I had not been without religious training; on the contrary, more than average pains had been bestowed upon my religious instruction from my earliest childhood.  My father, a good, plain, country clergyman, had worked hard to make me as good as himself; and had succeeded, at least, in training me in godly habits.  He died, however, when I was but twelve years of age; and fate had long before deprived me of the gentle care of a mother.  A boarding-school, followed by a college life, where nobody having any very direct interest in realising in my behalf the ancient blessing, that in fulness of time I should “die a good old man,” I was left very much to my own devices, which, in truth, were none of the best.

Among these were the study of Voltaire, Tom Paine, Hume, Shelley, and the whole school of infidels, poetical as well as prose.  This pursuit, and the all but blasphemous vehemence with which I gave myself up to it, was, perhaps, partly reactionary.  A somewhat injudicious austerity and precision had indissolubly associated in my childish days the ideas of restraint and gloom with religion.  I bore it a grudge; and so, when I became thus early my own master, I set about paying off, after my own fashion, the old score I owed it.  I was besides, like every other young infidel whom it has been my fate to meet, a conceited coxcomb.  A smattering of literature, without any real knowledge, and a great assortment of all the cut-and-dry flippancies of the school I had embraced, constituted my intellectual stock in trade.  I was, like most of my school of philosophy, very proud of being an unbeliever; and fancied myself, in the complacency of my wretched ignorance, at an immeasurable elevation above the church-going, Bible-reading herd, whom I treated with a good-humoured superciliousness which I thought vastly indulgent.

My wife was an excellent little creature and truly pious.  She had married me in the full confidence that my levity was merely put on, and would at once give way before the influence she hoped to exert upon my mind.  Poor little thing! she deceived herself.  I allowed her, indeed, to do entirely as she pleased; but for myself, I carried my infidelity to the length of an absolute superstition.  I made an ostentation of it.  I would rather have been in a “hell” than in a church on Sunday; and though I did not prevent my wife’s instilling her own principles into the minds of our children, I, in turn, took especial care to deliver mine upon all occasions in their hearing, by which means I trusted to sow the seeds of that unprejudiced scepticism in which I prided myself, at least as early as my good little partner dropped those of her own gentle “superstition” into their infant minds.  Had I had my own absurd and impious will in this matter, my children should have had absolutely no religious education whatsoever, and been left wholly unshackled to choose for themselves among all existing systems, infidelity included, precisely as chance, fancy, or interest might hereafter determine.