EARLY ATTITUDE TOWARD RELIGION 57 



arrest Satan and his works, permitted him to torment men. 

 This led to a wild desire to grow big enough to slay the pictured 

 demon who would permit such iniquities. Against the devil 

 himself I had no such rage, for it was clear that he was only a 

 bigger kind of bad man, such as I saw about me. This was 

 before my teens, when my fancies were proportionately valiant ; 

 after I passed twelve, came utter disbelief, or rather a turning 

 away from the whole matter. 



The concept of death came to me earlier than I can recall. In 

 the barracks hospital men were constantly dying, and as I 

 played in and about the building the performance went on 

 under my eyes. The funerals with the covered bier, the band 

 playing a dead march, and the escort, were my delight. I tagged 

 on to it to see the brief but stately ceremonies, to hear the vol- 

 ley, and then the quickstep home. So death came to be accepted 

 as the complement of life. With this went a curiously intense 

 belief in immortality, altogether instinctive, for I had no 

 teachings concerning it except in sermons which did not affect 

 me. I was not at any time interested in the matter of a life after 

 death, but accepted it as an absolute reality based on feeling. 



The only movements of the spirit in the religious field which 

 I can remember, came from two sources : my mother's singing 

 she sang simply and sweetly of the better hymns. "From 

 Greenland's Icy Mountains" and "Jerusalem the Golden" 

 would make me weep, I think because of the singing and not for 

 the religious sentiment. Oddly enough, I had a curious kind of 

 affection for Christ; I revolted at his submissiveness, but the 

 sense of his love for all living creatures made him dear, despite 

 that infirmity, in which he was so unlike the heroes with whom 

 I still dwelt. The other spiritual influence came from the negroes. 

 A number of them used to meet at night to talk religion beneath 

 a shed which lay open to the northern sky. One of them, well 

 named "Old Daniel," had a fervid imagination and excellent 

 descriptive powers. He would picture the coming of the great 

 angel as if it were before his eyes; the path of light shooting 



