we should fail of getting the right men:  we should pack them together by a mechanical process, instead of leaving them to be united by vital affinities.  Thus actuated, and other circumstances conducing, in September 1830, with some Irish friends, I set out to join Mr. Groves at Bagdad.  What I might do there, I knew not.  I did not go as a minister of religion, and I everywhere pointedly disowned the assumption of this character, even down to the colour of my dress.  But I thought I knew many ways in which I might be of service, and I was prepared to act recording to circumstances.

* * * * *

Perhaps the strain of practical life must in any case, before long, have broken the chain by which the Irish clergyman unintentionally held me; but all possible influence from him was now cut off by separation.  The dear companions of my travels no more aimed to guide my thoughts, than I theirs:  neither ambition nor suspicion found place in our hearts; and my mind was thus able again without disturbance to develop its own tendencies.

I had become distinctly aware, that the modern Churches in general by no means hold the truth as conceived of by the apostles.  In the matter of the Sabbath and of the Mosaic Law, of Infant Baptism, of Episcopacy, of the doctrine of the Lord’s return, I had successively found the prevalent Protestantism to be unapostolic.  Hence arose in me a conscious and continuous effort to read the New Testament with fresh eyes and without bias, and so to take up the real doctrines of the heavenly and everlasting Gospel.

In studying the narrative of John I was strongly impressed by the fact, that the glory and greatness of the Son of God is constantly ascribed to the will and pleasure of the Father.  I had been accustomed to hear this explained of his mediatorial greatness only, but this now looked to me like a make-shift, and to want the simplicity of truth—­an impression which grew deeper with closer examination.  The emphatic declaration of Christ, “My Father is greater than I,” especially arrested my attention.  Could I really expound this as meaning, “My Father, the Supreme God, in greater than I am, if you look solely to my human nature?” Such a truism can scarcely have deserved such emphasis.  Did the disciples need to be taught that God was greater than man?  Surely, on the contrary, the Saviour must have meant to say:  “Divine as I am, yet my heavenly Father is greater than I, even when you take cognizance of my divine nature.” I did not then know, that my comment was exactly that of the most orthodox Fathers; I rather thought they were against me, but for them I did not care much.  I reverenced the doctrine of the Trinity as something vital to the soul; but felt that to love the Fathers or the Athanasian Creed more than the Gospel of John would be a supremely miserable superstition.  However, that Creed states that there is no inequality