The experiences which make epochs in men’s lives are indeed strangely various and unexpected. Three events stand out as the destroyers of his Protestantism and of much of his outward edifice of faith. Their year was 1858. One was the discovery that the Puritan Sabbath of his youth had no Scriptural authority, but based itself, without confessing it, on the Jewish Sabbath Day, by erroneous interpretation. “If they have deceived me in this, they have deceived me in everything,” he said. His faith in his mother’s religious guides was gone.[8] In 1858 for the first time he broke the Sabbath by drawing some flowers on Sunday. That act, in him, stood for emancipation.[9] He had been finding that Catholic Psalters were lovely things, that Catholic peasants in Tuscany led sweet and patient lives, and that “Presbyterian prayers against time by people who never expected to be any the better for them, were unlovely and wrong.”[10] The same year he turned in at Turin to hear a Waldensian pastor. This was the second event. “To an audience of about seventeen gray-haired women and a few men, the preacher, a somewhat stunted figure with a cracked voice, put his utmost zeal into a consolatory discourse on the wickedness of the wide world, more especially of the plain of Piedmont and the city of Turin, and on the exclusive favour with God enjoyed by the between nineteen and twenty-four elect members of his congregation, in the streets of Admah and Zeboim.” “Myself neither cheered nor greatly alarmed by this doctrine, I walked back into the condemned city, and up into the gallery where Paul Veronese’s ‘Solomon and the Queen of Sheba’ glowed in full afternoon light.” And in that hour’s meditation his “evangelical beliefs were put away, to be debated of no more.”[11]