About this time I heard of another remarkable man, whose name was already before the public,—­Mr. Groves,—­who had written a tract called Christian Devotedness, on the duty of devoting all worldly property for the cause of Christ, and utterly renouncing the attempt to amass money.  In pursuance of this, he was going to Persia as a teacher of Christianity.  I read his tract, and was inflamed with the greatest admiration; judging immediately that this was the man whom I should rejoice to aid or serve.  For a scheme of this nature alone appeared to combine with the views which I had been gradually consolidating concerning the practical relation of a Christian Church to Christian Evidences.  On this very important subject it is requisite to speak in detail.

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The Christian Evidences are an essential part of the course of religious study prescribed at Oxford, and they had engaged from an early period a large share of my attention.  Each treatise on the subject, taken by itself, appeared to me to have great argumentative force; but when I tried to grasp them all together in a higher act of thought, I was sensible of a certain confusion, and inability to reconcile their fundamental assumptions. One either formally stated, or virtually assumed, that the deepest basis of all religious knowledge was the testimony of sense to some fact, which is ascertained to be miraculous when examined by the light of Physics or Physiology; and that we must, at least in a great degree, distrust and abandon our moral convictions or auguries, at the bidding of sensible miracle. Another treatise assumed that men’s moral feelings and beliefs are, on the whole, the most trustworthy thing to be found; and starting from them as from a known and ascertained foundation, proceeded to glorify Christianity because of its expanding, strengthening, and beautifying all that we know by conscience to be morally right.  That the former argument, if ever so valid, was still too learned and scholastic, not for the vulgar only, but for every man in his times of moral trial, I felt instinctively persuaded:  yet my intellect could not wholly dispense with it, and my belief in the depravity of the moral understanding of men inclined me to go some way in defending it.  To endeavour to combine the two arguments by saying that they were adapted to different states of mind, was plausible; yet it conceded, that neither of the two went to the bottom of human thought, or showed what were the real fixed points of man’s knowledge; without knowing which, we are in perpetual danger of mere argumentum ad hominem, or, in fact, arguing in a circle;—­as to prove miracles from doctrine, and doctrine from miracles.  I however conceived that the most logical minds among Christians would contend that there was another solution; which, in 1827, I committed to paper in nearly the following words: 

“May it not be doubted whether Leland sees the real circumstance that makes a revelation necessary?