What does God desire from me?
How shall I attain unto Him?
What is it He has sent me into the world to do?
These were the ceaseless questions of a heart that rested, meanwhile, in an unshaken confidence that time would bring the answer.
But these were early days, days when the influence of his mother, never wholly shaken off, was still dominant and pervasive in all that concerned him.

There came a period, however, beginning in all likelihood about his fourteenth, and lasting until his twentieth year or thereabouts, in which he certainly lost hold on all distinctively Christian doctrines.

With such a mind as his, and such a training, this was almost inevitable.

His intellect, while it hungered incessantly after supernatural truth, kept nevertheless a persistent hold upon the verities of the natural order, and could not rest until it had synthetized them into a coherent whole.

That was his life-long characteristic.