eliverer from terror and wrath
To me it came as filling an infinite void, as the supply of a boundless
want, and ultimately as the enhancement of all joy. I had been somewhat
sad and sombre in the secret moods of my mind, read Kirke White and knew
him by heart; communed with Young's "Night Thoughts," and with his prose
writings also; and with all their bad taste and false ideas of religion,
I think they awaken in the soul the sense of its greatness and its need.
I nursed all this, something like a moody secret in my heart, with a
kind of pride and sadness; I had indeed the full measure of the New
England boy's reserve in my early experience, and did not care whether
others understood me or not. And for a time something of all this flowed
into my religion. I was among the strictest of my religious companions.
I was constant to all our religious exercises, and endeavored to carry
a sort of Carthusian silence into my Sundays. I even tried, absurdly
enough, to pass that day without a smile upon my countenance. It was
on the ascetic side only that I [36] had any Calvinism in my religious
views, for in doctrine I immediately took other ground. I maintained,
among my companions, that whatever God commanded us to do or to be, that
we had power to do and be. And I remember one day rather impertinently
saying to a somewhat distinguished Calvinistic Doctor of Divinity: "You
hold that sin is an infinite evil?" "Yes." "And that the atonement is
infinite?" "Yes." "Suppose, then, that the first sinner comes to have
his sins cancelled; will he not require the whole, and nothing will
be left?" "Infinites! infinites!" he exclaimed; "we can't reason about
infinites!"

In connection with the religious ideas and impressions of which I have
been speaking, comes before me one of the most remarkable persons that
I knew in my youth, Paul Dewey, Uncle Paul, we always called him. He was
my father's cousin, and married my mother's half-sister. His religion
was marked by strong dissent from the prevailing views; indeed, he
was commonly regarded as an infidel. But I never heard him express any
disbelief of Christianity. It was against the Church construction of it,
against the Orthodox creed, and the ways and methods of the religious
people about him, that he was accustomed to speak, and that in no
doubtful language. I was a good deal with him during the year before I
went to college, for he taught me the mathematics; and one day he
said to me, "Orv