A reviewer, who has since made his name known, has pointed to the preceding remarks, as indicative of my deficiency in imagination and my tendency to romance.  My dear friend is undoubtedly right in the former point; I am destitute of (creative) poetical imagination:  and as to the latter point, his insight into character is so great, that I readily believe him to know me better than I know myself, Nevertheless, I think he has mistaken the nature of the preceding argument.  I am, on the contrary, almost disposed to say, that those have a tendency to romance who can look at a picture with men flying into the air, or on an angel with a brass trumpet, and dead men rising out of their graves with good stout muscles, and not feel that the picture suggests unbelief.  Nor do I confess to romance in my desire of something more than historical and daily human nature in the character of Jesus; for all Christendom, between the dates A.D. 100 to A.D. 1850, with the exception of small eccentric coteries, has held Jesus to be essentially superhuman.  Paul and John so taught concerning him.  To believe their doctrine (I agree with my friend) is, in some sense, a weakness of understanding; but it is a weakness to which minds of every class have been for ages liable.

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Such had been the progress of my mind, towards the end of what I will call my Third Period.  In it the authority of the Scriptures as to some details (which at length became highly important) had begun to be questioned; of which I shall proceed to speak:  but hitherto this was quite secondary to the momentous revolution which lay Calvinism prostrate in my mind, which opened my heart to Unitarians, and, I may say, to unbelievers; which enlarged all my sympathies, and soon set me to practise free moral thought, at least as a necessity, if not as a duty.  Yet I held fast an unabated reverence for the moral and spiritual teaching of the New Testament, and had not the most remote conception that anything could ever shatter my belief in its great miracles.  In fact, during this period, I many times yearned to proceed to India, whither my friend Groves had transferred his labours and his hopes; but I was thwarted by several causes, and was again and again damped by the fear of bigotry from new quarters.  Otherwise, I thought I could succeed in merging as needless many controversies.  In all the workings of any mind about Tri-unity, Incarnation, Atonement, the Fall, Resurrection, Immortality, Eternal Punishment, how little had any of these to do with the inward exercises of my soul towards God!  He was still the same, immutably glorious:  not one feature of his countenance had altered to my gaze, or could alter.  This surely was the God whom Christ came to reveal, and bring us into fellowship with:  this is that, about which Christians ought to have no controversy, but which they should unitedly, concordantly, themselves enjoy and exhibit to the heathen.  But oh, Christendom! what dost thou believe and teach?  The heathen cry out to thee,—­Physician, heal thyself.