Part 1, Section 5 Summary

Fred has been a Junior Fellow for a year and thinks it only right to tell his father about his own lack of religious conviction--not a task he relishes, because his father is a minister (and the history of his family contains many heated feuds over matters of religion). Fred does not want to distress his father but thinks informing him is only "decent politeness." He determines that the best time to broach the subject with his father is six in the evening, a time when his father regularly waits in his study for parishioners who do not come (they came every other time of the day but then). Fred remembered back to his childhood, when he and his two sisters would crawl along the ground so as to observe their father waiting for the parishioners who came at other times--without...