“You were ripe indeed then,” said I sadly, “like hundreds more, for Professor Windrush’s teaching.”

“I will come to that presently.  But in the meantime-was it my fault?  I was never what you call a devout person.  My ’organ of veneration,’ as the phrenologists would say, was never very large.  I was a shrewd dashing boy, enjoying life to the finger-tips, and enjoying above all, I will say, pleasing my mother in every way, except in the understanding what she told me-and what I felt I could not understand.  But as I grew older, and watched her, and the men round her, I began to suspect that religion and effeminacy had a good deal to do with each other.  For the women, whatsoever their temperaments, or even their tastes might be, took to this to me incomprehensible religion naturally and instinctively; while the very few men who were in their clique were-I don’t deny some of them were good men enough-if they had been men at all:  if they had been well-read, or well-bred, or gallant, or clear-headed, or liberal-minded, or, in short, anything but the silky, smooth-tongued hunt-the-slippers nine out of ten of them were.  I recollect well asking my mother once, whether there would not be five times more women than men in heaven-and her answering me sadly and seriously, that she feared there would be.  And in the meantime she brought me up to pray and hope that I might some day be converted, and become a child of God-And one could not help wishing to enjoy oneself as much as possible before that event happened.”

“Before that event happened, my dear fellow?  Pardon me, but your tone is somewhat irreverent.”

“Very likely.  I had no reason put before me for regarding such a change as anything but an unpleasant doom, which would cut me off, or ought to do so, from field sports, from poetry, from art, from science, from politics-for Christians, I was told, had nothing to do with the politics of this world-from man and all man’s civilisation, in short; and leave to me, as the only two lawful indulgences, those of living in a good house, and begetting a family of children.”

“And did you throw off the old Creeds for the sake of the civilisation which you fancied that they forbid?”

“No.  I am a Churchman, you know; principally on political grounds, or from custom, or from-the devil knows what, perhaps-I do not.”

“Probably it is God, and not the devil, who knows why, Templeton.”

“Be it so-Frightful as it is to have to say it-I do not so much care-I suppose it is all right:  if it is not, it will all come right at last.  And in the meantime, I compromise, like the rest of the world; and hear Jane making the children every week-day pray that they may become God’s children, and then teaching them every Sunday evening the Catechism, which says that they are so already.  I don’t understand it-I suppose if it was important, one would understand it.  One knows right from wrong, you know, and other fundamentals.  If that were necessary, one would know that too.”