he same meridian.

*****

Looking backwards from my present standpoint over the earnest past, a
boyhood fond of play and physical action, but averse to schoolwork,
lies before me. The aversion did not arise from intellectual apathy
or want of appetite for knowledge, but simply from the fact that my
earliest teachers lacked the power of imparting vitality to what they
taught. Athwart all play and amusement, however, a thread of
seriousness ran through my character; and many a sleepless night of my
childhood has been passed, fretted by the question 'Who made God?' I
was well versed in Scripture; for I loved the Bible, and was prompted
by that love to commit large portions of it to memory. Later on I
became adroit in turning my Scriptural knowledge against the Church of
Rome, but the characteristic doctrines of that Church marked only for
a time the limits of enquiry. The eternal Sonship of Christ, for
example, as enunciated in the Athanasian Creed, perplexed me. The
resurrection of the body was also a thorn in my mind, and here I
remember that a passage in Blair's 'Grave' gave me momentary rest.

Sure the same power
That rear'd the piece at first and took it down
Can reassemble the loose, scatter'd parts
And put them as they were.

The conclusion seemed for the moment entirely fair, but with further
thought, my difficulties came back to me. I had seen cows and sheep
browsing upon churchyard grass, which sprang from the decaying mould
of dead men. The flesh of these animals was undoubtedly a
modification of human flesh, and the persons who fed upon them were as
undoubtedly, in part, a more remote modification of the same
substance. I figured the self-same molecules as belonging first to
one body and afterwards to a different one, and I asked myself how two
bodies so related could possibly arrange their claims at the day of
resurrection. The scattered parts of each were to be reassembled and
set as they were. But if handed over to the one, how could they
possibly enter into the composition of the other? Omnipotence itself,
I concluded, could not reconcile the contradiction. Thus the plank
which Blair's mechanical theory of the resurrection brought
momentarily into sight, disappeared, and I was again cast abroad on
the waste ocean of speculation.

At the same time I could by no means get rid of the idea that the
aspects of nature and the consciousness of man implied the ope