“Do you believe all the fairy stories in the Bible!” my companion asked.
“Of course I do”, I replied, “It’s the Word of God, isn’t it?” “Who is God?” asked the West Indian.
“He made the world”, I added, “all this wonder”—and with a gesture I included earth and sky.
“Who made God!” asked my companion.
I turned away stricken: in a flash I saw I had been building on a word taught to me: “who made God?” I walked away alone, up the long meadow by the little brook, my thoughts in a whirl: story after story that I had accepted were now to me “fairy stories.” Jonah hadn’t lived three days in a whale’s belly. A man couldn’t get down a whale’s throat. The Gospel of Matthew began with Jesus’ pedigree, showing that he had been born of the seed of David through Joseph, his father, and in the very next chapter you are told that Joseph wasn’t his father; but the Holy Ghost. In an hour the whole fabric of my spiritual beliefs lay in ruins about me: I believed none of it, not a jot, nor a tittle: I felt as though I had been stripped naked to the cold.
Suddenly a joy came to me: if Christianity was all lies and fairy-tales like Mahometanism, then the prohibitions of it were ridiculous and I could kiss and have any girl who would yield to me. At once I was partially reconciled to my spiritual nakedness: there was compensation.
The loss of my beliefs was for a long time very painful to me. One day I told Stackpole of my infidelity and he recommended me to read “Butler’s Analogy” and keep an open mind. Butler finished what the West Indian had begun and in my thirst for some certainty I took up a course of deeper reading. In Stackpole’s rooms one day I came across a book of Huxley’s Essays; in an hour I had swallowed them and proclaimed myself an “agnostic”; that’s what I was; I knew nothing surely, but was willing to learn.
I aged ten years mentally in the next six months: I was always foraging for books to convince me and at length got hold of Hume’s argument against miracles. That put an end to all my doubts, satisfied me finally. Twelve years later, when studying philosophy in Goettingen, I saw that Hume’s reasoning was not conclusive but for the time I was cured. At midsummer I refused to be confirmed. For weeks before, I had been reading the Bible for the most incredible stories in it and the smut, which I retailed at night to the delight of the boys in the big bedroom.
This year as usual I spent the midsummer holidays in Ireland. My father had made his house with my sister Nita wherever Vernon happened to be sent by his Bank. This summer was passed in Ballybay in County Monaghan, I think. I remember little or nothing about the village save that there was a noble series of reed-fringed lakes near the place which gave good duck and snipe shooting to Vernon in the autumn.
These holidays were memorable to me for several incidents. A conversation began one day at dinner between my sister and my eldest brother about making up to girls and winning them. I noticed with astonishment that my brother Vernon was very deferential to my sister’s opinion on the matter, so I immediately got hold of Nita after the lunch and asked her to explain to me what she meant by “flattery.” “You said all girls like flattery. What did you mean?”