With not much more thought himself, Richard had very early noticed that for all her diligence in church-going, his mother did not seem the happier for her religion—there seemed to be a cloud on her forehead. She had inherited from her mother a heavy sense of responsibility. She had an oppressive sense of the claims of God but no personal relationship with him through which he could give his loving help to her for the duties of her life. She had no window to let in the perpendicular light of heaven. All the light she had was the horizontal light of duty—invaluable, but, ever accompanied by its own shadow of failure, giving neither joy nor hope nor strength. Her husband’s sense of duty was neither so strong nor so uneasy.

She had not attempted to teach Richard more in the way of religion than the saying of certain prayers, a ceremony of questionable character. Dearly loving his mother, and saddened by her lack of good spirits, the boy had put things together—amongst the rest, that she was always gloomiest on Sunday—and concluded that religion was the cause of her misery. This made him welcome the merest hint of its falsehood. He had no opportunity of learning what any vital believer in the Lord of religion might have to say. His only view of Christianity was a hopelessly distorted one.

Thus it is hardly any wonder that Richard grew up with the conviction that religion was worse than nothing, an evil phantom. It was not merely a hopeless task to pray to a power which didn’t exist—to believe in what was not must be ruinous to the best of human nature. Therefore, the older he grew the more he began to think that the best thing he could do for his fellow man was to deliver him from this dragon called Faith. But he only knew something of the tares, he knew nothing of the wheat among the tares—knew nothing of the wintry gleams of comfort shed on thousands of hearts by the most poverty-stricken belief in the merest and faultiest silhouette of a God.

But young Richard did love his kind. He gathered the chief joy of his life from a true relation to the life around him. At school he was always the champion of the oppressed. More than once for the sake of one weaker, he had gotten badly beaten. And now his protection of his kind was extended to all who, like his mother, suffered from false and outdated creeds.

His grandfather found him, as he said, a chip off the old block, and declared there was nothing the fellow could not do. By rights of inheritance, Richard’s muscles grew sinewy and hard. Quickly he was capable of handling a hammer and persuading iron to the full satisfaction of his teacher. In less than half the time an ordinary apprentice would have taken, Richard could hold alternate swing with the blacksmith, as, blow for blow, they pierced a block of metal to form the nave of a wheel. In ringing a wheel he soon excelled, and his grandfather’s smithy being the place for all kinds of blacksmith-work, Richard quickly learned the trade. As his fortnight’s holiday drew to an end, his parents wrote, saying that, as he was doing so well, they would like him to stay longer.