As I’ve written previously, the Scottish writer, essayist and poet Robert Louis Stevenson declared himself an atheist during his university days. It caused a rift between Stevenson and his parents – particularly his father, who was staunch in his Presbyterianism. Yet an examination of Stevenson’s life and work shows, despite his brief stint as an atheist, he retained a profound faith in God. It wasn’t a faith delineated by a church or creed, although it certainly carries the fingerprints of these. It was a faith sprung from Stevenson’s intuitive, poetic sense of God.