The same results
appeared. The majority had not been baptized; yet the good and bad
dispositions were so distributed as to preclude all possibility of
maintaining that the baptized boys were better than the unbaptized.
The reader may smile at the idea of any one's faith being troubled by a
fact of which the explanation is so obvious, but as a matter of fact my
brother was seriously and painfully shocked. The teacher to whom he
applied for a solution of the difficulty was not a man of any real power,
and reported my brother to the rector for having disturbed the school by
his inquiries. The rector was old and self-opinionated; the difficulty,
indeed, was plainly as new to him as it had been to my brother, but
instead of saying so at once, and referring to any recognised theological
authority, he tried to put him off with words which seemed intended to
silence him rather than to satisfy him; finally he lost his temper, and
my brother fell under suspicion of unorthodoxy.
This kind of treatment did not answer with my brother. He alludes to it
resentfully in the introductory chapter of his book. He became
suspicious that a preconceived opinion was being defended at the expense
of honest scrutiny, and was thus driven upon his own unaided
investigation. The result may be guessed: he began to go astray, and
strayed further and further.
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