10 MEMOIR OF AUGUSTUS DE MORGAN. 



1822. world, was unable to adapt the spiritual food to the needs 

 aligious of the recipient. He was made to learn by heart and 

 repeat long Scripture lessons, so chosen that their mean- 

 ing and connection with each other and with himself 

 were quite imperceptible ; indeed, I have heard him say 

 that, from frequent repetition, the words and phrases be- 

 came meaningless to him. He was taken to church twice 

 in the week, three times on Sunday, and required to 

 give an abstract of every sermon he heard. Being thus 

 administered, religion could not fail to become a source of 

 misery. Sunday was the one wretched day of the week, 

 to be got over somehow, and church was a place of 

 penance. A worse result of the system even than this 

 was the confusing together in an honest young mind all 

 ideas of right and wrong, truth and falsehood, in con- 

 nection with religion. The awful description of the 

 Devil and his doings, and the eternal burning to be under- 

 gone by all who did not believe what he could not then, 

 and never was able to believe in the prescribed form, 

 were set in the boy's mind against Jesus Christ's declara- 

 tion that His Father was a God of love, and that repent- 

 ance was the only condition of forgiveness. For a boy 

 like Augustus De Morgan, whose clear perceptions, love of 

 truth, and readiness to venerate, rendered him sensitive 

 to every word spoken by those whom he loved, or who 

 were in authority over him, such mental antagonisms 

 must have been the cause of great anguish, and he could 

 only escape, after he once began to think, by dismissing 

 the whole from his mind. The problem of how to recon- 

 cile the Divine idea of God's love with the human notion 

 of God's justice was a harder one than he ever met with 

 in after life, and he gave it up as insoluble. Not being 

 yet able to detect the logical fallacies and critical errors 

 which formed part of the arguments used to convince 

 him, he could only receive those arguments in silence, but 

 without assent. Happily the evil corrected itself, and no 

 harm was done in the end. His innate sense of relation- 



