It is true that his idea of the spiritual was limited. Perhaps it would
be more accurate to say that it was unlimited, since he accepted without
doubt or question everything that was to be found within the four
corners of what he had been taught. As a boy he had been noted for his
prowess in swallowing the largest pills.

"Don't think," he would say to his weaker brothers and sisters,
especially one of the latter whose throat seemed to be so constituted
that she was obliged to cut up these boluses with a pair of scissors,
"Don't think, but gulp 'em down!"

So it was with everything else in life; Thomas did not think, he gulped
it down. Thus in these matters of faith, if other young folk ventured to
talk of "allegory" or even to cast unhallowed doubts upon such points
as those of the exact method of the appearance on this earth of their
Mother Eve, or whether the sun actually did stand still at the bidding
of Joshua, or the ark, filled with countless pairs of living creatures,
floated to the top of Ararat, or Jonah, defying digestive juices, in
fact abode three days in the interior of a whale, Thomas looked on them
with a pitying smile and remarked that what had been written by Moses
and other accepted prophets was enough for him.

Indeed a story was told of him when he was a boy at school which well
exemplified this attitude. By way of lightening their labours a very
noted geologist who had the art of interesting youthful audiences and
making the rocks of the earth tell their own secular story, was brought
to lecture to his House. This eminent man lectured extremely well. He
showed how beyond a doubt the globe we inhabit, one speck of matter,
floating in the sea of space, had existed for millions upon millions of
years, and how by the evolutionary changes of countless ages it had