faculties free. He didn't want to be like the young men who said
in prayer-meeting that they leaned on their Saviour. He hated
their way of meekly accepting permitted pleasures.

In those days Claude had a sharp physical fear of death. A
funeral, the sight of a neighbour lying rigid in his black
coffin, overwhelmed him with terror. He used to lie awake in the
dark, plotting against death, trying to devise some plan of
escaping it, angrily wishing he had never been born. Was there no
way out of the world but this? When he thought of the millions of
lonely creatures rotting away under ground, life seemed nothing
but a trap that caught people for one horrible end. There had
never been a man so strong or so good that he had escaped. And
yet he sometimes felt sure that he, Claude Wheeler, would escape;
that he would actually invent some clever shift to save himself
from dissolution. When he found it, he would tell nobody; he
would be crafty and secret. Putrefaction, decay.... He could
not give his pleasant, warm body over to that filthiness! What
did it mean, that verse in the Bible, "He shall not suffer His
holy one to see corruption"?

If anything could cure an intelligent boy of morbid religious
fears, it was a denominational school like that to which Claude
had been sent. Now he dismissed all Christian theology as
something too full of evasions and sophistries to be reasoned
about. The men who made it, he felt sure, were like the men who
taught it. The noblest could be damned, according to their
theory, while almost any mean-spirited parasite could be saved by
faith. "Faith," as he saw it exemplified in the faculty of the
Temple school, was a substitute for most of the manly qualities