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Church, it was an alien body, mainly Irish and with virtually no intercourse, moral or social, with other churches. I was brought up in a moderate puritanism which eschewed all taint of Romanism. One of my earliest clear religious memories is that of being “walked out” of church with the rest of my family because the Vicar for the first time appeared in a white surplice instead of a black gown. My father, who was a churchwarden, on reaching home wrote a strong letter of expostulation, and after a brief interval in a dull little church under a minister of dubious character, we settled down in the church which is now Derby Cathedral, under the ministry of a famous evangelical preacher, the Rev. Sholto Douglas Campbell Douglas, who for some years oversatisfied our religious ardour by sermons of an hour and a quarter. In these years a strain of active piety took me away from this world’s thoughts, engaging me in serious endeavours to realize the meaning of the creeds and prayers placed before my childish mind. The failure to satisfy my elementary sense of reason and of justice in the doctrines of the atonement and of everlasting punishment for unrepentant sinners were, I think, the earliest evidence of a humanism which in early manhood led me to the abandonment of orthodox Christianity. At the time it was a painful process of an intellectual failure to reconcile tenets I was brought up to reverence with the dictates of my personal conscience, By the time I reached Oxford I found myself