Such familiarity is a soul-killing experience, and great will be the excuse for some of those sons of religious parents who have gone further toward hell than many born and bred thieves and sinners.
When Juliet came to understand clearly that her new friend did mean thorough-going unbelief, the rejection of _all_ the doctrines she had been taught by him whose memory she revered, she was altogether shocked, and for a day and a night regarded him as a monster of wickedness.

But her horror was mainly the reflex of that with which her father would have regarded him, and all that was needed to moderate horror to disapproval, was familiarity with his doctrines in the light of his agreeable presence and undeniable good qualities.

Thoroughly acquainted as she believed herself with "the plan of salvation," Jesus of Nazareth was to her but the vague shadow of something that was more than a man, yet no man at all.

I had nearly said that what He came to reveal had become to her yet more vague from her nebulous notion of Him who was its revelation.

Her religion was, as a matter of course, as dusky and uncertain, as the object-center of it was obscure and unrealized.