"When the parson, later Professor of Theology, who once prepared me and others for confirmation, suggested that I should read theology and become a clergyman, I agreed. Nothing have I regretted so much as that. By degrees the strong powers of imagination of the founders of religion together with the monstrous gullibility of their adherents, even and not least in Christendom, made me more and more confused. Finally, the mere thought of the ordination vow and an ecclesiastical career disgusted me. At last I exchanged my study of the Christian pieces of fiction for an inquiry into another wealth of exuberant imaginativeness, perhaps the most abundant of all, that of the writings of a religious community without any founder, and could not then foresee that I should be interested in the problems of these writings all my life."