Earlier in this essay he reports that “I was instructed in the legends of the Bible and of Saint Nicholas at the age of about two, and gave to both a passive acceptance not especially distinguished either for its critical keenness or its enthusiastic comprehension.” He then declares that just before the age of five he was told that Santa Claus does not exist, and that he thereupon countered with the query as to “why God is not equally a myth.” “Not long afterwards,” he continues, he was placed in a Sunday school at the First Baptist Church, but became so pestiferous an iconoclast that he was
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