In accordance with the family rule he regularly attended church, but the homilies to which he listened were not of a nature to quicken his religious feelings, while the doctrinal instruction he received at home he has himself described as "nothing but a dry kind of morality." Against one article of the creed taught him--the doctrine of original and inherited sin--all his instincts rebelled; and the antipathy was so compact with all his later thinking that we may readily believe that it manifested itself thus early.

If we may accept his own account of his youthful religious experiences, he was already on the way to that _Ur-religion_, which was his maturest profession of faith, and which he held to be the faith of select minds in all stages of human history.

Now, as at all periods of his life, it was the beneficent powers in nature that most deeply impressed him, and he records how in crude childish fashion he secretly reared an altar to these powers, though an unlucky accident in the oblation prevented him from repeating his act of worship.
Like other children, he was quick to see the inconsistency of the creed he was taught with the actual facts of experience.

One event in his childhood, the earthquake of Lisbon, especially struck him as a confounding commentary on the accepted belief in the goodness of God; and the impression was deepened when in the following summer a violent thunder-storm played havoc with some of the most treasured books in his father's library.

In all his soul's troubles, however, Goethe, according to his own account, found refuge in a world where questionings of the ways of Providence had never found an entrance.