The faith in which young Catherine Spence had been nurtured was a harsh one. In the religious allegory which she wrote in the 1880s, she depicted it as a doctrine of fear. She had learned that the creator ‘hath foreordained whatever comes to pass’, that ‘our first parents being left to the freedom of their own will, fell from the estate wherein they were created, by sinning against God, and that all people, being descended from Adam, sinned in him, and fell with him in his first transgression’. This crude and narrow version of Calvinism, drawn up in the 17th century expressly ‘for the more rude and ignorant’, puzzled and appalled her. She found the deity who exacted retribution for Adam's sin, from all his posterity for all time, unjust. ‘Why oh! why!’ she exclaimed ‘had not the sentence of death been carried out at once, and a new start made with more prudent people?’ God's injustice made him ‘unlovely’, but ‘it was wicked not to love God’, so she saw in her question and judgement her own condemnation. Furthermore, if she, an outwardly virtuous person, was already damned, so too must be almost everyone in the world. Even children could not be saved. One book that had profoundly influenced her childhood told of three child pilgrims following the path of Bunyan's Christian. But the children had the added burden of an imp called ‘Inbred Sin’ which never left them, not even at the point where Christian's burdens had fallen away.