“One more incident comes back to me out of my first year at school. Before I began going there my father had told me many of the Bible stories, among them that of the Flood. As that summer happened to be a very wet one, I surprised him with the remark: ‘Why, it must have been raining here now for nearly forty days and forty nights, but the water has not yet got up to the houses, much less to the tops of the mountains!’ ‘Yes, well at that time,’ he replied, ‘at the beginning of the world it didn’t rain just in drops, but like pouring water out of buckets.’ This explanation cleared my ideas. So when our teacher in school told us the story of the Flood, I waited patiently as far as the point where she ought to mention the difference between the rain then and the rain now, but she passed this over altogether. Then I could restrain myself no longer. ‘Teacher,’ I called out from my place, ‘you must tell the story correctly’, and without giving her time to tell me to keep quiet, I continued: ‘You must say that in those days it didn’t rain in drops, but like pouring water out of buckets’.

“When I was eight my father, at my own request, gave me a New Testament, which I read eagerly. Among the stories which interested me most was that of the Three Wise Men from the East. What did the parents of Jesus do, I asked myself, with the gold and other valuables which they got from these men? How could they have been poor after that? And that the Wise Men should never have troubled themselves again about the Child Jesus was to me incomprehensible. The absence, too, of any record of the shepherds of Bethlehem becoming disciples, gave me a severe shock.”

(back to top)