1.  I have found that my old belief narrowed my affections.  It taught me to bestow peculiar love on “the people of God,” and it assigned an intellectual creed as one essential mark of this people.  That creed may be made more or less stringent; but when driven to its minimum, it includes a recognition of the historical proposition, that “the Jewish teacher Jesus fulfilled the conditions requisite to constitute him the Messiah of the ancient Hebrew prophets.”  This proposition has been rejected by very many thoughtful and sincere men in England, and by tens of thousands in France, Germany, Italy, Spain.  To judge rightly about it, is necessarily a problem of literary criticism; which has both to interpret the Old Scriptures and to establish how much of the biography of Jesus in the New is credible.  To judge wrongly about it, may prove one to be a bad critic but not a less good and less pious man.  Yet my old creed enacted an affirmative result of this historical inquiry, as a test of one’s spiritual state, and ordered me to think harshly of men like Marcus Aurelius and Lessing, because they did not adopt the conclusion which the professedly uncritical have established.  It possessed me with a general gloom concerning Mohammedans and Pagans, and involved the whole course of history and prospects of futurity in a painful darkness from which I am relieved.

2.  Its theory was one of selfishness.  That is, it inculcated that my first business must be, to save my soul from future punishment, and to attain future happiness; and it bade me to chide myself, when I thought of nothing but about doing present duty and blessing God for present enjoyment.

In point of fact, I never did look much to futurity, nor even in prospect of death could attain to any vivid anticipations or desires, much less was troubled with fears.  The evil which I suffered from my theory, was not (I believe) that it really made me selfish—­other influences of it were too powerful:—­but it taught me to blame myself for unbelief, because I was not sufficiently absorbed in the contemplation of my vast personal expectations.  I certainly here feel myself delivered from the danger of factitious sin.

The selfish and self-righteous texts come principally from the three first gospels, and are greatly counteracted by the deeper spirituality of the apostolic epistles.  I therefore by no means charge this tendency indiscriminately on the New Testament.

3.  It laid down that “the time is short; THE LORD IS AT HAND:  the things of this world pass away, and deserve not our affections:  the only thing worth spending one’s energies on, is, the forwarding of men’s salvation.”  It bade me “watch perpetually, not knowing whether my Lord would return at cockcrowing or at midday.”