While they were walking in the park, the church bells in the city began to ring. John stood still and listened. There were the terrible bells of the Clara Church, which rang through his melancholy childhood; the bells of the Adolf-Fredrik, which had frightened him to the bleeding breast of the Crucified, and the bells of St. John's, which, on Saturdays, when he was in the Jacob School, had announced the end of the week. A gentle south wind bore the sound of the bells thither from the city, and it echoed like a warning under the high firs.

"Are you going to church?" asked his friend.

"No," answered John, "I am not going to church any more."

"Follow your conscience," said the engineer.

It was the first time that John had remained away from church. He determined to defy his father's command and his own conscience. He got excited, inveighed against religion and domestic tyranny, and talked of the church of God in nature; he spoke with enthusiasm of the new gospel which proclaimed salvation, happiness, and life to all. But suddenly he became silent.

"You have a bad conscience," said his friend.

"Yes," answered John; "one should either not do what one repents of, or not repent of what one does."

"The latter is the better course."

"But I repent all the same. I repent a good deed, for it would be wrong to play the hypocrite in this old idol-temple. My new conscience tells me that I am wrong. I can find no more peace."

And that was true. His new ego revolted against this old one, and they lived in discord, like an unhappy married couple, during the whole of his later life, without being able to get a separation.

The reaction in his mind against his old views, which he felt should be eradicated, broke out violently. The fear of hell had disappeared, renunciation seemed silly, and the youth's nature demanded its rights. The result was a new code of morality, which he formulated for himself in the following fashion: What does not hurt any of my fellow-men is permitted to me. He felt that the domestic pressure at home did him harm, and no one else any good, and revolted against it. He now showed his real feelings to his parents, who had never shown him love, but insisted on his being grateful, because they had given him his legal rights as a matter of favour, and accompanied by humiliations. They were antipathetic to him, and he was cold to them. To their ceaseless attacks on free-thinking he gave frank and perhaps somewhat impertinent answers. His half-annihilated will began to stir, and he saw that he was entitled to make demands of life.

The engineer was regarded as John's seducer, and was anathematised. But he was open to the influence of John's lady friend, who had formed a friendship with his step-mother. The engineer was not of a radical turn of mind; he had accepted Theodore Parker's compromise, and still believed in Christian self-denial. One should, he said, be amiable and patient, follow Christ's example, and so forth. Urged on by John's lady friend, for whom he had a concealed tenderness, and alarmed by the consequences of his own teaching, he wrote John the following letter. It was inspired by fear of the fire which he had kindled, by regard for the lady, and by sincere conviction: