Neville develops a childhood hunger to know the reality of God

Neville recalls that from the time he was a child he felt a hunger to know the reality of God for himself, a hunger that could not be satisfied by being merely told about it. The only time he was ever physically beaten was over the Bible, by a schoolmaster he describes as a sadist who caned him unmercifully, in a place where such corporal punishment was permitted. He frames this early, unrelenting hunger as ultimately answered not by doctrine but by the experience of God's reality actually unfolding within a man.