The Imagination of Our Hearts

The sons of late-nineteenth-century English aristocrats were, if judged to be sufficiently intelligent and especially if considered to possess leadership potential, sent for the completion of their education to Oxford or Cambridge. Young Winston Churchill was not regarded as University material; he was sent instead to Sandhurst to train for the Army. Churchill relished his technical army education but it left what was in fact his enormous and penetrating intellect unsatisfied and when he emerged from his training and was posted as a cavalry officer to India he set himself an intensive course of reading in order to fill the gap. Looking back on those years in his My Early Life, Churchill relates how his reading, because it was unguided, was unbalanced and how he became unduly influenced by writers who challenged and undermined the Christian faith in which he had been brought up. He consequently 'passed through a violent and aggressive anti-religious phase'. What brought him out of that phase was not reasoned argument to the contrary, for at that stage he had not heard it.