their simplest pleasures, the material surroundings of their lives, were connected with the idea of God—if they felt that what they enjoyed was sent by Him; if it were said of a toy that “God sends you this;” or of some domestic festivity that “God hopes that you will be happy[49] to-day,”—it appears to me that we should have less of that dreary philosophy which connects “God’s will” only with moments of bereavement and suffering. If we could only feel with Job, that God, who sends us so much that is sweet and wholesome, has equally the right to send us what is evil, we could early grow to recognise that, when the greater part of our lives is made up of what is desirable or interesting, and when we cling to life and the hope of happiness with so unerring an instinct, it is probable, nay, certain, that our afflictions must be ultimately intended to minister to the fulness of joy.
Religion
Certainly religious practices, though I enjoyed them in many ways, had no effect on conduct; indeed, I never thought of them as having any concern with conduct. Religious services never seemed to me in childhood to be solemnities designed for the hallowing of life, or indeed as having any power to do so, but merely as part of the framework of duty, as ceremonies out of which it was possible to derive a certain amount of interest and satisfaction.
Church was always a pleasure to me; I liked the mise-en-scène, the timbered roof, the[50] fallen day, the stained glass, the stone pillars, the comfortable pew, the rubricated prayer-book, the music, the movements of the minister—these all had a definite ?sthetic effect upon me; moreover, it was a pleasure to note, with the unshrinking gaze of childhood, the various delightful peculiarities of members of the congregation: the old man with apple-red cheeks, in his smock-frock, who came with rigid, creaking boots to his place; the sexton, with his goat-like beard; the solicitor, who emitted sounds in the hymns like the lowing of a cow; the throaty tenor, who had but one vowel for all; the dowager in purple silk, who sat through the Psalms and inspected her prayer-book through a gold eye-glass as though she were examining some natural curiosity. All these were, in childish parlance, “so funny.” And Church was thus a place to which I went willingly and joyfully; the activity of my observation saved me from the tedium with which so many children regard it.
Religious Sentiment
This vacuous ?stheticism in the region of religion continued with me through my school days. Of purpose and principle there was no trace. I do indeed remember one matter in[51] which I had recourse to prayer. At my private school, a big suburban establishment, I was thrust into a large dormitory, a shrinking and bewildered atom, fresh from the privacies and loving attentions of the nursery, and required to undress and go to bed before the eyes of fifty boys. It was a rude introduction to the world, and it is strange to reflect upon the helpless despair with which a little soul can be filled under circumstances which to maturer thoughts appear almost idyllic. But while I crouched miserably upon my bed, as I prepared to slip between the sheets—of which the hard texture alone dismayed me—I was struck by a shoe, mischievously, but not brutally thrown by a bigger boy some yards away. Is it amusing or pathetic to reflect that night after night I prayed that this might not be repeated, using a suffrage of the Litany about our persecutors and slanderers, which seemed to me dismally appropriate?
At the public school to which I was shortly transferred, where I enjoyed a tranquil and uneventfu............