Page:Early Reminiscences.djvu/18

xii on, and tell my story my own way—or if I should seem now and then to trifle upon the road—or should sometimes put on a fool's cap with a bell to it, for a moment or two as we pass along—don't fly off; and as we jog on, either laugh with me or at me, or, in short, do anything—only keep your temper."

As a picture of a condition of social and religious life now completely passed away I modestly think that my Reminiscences may have a certain amount of interest, as also as one of the uprise of a new spirit in social and religious ideas.

I feel satisfied that with children, till they become adults, prejudice is stronger than positive conviction. They are disposed to accept what they see and hear and feel, that is pleasant, as matter of course, and they make no efforts to search out and satisfy themselves as to the causes producing these pleasurable results. They are content, for instance, with their physical health as a normal condition. They detect at once and resent pain and sickness, that is to say any disturbance of that normal condition, which had hitherto afforded them complete satisfaction.

In like manner with regard to religious matters. It is solely when religion is presented to a youth in a revolting form, jarring with his innate sense of reverence, beauty, sanctity, that he repugns against it. But it is only when he attains to the age of reason that he seeks out and finds positive reasons for the adoption of religious convictions, that satisfy his spiritual instinct and his instinctive conceptions as to the beautiful, the reverent, and the suitable, in matters sacred.

In the following pages constituting my early history during the first thirty years of my life, I am conscious that up to my seventeenth year I had no positive religious convictions whatsoever, but I entertained very strong antipathies. Only in the year 1851 did I begin to see my way to positive positions with regard to Christianity and the English Church. Hitherto I had acquiesced in the religion taught me by my parents, as a child acquiesces in the means of health it enjoys, bread and butter, exercise, etc., without inquiring what it is that constitutes its well-being; but from the year 1851 I passed into the acquisitive stage and rapidly formed positive convictions that overlay my negative prejudices. They did not extinguish these latter, but furnished me with reasons why I had so inveterately recoiled from certain forms of