That did not last long. He was soon brought up against his ignorance of the world outside and his entire lack of comparative standards, and, as young men will, he thought that at all costs he must escape--that is, move from the circumference of a dizzily spinning world to the centre of it. First of all he came to the conclusion that he had religious doubts and consulted his vicar, who bowled him over with professional arguments. Against them he could only set his vivid sensation on that strange night and his keen recollection of the tallow candle in the bottle and the moon shining through the window; and of these he dared not speak. He agreed perfectly that he had set his hand to the noblest service in the world and had no right to look back. But looking forward availed him nothing; the present was bewildering and the past had suddenly become empty. The bung had been removed from the tight barrel of his existence and all the good liquor had leaked away. However, he did his work neither better nor worse than he had done it before. He christened children and churched women and married couples and read solemn and beautiful words over the dead, and for the first time began to ponder the meaning of these ceremonies. The Church, he said, sanctified birth and death and what lay between them, and he tried to persuade himself that it raised them from brutality, spiritualised them, and made them holy; but then he could not help feeling that there was some discrepancy. The facts remained the same, therefore if they were sacred at all they must be sacred in themselves. All that could be done by mind and Holy Writ, the product of inspired minds, was nobly to interpret the facts, to see to it that men lived nobly--lived nobly and nobly died. He had seen several persons die, had given them the comfort of religion, and now, when he remembered, he was struck principally by the dignity with which death was accepted. It seemed to him that men had religion in themselves, that it was not, could not be grafted on them from without. "Life," he said to himself, "is a religious thing, or it is something less than life." He felt that he was moving from the circumference to the centre, and then he realised that he was reaching only the centre of his own thoughts, not the heart of the world. He had advanced in theory but in practice was just as far out of his bearings as ever. He had fed himself chiefly with the writings of ironists and he was hungry for belief--in the nobility of life and death and the unity of all things. The lives of birds he knew and the lives of beasts, but of the lives of men he knew nothing at all. Never had he been to a great city, but he conceived that there also the lives of men must be very much what they were in the somnolent little town on the Devon estuary--they were born, they suffered, and they died. That was all. Surely that was all.