n God.

How had I arrived at such a conviction? How had I come, from praying
and fasting and Psalm-singing, to extreme impiety? Alas! my
backsliding had cost me no travail of spirit. Always weak in my faith,
playing at sanctity as I played at soldiers, just as I was in the mood
or not, I had neglected my books of devotion and given myself up to
profane literature at the first opportunity, in Vitebsk; and I never
took up my prayer book again. On my return to Polotzk, America loomed
so near that my imagination was fully occupied, and I did not revive
the secret experiments with which I used to test the nature and
intention of Deity. It was more to me that I was going to America than
that I might not be going to Heaven. And when we joined my father, and
I saw that he did not wear the sacred fringes, and did not put on the
phylacteries and pray, I was neither surprised nor shocked,
remembering the Sabbath night when he had with his own hand turned out
the lamp. When I saw him go out to work on Sabbath exactly as on a
week day, I understood why God had not annihilated me with his
lightnings that time when I purposely carried something in my pocket
on Sabbath: there was no God, and there was no sin. And I ran out to
play, pleased to find that I was free, like other little girls in the
street, instead of being hemmed about with prohibitions and
obligations at every step. And yet if the golden truth of Judaism had
not been handed me in the motley rags of formalism, I might not have
been so ready to put away my religion.

It was Rachel Goldstein who provoked my avowal of atheism. She asked
if I wasn't going to stay out of school during Passover, and I said
no. Wasn't I a Jew? she wanted to know. No, I wasn't; I was a
Freethinker. What was that? I didn't believe in God. Rachel was
horrified. Why, Kitty Maloney believed in God, and Kitty was only a
Catholic! She appealed to Kitty.

"Kitty Maloney! Come over here. Don't you believe in God?--There, now,
Mary Antin!--Mary Antin says she doesn't believe in God!"

Rachel Goldstein's horror is duplicated. Kitty Maloney, who used to
mock Rachel's Jewish accent, instantly becomes her voluble ally, and
proceeds to annihilate me by plying me with crucial questions.

"You don't believe in God? Then who made you, Mary Antin?"

"Nature made me."

"_Nature_ made you! What's that?"

"It's--everything. It's the trees--no, it's what makes the trees grow.
_That's_ what it is."

"But _Go