Because of the haste and confusion brought about by conflicting school
tasks, I had not for many months found time to read my Bible; indeed I
scarcely had time for a morning prayer.
I still went to church regularly every Sunday; that is we all went there
together. I reverenced the family pew where we had assembled for so
many years; and apart from that reason I hold it dear because it is
associated in my memory with my mother.
It was at church, however, that my faith continued to receive its most
damaging blows; it was there that religion seemed a cold and meaningless
term to me. Usually the commentaries, the narrow human reasoning and
dissection took away from the beauty of the Bible and the Gospels,
and deprived them of their grandly solemn and exquisite poetry. For a
peculiar nature like mine it was very difficult to have any one touch
upon holy subjects (in such a way as did the minister) without in some
measure, in my opinion, desecrating them. The family worship, held every
evening, awakened in me the only religious meditation that I now knew,
for the voice that read or prayed was exceedingly dear to me, and that
changed everything.
My untiring contemplation of nature, and the reflections that I indulged
in in the presence of the fossils I had brought from the mountains and
cliffs, and placed in my museum, indicated that there had been bred in
me a vague and unconscious pantheism.
In short my deeply rooted and still-living faith was covered over with
encumbering earth. At times it threw out a green shoot, but for the most
part it lay like an entirely dead thing in the cold ground. Moreover, I
was too much troubled to pray; my conscience, still restive and timid,
gave me no rest during the time that I was on my knees,--I always felt
remorse gnaw at me then because of the slovenly and half-done tasks, and
because of the feelings of hate I had for the “Big Ape” and the “Bull
of Apis,” emotions that I was obliged to hide and disguise until I
shuddered at the falsehoods I spoke and acted. These things gave me
poignant remorse and excruciating moral distress, and to escape from
these emotions I indulged in noisy sports and foolish laughter; and
when my conscience troubled me most, and I dared not, therefore, appear
before my parents, I took refuge with the servants, played tennis,
jumped the rope, or make a great racket.
For two or three years I had not spoken of a religious vocation, for
I now understood that such a desire was a thing of the past, was
impossible; but I had not found anything to put in its place. When
strangers asked what career I was being prepared for, my parents, a
little anxious in regard to my future, did not know what to say; and I
knew still less what to reply.
However my brother, who was also much concerned over my enigmatical
future, in one of those letters that seemed always to come from an
enchanted land, suggested, because of a certain facility in mathematics
and a certain precision of nature, certainly anomalies in one of my
temperament, that it might be well for me to study engineering. And
when they consulted me and I replied apathetically: “Very well, it is
agreeable enough to me,” the matter seemed satisfactorily settled.
I would need to spend a little more than a year at a polytechnic school
in order to prepare myself. To be there or elsewhere, what difference
did it make to me? . . . When I contemplated the men of a certain age
who surrounded me, those occupying the most honorable positions, who
had every claim to respect and consideration, I would say to myself:
“It will some day be necessary for me to live a useful, sedate life in
a given place and fixed sphere as they do, and to grow old as they
are--and that is all!” And a bitter hopelessness overwhelmed me as I
brooded on the thought; I yearned for the impossible; I longed most of
all to remain a child forever, and the reflection that the years were
fleeing, and that, whether I would or would not, I must become a man,
was anguish to me.