Very quickly I became more emancipated as I began to think things out for myself, and a year later I could laugh at these early fears. My father told me a crude anecdote which he had read, I think, in Mark Pattison’s “Memoirs.” A man in a public-house in Leicestershire had used the oath, “God strike me blind,” and instantly he had been struck blind by a flash of lightning. On becoming converted he had recovered his sight while taking the Sacrament. This edifying tale was, I believe, vouched for by a friend and disciple of Cardinal Newman’s, but to me, I confess, it seemed as stupid and revolting as anything I had ever heard. My father declared it to be true, yet I secretly doubted it, and that afternoon, in my own room, standing by the window, I said aloud, and very deliberately, “God strike me blind! God strike me blind!” I waited with a mingled trepidation and incredulity, as if I had thrown some mysterious bomb into the unknown. A sea-gull flew past the window, white against the dark autumn sky: the leaves of the Virginian creeper trembled and grew still. I said again and in a louder voice, “God strike me blind!” But no flash of lightning followed. Down below, on the beach, the gray waves curled over with a slow musical splash. I looked into the sky, but it was calm and untroubled, and I decided that the story was a myth. Most of my religious difficulties were, however, metaphysical. The conception of eternity was one I could not grasp. I could, in a vague way, figure myself as living on for ever, but I could not with the same facility move my mind backward. I seemed able to imagine that there might be no end, but I could not imagine that there had been no beginning. “If there had been no beginning, how could we ever have got as far as this?” I asked myself. “Where I am now――this particular moment――must be at a certain distance from something, or it cannot be anywhere. But if there is no beginning, then this moment cannot be any further on than yesterday was!” My brain grew dizzy with vain efforts to think impossible thoughts. I would break a stick and say, “God can make it that I haven’t broken it. But if I shut my eyes, and when I open them the stick is whole, that will only show He has mended it. Yet He is all-powerful!” And so on, and so on; for whatever point I took up, sooner or later I was met by an insoluble problem. These problems were, nevertheless, just what fascinated me. The practical ethics of religion, that I should simply be good and encourage in myself a variety of Christian virtues――that kind of thing did not interest me in the least. As a matter of fact, I possessed singularly few of these virtues. It is true that I detested any kind of meanness or cruelty, that I was truthful, straightforward, and, in certain directions, loving and gentle enough; but I was egotistical, proud, and ludicrously self-conscious, quick tempered, flying into violent passions for very