This quote is by Arthur Benson and he is describing his brother and his interest in religion when a boy. I think it's the case of many: certainly it was of mine.

  "Yet religion was wholly unreal thing to the child. He learnt his Bible lessons and psalms; he knew the liturgy by heart; but the religious idea, the thought of God, the Christian life of effort, were all things that he merely accepted as so many facts that were taught him, but without the least interest in them, or even the shadowiest attempt to apply them to his own life. It seemed strange to Hugh when, in years long after, religion came to have so deep a meaning to him, that it should have been so entirely a blank to him in the early days. God was no more to him than a far-off monarch; a mighty shadowy person, very remote and powerful, but the circle of whose influence never touched his own."