of a certain unreality
in the whole transaction, but on the other hand I had the same feeling
of unreality in the system of theology which led to it. I tried to do
my best to carry out the line of spiritual duties imposed upon me. I
made no question that I was a bad boy, but the conception of total
depravity in the theological sense never gained a hold on me, and once
inside the church there seemed to be a certain safeguard thrown over
me. The sense of _ecstasy_ (which my Uncle William had experienced in
his religious relation, the "power" of the revivalists) I have since
known in conditions of extraordinary mental exaltation, and understand
it as a mental phenomenon, as the momentary extension of the
consciousness of the individual beyond the limitations of the bodily
sense--a being snatched away from the body and made to see and feel
things not describable in terms of ordinary experience, but in my
religious evolution it had no place, then or since.

The intellectual slowness of which I have spoken continued through
all these years. I had left the dame's school, where the rule of long
division proved my _pons asinorum_, and went to a man's school, where
I earned my schooling by making the fires and sweeping the schoolroom,
and here I learned some Latin and the higher rules in arithmetic by
rote, always with the reputation of a stupid boy, good in the snowball
fights of the intermission, when we had two snow forts to capture
and defend; in running foot-races, the speediest, and in backhand
wrestling, the strongest, but mentally hopeless. All this period of
my life seems dreary and void, except when I got to nature, and the
delight of my hours in the fields and woods is all that remains to
me of a childhood tormented by burdens of conscience laid on me
prematurely, and by a domestic discipline the severity of which,
with all the reverence and gratitude I bear my parents, I can hardly
consider otherwise than gravely mistaken and disastrous to me, though
my mother's discipline has never made me an enemy of the rod for
children. My own experience as child and parent convinces me that an
inexorable, though mild, physical punishment is the only remedy for
the obstinacy of certain fractious child natures, in the years before
reason operates, and for the assurance of necessary discipline in
families.

The incessant Bible lessons, filling my mind with indigestible
conceptions of life present and to come, mysteries for the
c