Page:Early Reminiscences.djvu/144

106 With regard to definite religion, my father had none, having been never taught any. He had learned none at Addiscombe, where was his schooling, none in India, and very little, if any, when he came home. But he had deep in his heart that natural religion which will hold many a man true, honourable and just. He was distinctly a religious man, without knowing why he was religious. He disliked definite theological statements, and when about to read a sermon to the family and domestics on Sunday evening he went over it first, and with a pencil scored out every passage that related in any way to dogma.

These sermons, as may well be imagined, were dull. I can recall a certain evening when my father was reading one of these moral discourses, that it was brought to an abrupt conclusion, before the reader had reached the "third, and lastly," by the footman's head declining in sleep upon the ample bosom of the housemaid.

The character of the sermons of that period was solely the inculcation of morality. My dear mother often asked the pageboy what the sermon he had heard was about, and the invariable answer was, " Please, mum, it was about being good."

My father's favourite reading was the Westminster Review, to my mind the ablest of the quarterlies, and I read it diligently. It broadened my mind.

When I was with my tutor in 1850 at Bayonne, I worked at Euclid, and I saw clearly that what were leading truths in the Elements of Geometry were dogmas upon which all progressive mathematical knowledge reposed. The three angles of every rectilinear triangle are altogether equal to two right angles. In right-angled triangles the square of the hypothenuse is equal to the squares of the remaining sides. On these truths vast sciences have been reared. What the first principles of Euclid have been to geometry, astronomy, etc., that the dogmatic statements in the Nicene Creed have been to Christian theology. We cannot build up a religion save on certain affirmations as bases. The Mohammedans have their Koran; the Jews the Torah; the Latter-day Saints their Book of Mormon. We can rear no religion on a fog-bank or on shifting sands. That seemed clear to me, not at once, but arrived at gradually.

My father had a strong belief in the efficacy of corporal