rote poems, dramas, operas, and for two school papers. He also acted in plays and showed a taste for the Roman dramatist, Terence. The only area of school where he showed little interest was active participation in sports because he was physically delicate and shy. Throughout these years, the boy was intensely preoccupied with religious reading and thinking, and though many of the ideas that he entertained at the time probably reflected immaturity of thought, they still played an important role in his later theological development and writings. His religious training at home accounted for his great familiarity with the Bible. He deemed his knowledge of Catechism to be perfect as he was raised in the Anglican church, but he also admitted that he was not deeply religious in childhood, by which he meant that he did not perceive the true meaning of loving God and had formed no religious convictions until he was fifteen. Indeed, when he was fourteen his readings led him into mild skepticism about revealed religion, and he took pleasure in reading the objections to revelation in certain works. When he was fifteen, though, the sermons of and conversations with the Reverend Walter Mayers of Pembroke College, Oxford, would bring the beginning of a divine faith to the boy (Lapati 14-15).
John Henry graduated his course at Ealing and enrolled at Oxford, which at the time was still bound to the Church of England so that a prerequisite for admission was formal subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles. The faculty presented the elements of theology in a systematic manner. Oxford was based on the medieval ideal and so was a colony of twenty independent colleges, and the curriculum was also in the medieval manner and so did not include modern studies but only the classics of Greece and Rome. Oxford could thus be said to be living in the ancient past within a medieval framework. The majority of students seemed to be attending college larg...