Because my crisis was so acute, I know what fundamental questions underlie the intellectual reorientation which has become an inevitable part of the college curriculum for every thinking student. From my own experience I can demonstrate why it is that education so often spells the end of orthodoxy.

I.

The environment in which I grew up was that of the typical middle-class American home just after the turn of the century. Queen Victoria had been dead five years when I came into the world, but her spirit lived on and was the tutelary genius of my childhood and youth.

I was born a good Presbyterian, and, fittingly enough, predestination played an important role in my early life. Both of my parents were gentle, unaffected, devoted Christians, and my father was an elder in the church. We lived in a small city of the Middle West, on the fringe of what H.L. Mencken calls 'the Bible Belt.' Long before I could be aware of it myself, the double accident of parentage and geography had shaped me for the service of God.

Our neighborhood was made up of families like mine. All social life was centred in the church and its activities. Our minister, who was an intimate friend of the family, was an upright old Scotsman, a living monument to all the Christian virtues. He had served our parish almost as long as anybody could remember, and his never-failing kindliness and charity made him universally beloved.

My earliest distinct recollection is of family prayers. This was a regular feature of our daily life. After supper we would retire to the library, where my father, with wife and children gathered about him, would read a chapter from the Scriptures. Psalms and Proverbs were his favorite books, and he repeated them so often that I soon knew them by heart. After the reading came prayers, during which each little event of the day would be rehearsed and we would give thanks to God for all the good things we had enjoyed.

It was natural that a child brought up in such a home should early come to think of the God who ruled over it, whose presence was so imminently felt in every department of daily life, as one of his most intimate acquaintances. He was very real, this God of my childhood; as real as my father, and in fact quite like him. There was nothing sinister about Him, nothing to incite fear—except, of course, when I disobeyed Him. He was merely the head of the world as my father was head of our household. The ways of both were often inscrutable to me, but I never doubted their ultimate wisdom and their concern for my own good.

By the time I came to the age of reason the system under which I had grown up had implanted in my mind certain clear ideas about the universe and my place in it. The world was created by God as a laboratory for testing human beings. In the Bible He had revealed His commandments, which were distinct, direct, and admitted of no argument. Obedience to these injunctions was virtue, disobedience sin. The one meant honor and happiness and life everlasting; the other was the way of shame and disgrace in this world, and led to eternal torments in the world to come.