I had not been without religious training; on the contrary, more than
average pains had been bestowed upon my religious instruction from my
earliest childhood. My father, a good, plain, country clergyman, had
worked hard to make me as good as himself; and had succeeded, at least,
in training me in godly habits. He died, however, when I was but twelve
years of age; and fate had long before deprived me of the gentle care of
a mother. A boarding-school, followed by a college life, where nobody
having any very direct interest in realising in my behalf the ancient
blessing, that in fulness of time I should "die a good old man," I was
left very much to my own devices, which, in truth, were none of the best.

Among these were the study of Voltaire, Tom Paine, Hume, Shelley, and the
whole school of infidels, poetical as well as prose. This pursuit, and
the all but blasphemous vehemence with which I gave myself up to it, was,
perhaps, partly reactionary. A somewhat injudicious austerity and
precision had indissolubly associated in my childish days the ideas of
restraint and gloom with religion. I bore it a grudge; and so, when I
became thus early my own master, I set about paying off, after my own
fashion, the old score I owed it. I was besides, like every other young
infidel whom it has been my fate to meet, a conceited coxcomb. A
smattering of literature, without any real knowledge, and a great
assortment of all the cut-and-dry flippancies of the school I had
embraced, constituted my intellectual stock in trade. I was, like most of
my school of philosophy, very proud of being an unbeliever; and fancied
myself, in the complacency of my wretched ignorance, at an immeasurable
elevation above the church-going, Bible-reading herd, whom I treated with
a good-humoured superciliousness which I thought vastly indulgent.

My wife was an excellent little creature and truly pious. She had married
me in the full confidence that my levity was merely put on, and would at