engaging friend my
Father would have been, and would pre-eminently have been to me,
if it had not been for this stringent piety which ruined it all.

Let me speak plainly. After my long experience, after my patience
and forbearance, I have surely the right to protest against the
untruth (would that I could apply to it any other word!) that
evangelical religion, or any religion in a violent form, is a
wholesome or valuable or desirable adjunct to human life. It
divides heart from heart. It sets up a vain, chimerical ideal, in
the barren pursuit of which all the tender, indulgent affections,
all the genial play of life, all the exquisite pleasures and soft
resignations of the body, all that enlarges and calms the soul
are exchanged for what is harsh and void and negative. It
encourages a stern and ignorant spirit of condemnation; it throws
altogether out of gear the healthy movement of the conscience; it
invents virtues which are sterile and cruel; it invents sins
which are no sins at all, but which darken the heaven of innocent
joy with futile clouds of remorse. There is something horrible,
if we will bring ourselves to face it, in the fanaticism that can
do nothing with this pathetic and fugitive existence of ours but
treat it as if it were the uncomfortable ante-chamber to a palace
which no one has explored and of the plan of which we know
absolutely nothing. My Father, it is true, believed that he was
intimately acquainted with the form and furniture of this
habitation, and he wished me to think of nothing else but of the
advantages of an eternal residence in it.

Then came a moment when my self-sufficiency revolted against the
police-inspection to which my 'views' were incessantly subjected.
There was a morning, in the hot-house at home, among the gorgeous
waxen orchids which reminded my Father of the tropics in his
youth, when my forbearance or my timidity gave way. The enervated
air, soaked with the intoxicating perfumes of all those
voluptuous flowers, may have been partly responsible for my
outburst. My Father had once more put to me the customary
interrogatory. Was I 'walking closely with God'? Was my sense of
the efficacy of the Atonement clear and sound? Had the Holy
Scriptures still their full authority with me? My replies on this
occasion were violent and hysterical. I have no clear
recollection what it was that I said,--I desire not to recall the
whimpering sentences in which I begged to be let alone,