Old Fox may have meant Well, but his book makes for cruelty and lasciviousness. Also I worried myself a good deal about Hell. I would suggest to our ecclesiastical authorities that they should make up their mind about Hell and announce the result. When I was a boy, a material Hell was still by most pious folks accepted as fact. The suffering caused to an imaginative child can hardly be exaggerated. It caused me to hate God, and later on, when my growing intelligence rejected the conception as an absurdity, to despise the religion that had taught it. It appeared one could avoid Hell by the simple process of “believing.” But how was I to be sure that I did believe, sufficiently? There was a mountain of rubbish on some waste land beside the Limehouse canal: it was always spoken of locally as the “mountain.” By way of experiment, I prayed that this mountain might be removed. It would certainly have been of advantage to the neighbourhood; and as, by comparison with pictures I had seen, it was evidently but a very little mountain, I thought my faith might be sufficient. But there it remained morning after morning, in spite of my long kneelings by my bedside. I felt the fault was mine and despaired.

Another fear that haunted me was the Unforgivable Sin. If only one knew what it was one might avoid it. I lived in terror of blundering into it. One day—I forget what led to it—I called my Aunt Fan a bloody fool. She was deaf and didn't hear it. But all that night I lay tossing on my bed. It had come to me that this was the Unforgivable Sin, though even at the time, and small though I was, I could not help reflecting that if this were really so, there must in the Parish of Poplar be many unforgivable sinners. My mother, in the morning, relieved my mind as to its being the particular Unforgivable Sin, but took it gravely enough notwithstanding, and kneeling side by side in the grey dawn, we prayed for forgiveness.