Christianity, as
exemplified by the Roman Catholic church, has always stood aloof.

"I remember," he relates in one of his essays, "when a boy, lying on my
back in the grass, gazing into the summer blue above me, and wishing I
could melt into it, become a part of it. For these fancies I believe
that a religious tutor was innocently responsible; he had tried to
explain to me, because of certain dreamy questions, what he termed 'the
folly and the wickedness of Pantheism,' with the result that I
immediately became a Pantheist, at the tender age of fifteen. And my
imaginings presently led me not only to want the sky for a playground,
but also to become the sky!"

That there were faults and misunderstandings and mistaken ideas of
discipline on the part of his preceptors is perhaps possible. Those were
the days of "stripes innumerable," and what was a right-minded
ecclesiastic to do with a boy, but thrash him, when, in the very
stronghold of Catholicism, he declared himself a Pantheist?

If Monsignor Corbishly with his tactful and unprejudiced mind had been
at that time head of Ushaw, as he ultimately became, instead of a
contemporary of Hearn's, it is open to conjecture that the life of the
little genius might have taken an entirely different course. Like his
prototype, Flaubert, there was a _fond d'ecclesiastique_ in Hearn's
nature, as was proved by his later life. Had his earnestness, industry,
and ascetic self-denial been appealed to, with his warm heart and
pliable nature, might he not have been tamed and brought into line?

It is the old story where genius is concerned. Because an exceptional
youth happens to place himself in revolt against the system of a
university, the authorities cannot remake their laws to fit into his
eccentricity. Hearn, as he himself confesses, voluntarily handicapped
himself all his life, and lost the race, run with stronger,
better-conditioned competitors. But that he should have come away from
Ushaw College, as he declares, knowing as little as when he entered, is
plainly one of his customary exaggerations. The Reverend H. F. Berry,
French master during his residence there, was certainly not competent to
instil a finished French style into the future translator of "Sylvestre
Bonnard." But it is impossible that he could have left college entirely
ignorant of English literature of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries,
remaining, as he did, at the head of his class in English composition
for t