This reconstruction, nevertheless, was being attempted twenty years ago, in the aftermath of the higher criticism, by all boys with a speculative bent of mind; they were distinguished from their predecessors by inherited scepticism; and their natural history, to venture once more on a generalization from admittedly incomplete data, was roughly the same everywhere in England. Were it reasonable to fancy for a moment that modern boys were distressed when their faith left them, severe blame would attach to the timorous, indolent or dishonest parents who shirk the burden of explaining and who teach as truth what they themselves believe to be untrue, hoping that, when their children are older, they will somehow have learned better at the hands of masters, who are debarred from religious controversy, or of boys, who can only contribute an equal ignorance. In fact, the boy who lost his faith in revealed religion lost it more slowly, but no whit more painfully than his belief in fairies; he no longer wrote to his fellows, as Gladstone and Manning would write, to discuss the state of his soul; he sought no spiritual director and asked no one to pray for him, though he may have wondered why his parents preserved a grotesque imposture for so long. In reading and in discussion he had absorbed ideas of biological evolution, of geological testimony and of religion studied comparatively; he applied to historical Christianity the tests which he had been taught to use on the history of Greece and Rome, accepting nothing that could not be proved by evidence and rejecting the pretensions of faith as he rejected the statements of a secular historian that his history was literally inspired. Already he had heard that the Old Testament was no longer accepted as heretofore; he may even have learned that, for thousands of years before Christ, countless gods were sacrificed annually by crucifixion or other means and that a Barabbas was annually released to the people; the distillation continued until he was left with the residuum that a man named Jesus Christ, claiming or having claimed for him a divine fatherhood, was crucified after a short life of healing and teaching; there were, he found, no independent contemporary documents, and the fullest accounts, written many years after the events they described, were inspired by the devotion of his followers, whose critical judgement, however, was on a level of education to be expected in one harassed and turbulent corner of the Roman Empire.