to receive its most
damaging blows; it was there that religion seemed a cold and meaningless
term to me. Usually the commentaries, the narrow human reasoning and
dissection took away from the beauty of the Bible and the Gospels,
and deprived them of their grandly solemn and exquisite poetry. For a
peculiar nature like mine it was very difficult to have any one touch
upon holy subjects (in such a way as did the minister) without in some
measure, in my opinion, desecrating them. The family worship, held every
evening, awakened in me the only religious meditation that I now knew,
for the voice that read or prayed was exceedingly dear to me, and that
changed everything.

My untiring contemplation of nature, and the reflections that I indulged
in in the presence of the fossils I had brought from the mountains and
cliffs, and placed in my museum, indicated that there had been bred in
me a vague and unconscious pantheism.

In short my deeply rooted and still-living faith was covered over with
encumbering earth. At times it threw out a green shoot, but for the most
part it lay like an entirely dead thing in the cold ground. Moreover, I
was too much troubled to pray; my conscience, still restive and timid,
gave me no rest during the time that I was on my knees,--I always felt
remorse gnaw at me then because of the slovenly and half-done tasks, and
because of the feelings of hate I had for the "Big Ape" and the "Bull
of Apis," emotions that I was obliged to hide and disguise until I
shuddered at the falsehoods I spoke and acted. These things gave me
poignant remorse and excruciating moral distress, and to escape from
these emotions I indulged in noisy sports and foolish laughter; and
when my conscience troubled me most, and I dared not, therefore, appear
before my parents, I took refuge with the servants, played tennis,
jumped the rope, or make a great racket.

For two or three years I had not spoken of a religious vocation, for
I now understood that such a desire was a thing of the past, was
impossible; but I had not found anything to put in its place. When
strangers asked what career I was being prepared for, my parents, a
little anxious in regard to my future, did not know what to say; and I
knew still less what to reply.

However my brother, who was also much concerned over my enigmatical
future, in one of those letters that seemed always to come from an
enchanted land, suggested, because of a certain facility in mathema