Trumbull begins his book with an account of how Comstock, as an eighteen-year-old boy, heard that a mad dog was "running amuck" in the little village of Winnipauk, Connecticut, where he was working as a clerk in the grocery store. He took a gun and a pistol, went out alone on a mad-dog hunt, and killed the dog. The incident, to Trumbull, is symbolic of Comstock's whole career. It was, Trumbull says, "his first taste of mad-dog hunting," and he spent his life at it. According to Trumbull, he went after the dog "because he saw that the lives of others were being imperiled and no one seemed ready to accept the responsibility of ending the public peril--no one but himself"; and he kept on hunting mad dogs thereafter for the same reason. "His life," says Trumbull, "was at stake each time--but what of that? The lives of others were at stake, and he had been brought up to understand that moral heroism was the only thing really worth while in this life." He killed his first mad dog, according to Trumbull, in order to save little children from being attacked; and it was always "a source of profound gratitude to Mr. Comstock" that he got the dog "before a single child had been bitten," but it was "one of the heart sorrows of his life" that this could not be said "of the more dangerous beasts of prey against whom his life work is directed."

That this was Comstock's own view of his peculiar career is sufficiently evident from Trumbull's biography. He saw himself defending children from "defilement" at the risk of his life and his reputation. Sustained by his reliance on God, he fought evil wherever he saw it. He "fought the devil," in fact; and, says Trumbull, "the devil has had greater difficulty in making deposits in childhood banks, to draw upon at will, since Anthony Comstock entered business against him." But although this was Comstock's conscious psychology and his intellectual rationalization of his conduct, one does not have to read Trumbull's book very carefully in order to find, below these heroic appearances, an entirely different set of motives and impulses in Comstock's character.

His childhood was fanatically Puritanical. He was born ( 1844) of parents who were Puritan Congregationalists near New Canaan, Connecticut. They spent nearly the whole of every Sunday at church and Sunday school, with a lunch "eaten in the horse sheds" and a dinner at home, followed by the closing church service of the day. "Daily prayers were conducted every morning before breakfast." The mother's "watchwords" for her children were "purity, principle, duty." She told them Bible stories and stories "sometimes from other sources, but always they were stories of moral heroism." Trumbull reports a conversation with Comstock: "'Such stories, to-day, fascinate me,' Mr. Comstock will tell you. 'I don't care that'--with a contemptuous snap of his finger--'for your bloodand-thunder stories. But I do enjoy the story of any man or woman, boy or girl, who sacrifices self for principle.' Harking back to his mother again, he says with earnestness: 'I'm not entitled to much credit if I stand out against some things in a way that makes people characterize me as puritanical'; and he adds with some conviction, 'I cannot but feel that the teachings of my mother are vastly superior to anything that my opponents have to offer me.'"

She taught him the Puritanism of St. Paul, set him on St. Paul's side of the fight between the Flesh and the Spirit, and made him ready to sacrifice himself in the war on the Flesh. The fight, of course, began in the boy himself. He was "healthily mischievous," says Trumbull. That he had strong fleshly instincts to overcome is probable from Trumbull's description of him at the age of sixty-nine: "Standing about five feet ten in his shoes, he carries his two hundred and ten pounds of muscle and bone so well that you would not judge him to weigh over a hundred and eighty. His Atlas shoulders, of enormous breadth and squareness, his chest of prodigious girth, surmounted by a bull-like neck, are in keeping with a biceps and a calf of exceptional size and iron solidity. His legs are short, and remind one somewhat of tree trunks."