Tolstoi's conversion was due to the wild days he spent as a young man. He was a proud aristocrat, and gave play to all his instincts; he was an atheist and pessimist, he was a gambler and a rake. He shows us his evolution in his various novels and autobiographical works. He finally came to deify ignorant peasants and advocated extreme non-resistance. He worshipped poverty, practised self-abnegation, and derogated sex. But, after all, his latter views are but the reactions to the life he led in youth, and a regression with some changes to views he was taught in childhood. The same is true of Strindberg, who as a young man was an atheist, and a believer in free love; through the sufferings brought about by his three marriages and his attacks of insanity, he "turned." He looked with disapproval upon his early ideas, attributed much of his misery to his entertaining them; hence he discarded them, and returned to the religious views he held as a child. But his greatest work belonged to the period when he held liberal ideas. Dostoievsky was really always a devout orthodox Christian, even in his early revolutionary days. His great suffering in Siberia chastened him, and made him find a welcome religion in the religion of suffering, a guide in Christ who suffered. He is always at pains in his later novels to prove the existence of a personal God--a fact which makes one suspect that he had his own doubts, and that he tried to rid himself of them by his writing. Being also an epileptic, he would, particularly in these attacks, digress to infantile fixations and they would lead him to worship his sublimated "Father in Heaven." There are many who naïvely insist that these men, when they went back to the belief of childhood days, had at last come to see the truth. The point of view taken is dependent on whether a man considers belief in the dogma of a religion a fetter or an asset. In English literature we have as examples of reactions, both in religion and politics, the Lake School poets, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey. All of them later turned away from the republican and pantheistic ideas of their youth. The reason Southey fought so bitterly against free thinkers like Byron and Shelley, is that in youth he, like them, also was attached to the ideas of the French Revolution. He became a Tory of Tories, showed disapproval of all the leading thinkers of the time, of men like Hazlitt, Lamb and Hunt. Liberal ideas, it is well known, have no greater enemy than a renegade liberal. Southey was sufficiently pilloried by Byron in the _Vision of Last Judgment_, and the psychology of his reaction has been drawn in the portrait of him by Hazlitt in _The Spirit of the Age_, while the gentle Lamb has administered to him a rebuke in the immortal _Letter of Elia to Robert Southey_.