church. He knew, too, she was always hoping to hear that he at
last felt the need of coming closer to the church. She did not
harass him about these things, but she had told him once or twice
that nothing could happen in the world which would give her so
much pleasure as to see him reconciled to Christ. He realized, as
he talked to her about the Erlichs, that she was wondering
whether they weren’t very “worldly” people, and was apprehensive
about their influence on him. The evening was rather a failure,
and he went to bed early.
Claude had gone through a painful time of doubt and fear when he
thought a great deal about religion. For several years, from
fourteen to eighteen, he believed that he would be lost if he did
not repent and undergo that mysterious change called conversion.
But there was something stubborn in him that would not let him
avail himself of the pardon offered. He felt condemned, but he
did not want to renounce a world he as yet knew nothing of. He
would like to go into life with all his vigour, with all his
faculties free. He didn’t want to be like the young men who said
in prayer-meeting that they leaned on their Saviour. He hated
their way of meekly accepting permitted pleasures.
In those days Claude had a sharp physical fear of death. A
funeral, the sight of a neighbour lying rigid in his black
coffin, overwhelmed him with terror. He used to lie awake in the
dark, plotting against death, trying to devise some plan of
escaping it, angrily wishing he had never been born. Was there no
way out of the world but this? When he thought of the millions of
lonely creatures rotting away under ground, life seemed nothing
but a trap that caught people for one horrible end. There had
never been a man so strong or so good that he had escaped. And
yet he sometimes felt sure that he, Claude Wheeler, would escape;
that he would actually invent some clever shift to save himself
from dissolution. When he found it, he would tell nobody; he
would be crafty and secret. Putrefaction, decay…. He could
not give his pleasant, warm body over to that filthiness! What
did it mean, that verse in the Bible, “He shall not suffer His
holy one to see corruption”?
If anything could cure an intelligent boy of morbid religious
fears, it was a denominational school like that to which Claude
had been sent. Now he dismissed all Christian theology as
something too full of evasions and sophistries to be reasoned
about. The men who made it, he felt sure, were like the men who
taught it. The noblest could be damned, according to their
theory, while almost any mean-spirited parasite could be saved by
faith. “Faith,” as he saw it exemplified in the faculty of the
Temple school, was a substitute for most of the manly qualities
he admired. Young men went into the ministry because they were
timid or lazy and wanted society to take care of them; because
they wanted to be pampered by kind, trusting women like his
mother.
Though he wanted little to do with theology and theologians,
