Nothing in his surroundings made for gloom or for a Calvinism of the soul.

The swiftness of his intellectual development might have made him sceptical of theology in general, but no influence in his home was likely in any way to make him sceptical of his father's theology in particular.
He went to Eton, and the religion in which he had been brought up stood the moral test of the most critical years in boyhood.

It never failed him, and he never questioned it.

But when that trial was over, and after an illness which shook up his body and mind, he came under the influence of a matron who held with no little force of character the views of the Anglo-Catholic party.

These views stole gradually into the mind of the rather effeminate boy, and although they did not make him question the theology of his father for some years, he soon found himself thinking of the religious opinions of his uncles and aunts with a certain measure of superiority.
"I began to feel," he told me, "that I was living in a rather provincial world--the world described by Wells and Arnold Bennett." This restlessness, this desire to escape into a greater and more beautiful world, pursued him to Oxford, and, for the moment, he found that greater and beautiful world in the life of Balliol.