hics, their
attempts seemed to me to exhibit the same absurdity with which Jowett's
constructive teaching had first made me familiar. Their denials of
everything which to me had been previously sacred appalled me like the
overture to some approaching tragedy. Their confident attempts at some
new scheme of affirmations affected me like a solemn farce.

Some foretastes of the new gospel had, as I have said already, been
vouchsafed to me at Littlehampton by Mr. Philpot. I now saw what
logically the new gospel implied. The sense of impending catastrophe
became more and more acute. I felt like a man on a ship, who, having
started his voyage in an estuary, and imagining that a deck is by nature
as stable as dry land, becomes gradually conscious of the sway of the
outer sea, until, when he nears the bar, showers of spray fall on him,
he perceives that the bows are plunging, and at last the percussion of
waves makes the whole vessel shudder.

Such, then, were the effects on me of the religious liberalism of
Oxford, and in this respect, as I now see, looking backward, my
condition was temperamentally the same as it had been when I was still
under the tuition of superorthodox governesses. In those days any
questioning of the verbal inspiration of the Bible and the miraculous
events recorded in it seemed to me, as it did later, to be at once
absurd and blasphemous. There was, however, even then, something which
to me seemed no less absurd than "the infidel's" attack on the dogmas of
Christian orthodoxy--for I knew that "the infidel" existed--and this was
the manner in which the Anglican clergy defended them. I was always,
when a child, looking forward each week to the Sunday sermon, in the
hope of finding some portions of it which I could either mimic or
parody. I remember one sermon in particular, which the preacher devoted
to a proof of God's existence. My own mental comment was, "If anything
could make me such a fool as to doubt this self-evident truth, your
arguments and the inflections of your voice would certainly make me do
so." I heard another preacher indulge in a long half-hour of sarcasm at
the expense of "the shallow infidel, who pointed to the sky and said,
'Where are the signs of His coming?'" In those days we were required by
a governess to write out the morning's sermon as a pious discipline in
the afternoon. This sermon I reproduced with a series of pictures in the
margin, one of which represented the "shallow in