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ing them look foolish, getting the better of them in every w.ay. Life
was hierarchical and whatever happened was right. There were the
strong, who deserved to win and always did win, and there were the
weak, who deserved to lose and always did lose, everlastingly.
I did not question the prevailing standards, because so far as
I could see there were no others. How could the rich, the strong,
the elegant, the fashionable, the powerful, be in the wrong? It was
their world, and the rules they made for it must be the right ones.
And yet from a very early age I was aware of the impossibility of
any
subjective
conformity. Always at the center of my heart the
inner self seemed to be awake, pointing out the difference between
the moral obligation and the psychological
fact.
It was the same
in all matters, worldly or other-worldly. Take religion, for instance.
You were supposed to love God, and I did not question this. Till
the age of about fourteen I believed in God, and believed that the
accounts given of him were true. But I was well aware that I did
not love
him.
On the contrary, I hated him, just as I hated Jesus
and the Hebrew Patriarchs.
If
I had sympathetic feelings toward any
character in the Old Testament, it was toward such people as Cain,
Jezebel, Haman, Agag, Sisera: in the New Testament my friends,
if any, were Ananias, Caiaphas, Judas and Pontius Pilate. But the
whole business of religion seemed to be strewn with psychological
impossibilities. The Prayer Book told you, for example, to love God
and fear him: but how could you love someone whom you feared?
With your private affections it was the same. What you
ought
to
feel was usually clear enough, but the appropriate emotion could
not be commanded. Obviously it was my duty to feel grateful toward
Bingo and Sim; but I was not grateful. It w.as equally clear that one
ought to love one's father, but I knew very well that I merely disliked
my own father, whom I had barely seen before I was eight and who
appeared to me simply as a gruff-voiced elderly man forever saying
"Don't." It was not that one did not want to possess the right quali–
ties or feel the correct emotions, but that one could not. The good
and the possible never seemed to coincide.
There was a line of verse that I came across not actually while
I was at Crossgates, but a year or two later, and which seemed to
strike a sort of leaden echo in my heart. It was: "The armies of
unalterable law." I understood to perfection what it meant to be
