The greatest difference between Protestants and Roman Catholics is probably the age at which they are baptised...

Roman Catholics, baptised as infants, are in the Faith before they are conscious of it, and generally have to struggle harder to leave it than Protestants, who wait until something like the Age of Reason to be baptised and to confirm that they understand and accept the tenets of their Faith--and who may actually then, as I did at age eleven years old, find that they do not agree with the tenets of Christianity, and that they do not wish to be baptised or to make a profession of Faith in it.  There was in fact, in all conscience, nothing else that I felt I could do, then or ever, but to reject it, since I completely disbelieved, and disliked the Christian religion, such as it was expounded to me, by a Protestant minister who was sincerely attempting to persuade me of its truth and moral necessity, and who was perplexed and confounded that I did not agree: that my heart was corrupt, that I was sinful by nature, or that I needed to be saved from my sins; when my belief, as a boy of good conscience, was that I myself should atone  for my sins if I were able to--or, better, just not commit any sins.  The peculiar thing about rational decisions, be they made never so early in one's life, is that they require no subsequent alteration.  So I have troubled no more about Christianity in the course of a long life than I have about Zoroastrianism or Fire Worship--though I still wonder why so many have been its dupes for so long, when its falsity, nullity and absurdity were to me so early and clearly evident.

A frequently asked question, by those of a lower class than Methodist-Presbyterian to whom I have recounted this anecdote of my boyish apostasy, is "Why didn't your parents beat your apostatic little ass?"  There are two answers:  (1) By the 1950's Middle Class Americans above the rank of Baptists (in the Northern United States) no longer beat their children for apostasy.  (2) If I had not been entirely serious (i.e., just farting around or showing off) they might have.