So that,now as formerly,religious doctrine,accepted on trust and supported by external pressure,thaws away gradually under the influence of knowledge and experience of life which conflict with it,and a man very often lives on,imagining that he still holds intact the religious doctrine imparted to him in childhood whereas in fact not a trace of it remains.
A clever and truthful man,once told me the story of how he ceased to believe.On a hunting expedition,when he was already twenty-six,he once,at the place where they put up for the night,knelt down in the evening to pray--a habit retained from childhood.His elder brother,who was at the hunt with him,was lying on some hay and watching him.When S.had finished and was settling down for the night,his brother said to him:"So you still do that?"
They said nothing more to one another.But from that day S.ceased to say his prayers or go to church.And now he has not prayed,received communion,or gone to church,for thirty years.
And this not because he knows his brother's convictions and has joined him in them,nor because he has decided anything in his own soul,but simply because the word spoken by his brother was like the push of a finger on a wall that was ready to fall by its own weight.The word only showed that where he thought there was faith,in reality there had long been an empty space,and that therefore the utterance of words and the making of signs of the cross and genuflections while praying were quite senseless actions.
Becoming conscious of their senselessness he could not continue them.
So it has been and is,I think,with the great majority of people.I am speaking of people of our educational level who are sincere with themselves,and not of those who make the profession of faith a means of attaining worldly aims.(Such people are the most fundamental infidels,for if faith is for them a means of attaining any worldly aims,then certainly it is not faith.)these people of our education are so placed that the light of knowledge and life has caused an artificial erection to melt away,and they have either already noticed this and swept its place clear,or they have not yet noticed it.
The religious doctrine taught me from childhood disappeared in me as in others,but with this difference,that as from the age of fifteen I began to read philosophical works,my rejection of the doctrine became a conscious one at a very early age.From the time I was sixteen I ceased to say my prayers and ceased to go to church or to fast of my own volition.I did not believe what had been taught me in childhood but I believed in something.What it was I believed in I could not at all have said.I believed in a God,or rather I did not deny God--but I could not have said what sort of God.Neither did I deny Christ and his teaching,but what his teaching consisted in I again could not have said.
Looking back on that time,I now see clearly that my faith--my only real faith--that which apart from my animal instincts gave impulse to my life--was a belief in perfecting myself.But in what this perfecting consisted and what its object was,I could not have said.I tried to perfect myself mentally--I studied everything I could,anything life threw in my way;I tried to perfect my will,I drew up rules I tried to follow;I perfected myself physically,cultivating my strength and agility by all sorts of exercises,and accustoming myself to endurance and patience by all kinds of privations.And all this I considered to be the pursuit of perfection.the beginning of it all was of course moral perfection,but that was soon replaced by perfection in general:
By the desire to be better not in my own eyes or those of God but in the eyes of other people.And very soon this effort again changed into a desire to be stronger than others:to be more famous,more important and richer than others.
