Then came the period of emotional and intellectual expansion, when the scientific and critical instincts began to germinate. These were completely spontaneous and not stimulated by any influences of the environment. To inquire, to question, to investigate the qualities of the things around us and to search out their causes, is as native an impulse as the religious impulse would be found to be if only we would refrain from exciting it artificially. In the first place, this scientific impulse was not greatly concerned with the traditional body of beliefs which were then inextricably entwined in my mind with the exercise of the religious instinct. In so far, indeed, as it touched them it took up their defence. Thus I read Renan’s “Life of Jesus,” and the facile sentiment of this book, the attitude of artistic reconstruction, aroused a criticism which led me to overlook any underlying sounder qualities. Yet all the time the inquiring and critical impulse was a slowly permeating and invading influence, and its application to religion was from time to time stimulated by books, although such application was in no slightest degree favoured by the social environment. When, too, at the age of fifteen, I came to read Swinburne’s “Songs before Sunrise,”—although the book made no very personal appeal to me,—I realised that it was possible to present in an attractively modern emotional light religious beliefs which were incompatible with Christianity, and even actively hostile to its creed. The process of disintegration took place in slow stages that were not perceived until the process was complete. Then at last I realised that I no longer possessed any religious faith. All the Christian dogmas I had been brought up to accept unquestioned had slipped away, and they had dragged with them what I had experienced of religion, for I could not then so far analyse all that is roughly lumped together as “religion” as to disentangle the essential from the accidental. Such analysis, to be effectively convincing, demanded personal experiences I was not possessed of.