He ought to have known that if I had been sent to West Point, and had my comrades, or anybody else, derided, scoffed at, or belittled the religion of my mother, I should have fought for it, stood by it, and found argument to support my belief in it, and very possibly would have been one of the few religious gentlemen who have come from West Point, like General O. O. Howard.
So I was sent to Waterville, where a majority of the pupils were fitting for the ministry, and some of them were even then performing, in part, the duties of clergymen. Unfortunately, I had a much higher standard as to clergymen than they had, and I naturally observed all their shortcomings and outgoings. And when religious matters were discussed, as they very soon were, and I was not found quite up to the belief, they undertook to teach me. But they broached subjects upon which I knew quite as much as they did and thought a little more. In consequence, I could very easily trouble them with questions which it was impossible for them or any one else to answer. The result of my taking the other side was that my own faith was weakened. The more we discussed, the more I was disliked by some of my college mates. On the other hand, certain ones, whose faith had been shaken, closed around me more closely, and we set up for ourselves against the prevalent beliefs in which we were being educated.
Before the first year had ended, I had changed my intention entirely regarding the ministry, if ever I had much in that direction, and devoted myself to the physical sciences, especially chemistry. I was exceedingly interested in books on alchemy, and in the experiments which had been made in the vain endeavor to find the philosopher's stone. I think I was imbued almost with the enthusiasm of the earlier chemists, and above all, I was inspired to believe that chemistry and its adjuncts were to be the means of opening a very great field of highly promising labor and research to benefit all mankind, particularly in the study of those sciences which were to test the magnetic and electric discoveries by Galvani, the results of whose researches were then being exploited by the great discoveries of Sir Humphry Davy.
I believed that the gates for pursuing chemical knowledge and investigation in a regularly defined and scientific manner were opened by the wonderful invention of the murdered Lavoisier in his
