As his knowledge increased, and the powers of his intellect strengthened, he began to exercise his reason upon the many problems of doctrine and religious belief which could not fail to be uppermost in his mind when his upbringing and the environment in which circumstances had placed him are considered. His aunt, although a strict Calvinist, was a large-minded woman, and, as her nephew says, “far from confining salvation to those who thought as she did on religious subjects.” “Her home,” he says, “was the resort of all the dissenting ministers in the neighbourhood, without distinction, and those who were the most obnoxious, on account of their heresy, were almost as welcome to her, if she thought them honest and good men (which she was not unwilling to do), as any others.” Although all the religious books that came in his way tended to confirm him in the principles of Calvinism, he was led by the natural vigour of his mind, and by an innate spirit of philosophical optimism, which strengthened with advancing years, to feel a repugnance to its gloomy tenets, and to question the sufficiency and reasonableness of much of its doctrine. The conversation of the heretical divines in whose company he was thrown served, moreover, to awaken inquiry and to increase his doubts. These divines were for the most part men who, in liberality of thought, were far in advance of the congregations they served, and this was especially the case of those for whose attainments and character the discerning boy had most respect. The youth, who as a child had lisped at his mother’s knee, “without missing a word,” the formularies of the Assembly’s Catechism, was now tortured with doubt and misgiving as he strove to penetrate into and to realise the meaning of the phrases his memory so tenaciously retained. And the more he read and the more he pondered the more disquieted he became. “Having,” he says, “read many books of _experiences_, and, in consequence, believing that a _new birth_, produced by the immediate agency of the Spirit of God, was necessary to salvation, and not being able to satisfy myself that I _had_ experienced anything of the kind, I felt occasionally such distress of mind as it is not in my power to describe, and which I still look back upon with horror. Notwithstanding I had nothing very material to reproach myself with, I often concluded that God had forsaken me, and that mine was like the case of Francis Spira, to whom, as he imagined, repentance and salvation were denied. In that state of mind I remember reading the account of the man in the iron cage in the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ with the greatest perturbation.”