shes
his backsliding parent:

"'MY DEAR MOTHER,--I give my father up. I give him a parable: that
the Waverley novels are better reading for every day than the tragic
_Life_. And he takes it back-side foremost, and shakes his head, and
is gloomier than ever. Tell him that I give him up. I don't want no
such a parent. This is not the man for my money. I do not call that
by the name of religion which fills a man with bile. I write him a
whole letter, bidding him beware of extremes, and telling him that his
gloom is gallows-worthy; and I get back an answer--. Perish the
thought of it.

"'Here am I on the threshold of another year, when, according to all
human foresight, I should long ago have been resolved into my
elements: here am I, who you were persuaded was born to disgrace
you--and, I will do you the justice to add, on no such insufficient
grounds--no very burning discredit when all is done; here am I
married, and the marriage recognised to be a blessing of the first
order. A1 at Lloyd's. There is he, at his not first youth, able to
take more exercise than I at thirty-three, and gaining a stone's
weight, a thing of which I am incapable. There are you; has the man
no gratitude? . . .

"'Even the Shorter Catechism, not the merriest epitome of religion,
and a work exactly as pious although not quite so true as the
multiplication table--even that dry-as-dust epitome begins with a
heroic note. What is man's chief end? Let him study that; and ask
himself if to refuse to enjoy God's kindest gifts is in the spirit
indicated.'

"As may be judged from this half-playful, half-serious remonstrance,
Stevenson's relation to his parents was eminently human and beautiful.
The family dissensions above alluded to belonged only to a short but
painful period, when the father could not reconcile himself to the
discovery that the son had ceased to accept the formulas of Scottish
Calvinism. In the eyes of the older man such heterodoxy was for the
moment indistinguishable from atheism; but he soon arrived at a better
understanding of his son's position. Nothing appears more
unmistakably in these letters than the ingrained theism of Stevenson's
way of thought. The poet, the romancer within him, revolted from the
conception of formless force. A personal deity was a necessary
character in the drama, as he concei