The bishop's view of God as a God of wrath was apparently shared, to some extent at least, by Crane's mother; but his father, who resigned from the Presbyterian church as a young man in protest against the harshness of its doctrine of infant damnation, was apparently of a gentler persuasion, stressing in his milder books on Christian conduct a view of God as a God of mercy and compassion. The religious poems in Stephen Crane's first book of poems,
The Black Riders (1895), written about the same time he was writing
The Red Badge of Courage, reflect the anguish of a spiritual crisis in which he attempted to exorcise the Pecks' God of wrath and, beyond that, to test his faith in general against the moral realities he observed as a young newspaper reporter in Asbury Park, New Jersey, and New York City in the early 1890s. The religious issue haunted Crane's imagination to the end. As Amy Lowell observed, "He disbelieved it and hated it, but he could not free himself from it." The effect of his preoccupation with questions of faith is not only evident in his poetry but appears, more obliquely, in his fiction as well, notably in its striking evocation of man's poignant alienation in a God-abandoned world of menace and violence.
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