It must not, of course, be imagined that he thus faced the problem and gave this answer. He no more faced the problem than any other boy does, than the great majority of men do. He simply grew up according to his surroundings, agreeing with them, accepting the rule he found accepted, developing as his environments made him. But although he did not mentally face and enumerate his difficulties, he was aware of them just the same. He was clearly conscious of a conflict between fact and theory, between teaching and example, between reality and dreams. He became year after year also more clearly aware of a repugnance rising within him to religion and to religious teaching. He shrank from it without realising why. He supposed it was just his natural sin. It was, of course, that he was proving its unreality as a guide to life. He began to shrink, too, from all religious topics, from religious services and religious books. They jarred on him. He found himself also losing his reverence for his religious teachers--for all his teachers, in fact--for they all professed religion. Their words had grated on him first, the difference between what they professed to believe and what he knew they did believe. Unaware of the reason till much later, almost unconsciously there grew up in him a contempt towards all his teachers and masters, a sense that they must be and were hypocrites and impostors. He found himself at eighteen far adrift from all guidance and counsel, shunning religion because he saw that the teachings of Christ were quite unadapted for the world he had to live in, scornful of and contemning his teachers for what seemed to him hypocrisy. It was not a satisfactory state for a boy, and the less so because it was still almost unconscious. He felt all that I have said, the avoidance, the dislike, but he had not yet faced it to himself and said, "Why does Christianity jar upon me and seem unreal, what are its difficulties?" Nor, "What is it that causes my dislike and contempt of my teachers? They are better men in all ways than I am. They are good men. I shall never be as good. I honour them in their lives. I admit that. What is the difficulty?" He was adrift without compass or pilot, and he did not know it. Yet he was already far from the safe harbour of trust and belief. The storms and darkness of the sea of life were before him, and there was no star by which he could steer. He made no effort, raised as yet no alarm, for he knew not that his anchor had dragged, that he had lost hold, perhaps never to regain it. CHAPTER IV. SCIENTIFIC THEOLOGY--I.