"Who dared to put such a thought into your head?" She "would not give up her authorities, but she had too much reason to believe them." Again I demanded the name of my slanderer, and was refused it. And then. I burst out, for the first time in my life, into a real fit of rage with her. I cannot tell how I dared to say what I did, but I was weak, nervous, irritable--my brain excited beyond all natural tension. Above all, I felt that she was unjust to me; and my good conscience, as well as my pride, rebelled. "You have never trusted me," I cried, "you have watched me--" "Did you not deceive me once already?" "And if I did," I answered, more and more excited, "have I not slaved for you, stinted myself of clothes to pay your rent? Have I not run to and fro for you like a slave, while I knew all the time you did not respect me or trust me? If you had only treated me as a child and an idiot, I could have borne it. But you have been thinking of me all the while as an incarnate fiend--dead in trespasses and sins--a child of wrath and the devil. What right have you to be astonished if I should do my father's works?" "You may be ignorant of vital religion," she answered; "and you may insult me. But if you make a mock of God's Word, you leave my house. If you can laugh at religion, you can deceive me." The pent-up scepticism of years burst forth. "Mother," I said, "don't talk to me about religion, and election, and conversion, and all that--I don't believe one word of it. Nobody does, except good kind people--(like you, alas! I was going to say, but the devil stopped the words at my lips)--who must needs have some reason to account for their goodness. That Bowyer--he's a soft heart by nature, and as he is, so he does--religion has had nothing to do with that, any more than it has with that black-faced, canting scoundrel who has been telling you lies about me. Much his heart is changed. He carries sneak and slanderer written in his face--and sneak and slanderer he will be, elect or none. Religion? Nobody believes in it. The rich don't; or they wouldn't fill their churches up with pews, and shut the poor out, all the time they are calling them brothers. They believe the gospel? Then why do they leave the men who make their clothes to starve in such hells on earth as our workroom? No more do the tradespeople believe in it; or they wouldn't go home from sermon to sand the sugar, and put sloe-leaves in the tea, and send out lying puffs of their vamped-up goods, and grind the last farthing out of the poor creatures who rent their wretched stinking houses. And as for the workmen--they laugh at it all, I can tell you. Much good religion is doing for them! You may see it's fit only for women and children--for go where you will, church or chapel, you see hardly anything but bonnets and babies! I don't believe a word of it,--once and for all. I'm old enough to think for myself, and a free-thinker I will be, and believe nothing but what I