‘The honour of parents hangs upon the belief in God. The duty of parents to the children whom they have begotten, perhaps to those children’s bitter pain, is a law of Nature. But the duty that children owe to parents needs a revelation of the Divine Will. And what if the revelation fails?’ Thus Gerald for the first time in life began to look with angry eyes upon the father who had once been his ideal of human goodness. Mr. Eversley held that children were ‘an heritage and gift that cometh of the Lord;’ he had been known to say that, where God sent the mouths, He would send the bread to feed them. The theory can hardly be said to be justified by experience. Gerald resented and condemned it. He argued that the parent was responsible for his children’s welfare here and hereafter. Unhappy, wretched he was in his view; it made his home (with its widening circle of open-mouthed little sisters) intolerable to him; his father ceased to be any more his friend, and became to him as a stranger, and for many months in the early days of his college life, Kestercham--the once loved village of his boyhood--saw him not. His vision being thus disturbed, his soul embittered, he turned a fierce scrutiny upon the evidences of Christ’s religion. He treated them fiercely, almost vindictively. He resolved to give them no quarter. He would be true to his conscience--logically true--be the cost what it might. He seemed to delight in tearing his old beliefs to shreds. Human nature is strangely capable of finding pleasure in self-inflicted pain. It is not the function of a religious creed to solve all difficulties. Difficulties, physical, intellectual, spiritual, are the stimulus of humanity. Do them away, and humanity becomes contented and enervated. Lessing said, not less forcibly than nobly, that the possession of truth belongs to God; it is the search for truth that is the dignity of man. In this light Pilate’s question gets a new meaning, What is truth? No evil could happen to human nature so great as the loss of its unsolved and as yet insoluble mysteries. Religion does not affect to solve religious difficulties. Difficulties are inherent in the relation of the divine to the human. God may be apprehended but not comprehended. Were it possible to comprehend Him, it would be impossible to worship Him. The blessing of religion is not in solving the mysteries of life or nature; it is in showing that there is a solution, and that God keeps it in His hands. But Gerald Eversley’s mind was already decided for negation (though he knew it not) when he applied himself to the study of Christianity. That it was so is clear from such words as these in one of his papers: