His reason, too, following Darwin, told him that the earlier part of the Old Testament could not be correct. Man has risen, not fallen; he had his origin not six thousand years ago, but perhaps sixty thousand, perhaps much more. In many ways his reason fought with his religion, and it prevailed. Was no one ever reasoned out of a faith? Surely this boy was, surely many boys and men equally with him have so been deprived by reason of their faiths. Reason is the enemy of faith. Is not this so? When that boy was fighting his battle long ago I am sure he thought so. Certainly he said so to himself. Was he insincere or mistaken? Surely he should know best of what was going on in his mind. He tells how reason drove him from his faith. Was he not right? I think that he had not then learned to look at the roots of things. If there is one truth which grows upon us in life as we go on, as we watch men and what they say and do, as we watch ourselves and what we say or do, it is this, that men do not do things nor feel things because they think them, but the reverse. Men think things because they want to do them; their reason follows their instincts. No man seeks to disprove what he likes and feels to be good, no man seeks to prove what he instinctively dislikes and rejects. You cannot argue yourself into a liking or a distaste. If, then, you find a man seeking reasons to disprove his faith, it is because his faith irks him, because he would fain shake it off and be done with it. If he were happy in it and it suited him, reasons disproving any part of it would pass by him harmlessly. You cannot shake a man's conviction of what he _feels_ to be useful and beautiful. To the man, therefore, looking back it seems that all the boy's thoughts, his arguments, his reasoning, arise from this, that his religion did not suit. It galled him somewhere, perhaps in many places; it was a burden, and instead of being beautiful it was the reverse. So to rid himself of what he could not abide he sought refuge in his reason. And his reason going, as reason has always done, to the theories of faith instead of to the facts, he found that the creeds and beliefs had no foundation in fact, were but formulae thrown upon an ignorant world, and should be rejected. So he left them. But it was never his reason that made him do so; reason came in but as the judge, openly justifying what had happened silently and unnoticed in his heart. What was it, then, that drove the boy from his faith? What were his instincts that remained unfulfilled, roused against his religion till they drove him to find reasons for leaving it? What was it that galled him till he revolted? There were, I think, mainly two things--the rise of an intense revolt to the continual exercise of authority, and the greater effect of the code of Christ upon him.