Because my father was a Catholic and I was baptized in that faith, I was supposed to accept all the dogma, as well as the legends, of the Church as true. In the life about me I saw flourishing the Methodist, the Baptist, the United Brethren, the Christian, the Congregationalist, the what-not churches, each representing, according to its adherents, the exact historic and truthful development and interpretation of life or the world. As a fourteen-or fifteen-year-old boy I listened to sermons on hell, where it was, and what was the nature of its torments. As rewards for imaginary good behavior I have been given colored picture cards containing exact reproductions of heaven! Every newspaper that I have ever read, or still read, has had an exact code of morals by the light of which one may detect at once Mr. Bad Man and Mr. Good Man and so save oneself from the machinations of the former! The books which I was advised to read, and for the neglect of which I was frowned upon, were of that naïve character known as pure. One should read only good books--which meant of course books from which any reference to sex had been eliminated, and what followed as a natural consequence was that all intelligent interpretation of character and human nature was immediately discounted. A picture of a nude or partially nude woman was sinful; a statue equally so. The dance in our home and our town was taboo. The theater was an institution which led to crime, the saloon a center of low, even bestial vices. The existence of such a thing as an erring or fallen woman, let alone a house of prostitution, was a crime, scarcely a fact to be considered. There were forms and social appearances which we were taught to wear, quite as one wears a suit of clothes. One had to go to church on Sunday whether one wished to or not. It was considered good business, if you please, to be connected with some religious organization; and, by the same token, this commercialized religiosity was transmuted into glistening virtue. We were taught persistently to shun most human experiences as either dangerous or degrading or destructive. The less you knew about life the better; the more you knew about the fictional heaven and hell ditto. People walked about in a kind of sanctified maze or dream, hypnotized or self-hypnotized by an erratic and impossible theory of human conduct which had grown up heaven knows where or how, and had finally cast its amethystine spell over all America, if not over all the world.