These abode with him through manhood; and in later life morbid scruples and superstitious anxieties about his soul laid hold on his imagination.

Yet religion did not penetrate Tasso's nature.
As he conceived it, there was nothing solid and supporting in its substance.

Piety was neither deeply rooted nor indigenous, neither impassioned nor logically reasoned, in the adult man.[81] What it might have been, but for those gimcrack ecstasies before the Host in boyhood, cannot now be fancied.

If he contained the stuff of saint or simple Christian, this was sterilized and stunted by the clever fathers in their school at Naples.
During the years of his feverishly active adolescence Tasso played for a while with philosophical doubts.

But though he read widely and speculated diffusely on the problems of the universe, he failed to pierce below the surface of the questions which he handled.