As a private personage Byron was, undoubtedly, as much of the dilettante in his free-thought as in his politics. His admirable reasoning power revolted against belief in what was contrary to reason; but, like most of the great men at the beginning of the century--that is to say, before the remarkable development of religion and science which has taken place during its progress--he was sceptical and superstitious at one and the same time. As a child, religion had been made a weariness to him; his mother dragged him regularly to church, and he revenged himself when he was bored beyond all measure by pricking her with a pin. As a youth, he was roused to revolt by the rigid literal beliefs of the Church of England, as contained in its thirty-nine Articles; he wrote in his memorandum-book: "It is useless to tell me _not_ to _reason_, but to _believe_. You might as well tell a man not to wake, but _sleep_." The belief in eternal hell-fire was a subject of eternal merriment with him. He writes to Moore in 1822: "Do you remember Frederick the Great's answer to the remonstrance of the villagers whose curate preached against the eternity of hell's torments? It was thus:--'If my faithful subjects of Schrausenhaussen prefer being eternally damned, let them.'" And he horrified his fellow-countrymen by writing in _Don Juan_: "There's nought, no doubt, so much the spirit calms As rum and true religion."[2] He disliked the clergy. Trelawny reports him to have said: "When did parsons patronise genius? If one of their black band dares to think for himself, he is drummed out or cast aside, like Sterne and Swift"; and Moore gives as one of his ejaculations: "These rascals of priests have done more harm to religion than all the unbelievers." But, in spite of all his jests and jeers, his feeling was one of uncertainty. He dared not endorse the conclusions to which Shelley was led by his reflections; and he sent his little daughter to be educated in a convent, to withdraw her from the influence of the sceptical talk of Shelley and his wife. A beautiful and very characteristic letter from Shelley gives decisive evidence on the subject of Byron's uncertainty. "Lord Byron," he writes, "has read me one or two letters of Moore to him, in which Moore speaks with great kindness of me; and of course I cannot but feel flattered by the approbation of a man, my inferiority to whom I am proud to acknowledge(!) Amongst other things, however, Moore seems to deprecate my influence on Lord Byron's mind on the subject of religion, and to attribute the tone assumed in _Cain_ to my suggestion.... I think you know Moore. Pray assure him that I have not the smallest influence over Lord Byron in this particular; if I had, I certainly should employ it to eradicate from his great mind the delusions of Christianity, which, in spite of his reason, seem perpetually to recur, and to lie in ambush for the hours of sickness and distress.