But for the bias against the priest, I was left unbiassed at that tender and susceptible age. I had learned my catechism and read my Bible, and used to say the Lord's Prayer as I went to bed, and "God bless papa and mamma" and the rest, in the usual perfunctory manner. Never a word against religion was said in my hearing by those few on whom I had pinned my childish faith; on the other hand, no such importance was attached to it, apparently, as was attached to the virtues of truthfulness, courage, generosity, self-denial, politeness, and especially consideration for others, high or low, human and animal alike. I imagine that my parents must have compromised the matter between them, and settled that I should work out all the graver problems of existence for myself, when I came to a thinking age, out of my own conscience, and such knowledge of life as I should acquire, and such help as they would no doubt have given me, according to their lights, had they survived. I did so, and made myself a code of morals to live by, in which religion had but a small part. For me there was but one sin, and that was cruelty, because I hated it; though Nature, for inscrutable purposes of her own, almost teaches it as a virtue. All sins that did not include cruelty were merely sins against health, or taste, or common-sense, or public expediency. Free-will was impossible. We could only _seem_ to will freely, and that only within the limits of a small triangle, whose sides were heredity, education, and circumstance--a little geometrical arrangement of my own, of which I felt not a little proud, although it does not quite go on all-fours--perhaps because it is only a triangle. That is, we could will fast enough--_too_ fast; but could not will _how_ to will--fortunately, for we were not fit as yet, and for a long time to come, to be trusted, constituted as we are! Even the characters of a novel must act according to the nature, training, and motives their creator the novelist has supplied them with, or we put the novel down and read something else; for human nature must be consistent with itself in fiction as well as in fact. Even in its madness there must be a method, so how could the will be free? To pray for any personal boon or remission of evil--to bend the knee, or lift one's voice in praise or thanksgiving for any earthly good that had befallen one, either through inheritance, or chance, or one's own successful endeavor--was in my eyes simply futile; but, putting its futility aside, it was an act of servile presumption, of wheedling impertinence, not without suspicion of a lively sense of favors to come. It seemed to me as though the Jews--a superstitious and business-like people, who know what they want and do not care how they get it--must have taught us to pray like that.