heaven one night, while he was gazing at the moon; and that this event had been foretold by Merlin:—­it would surely be the height of absurdity to dilate on the truth of the Newtonian theory as “the moral evidence” of the truth of the miracles and prophecy.  Yet this is what those do, who adduce the excellence of the precepts and spirituality of the general doctrine of the New Testament, as the “moral evidence” of its miracles and of its fulfilling the Messianic prophecies.  But for the ambiguity of the word doctrine, probably such confusion of thought would have been impossible.  “Doctrines” are either spiritual truths, or are statements of external history.  Of the former we may have an inward witness;—­that is their proper evidence;—­but the latter must depend upon adequate testimony and various kinds of criticism.

How quickly might I have come to my conclusion,—­how much weary thought and useless labour might I have spared,—­if at an earlier time this simple truth had been pressed upon me, that since the religious faculties of the poor and half-educated cannot investigate Historical and Literary questions, therefore these questions cannot constitute an essential part of Religion.—­But perhaps I could not have gained this result by any abstract act of thought, from want of freedom to think:  and there are advantages also in expanding slowly under great pressure, if one can expand, and is not crushed by it.

I felt no convulsion of mind, no emptiness of soul, no inward practical change:  but I knew that it would be said, this was only because the force of the old influence was as yet unspent, and that a gradual declension in the vitality of my religion must ensue.  More than eight years have since past, and I feel I have now a right to contradict that statement.  To any “Evangelical” I have a right to say, that while he has a single, I have a double experience; and I know, that the spiritual fruits which he values, have no connection whatever with the complicated and elaborate creed, which his school imagines, and I once imagined, to be the roots out of which they are fed.  That they depend directly on the heart’s belief in the sympathy of God with individual man,[7] I am well assured:  but that doctrine does not rest upon the Bible or upon Christianity; for it is a postulate, from which every Christian advocate is forced to start.  If it be denied, he cannot take a step forward in his argument.  He talks to men about Sin and Judgment to come, and the need of Salvation, and so proceeds to the Saviour.  But his very first step,—­the idea of Sin,—­assumes that God concerns himself with our actions, words, thoughts; assumes therefore that sympathy of God with every man, which (it seems) can only be known by an infallible Bible.