In the earliest period of my Oxford residence I fell into uneasy collision with him concerning Episcopal powers.  I had on one occasion dropt something disrespectful against bishops or a bishop,—­something which, if it had been said about a clergyman, would have passed unnoticed:  but my brother checked and reproved me,—­as I thought, very uninstructively—­for “wanting reverence towards Bishops.”  I knew not then, and I know not now, why Bishops, as such, should be more reverenced than common clergymen; or Clergymen, as such, more than common men.  In the World I expected pomp and vain show and formality and counterfeits:  but of the Church, as Christ’s own kingdom, I demanded reality and could not digest legal fictions.  I saw round me what sort of young men were preparing to be clergymen:  I knew the attractions of family “livings” and fellowships, and of a respectable position and undefinable hopes of preferment.  I farther knew, that when youths had become clergymen through a great variety of mixed motives, bishops were selected out of these clergy on avowedly political grounds; it therefore amazed me how a man of good sense should be able to set up a duty of religious veneration towards bishops.  I was willing to honour a Lord Bishop as a peer of Parliament; but his office was to me no guarantee of spiritual eminence.—­To find my brother thus stop my mouth, was a puzzle; and impeded all free speech towards him.  In fact, I very soon left off the attempt at intimate religious intercourse with him, or asking counsel as of one who could sympathize.  We talked, indeed, a great deal on the surface of religious matters; and on some questions I was overpowered and received a temporary bias from his superior knowledge; but as time went on, and my own intellect ripened, I distinctly felt that his arguments were too fine-drawn and subtle, often elaborately missing the moral points and the main points, to rest on some ecclesiastical fiction; and his conclusions were to me so marvellous and painful, that I constantly thought I had mistaken him.  In short, he was my senior by a very few years:  nor was there any elder resident at Oxford, accessible to me, who united all the qualities which I wanted in an adviser.  Nothing was left for me but to cast myself on Him who is named the Father of Lights, and resolve to follow the light which He might give, however opposed to my own prejudices, and however I might be condemned by men.  This solemn engagement I made in early youth, and neither the frowns nor the grief of my brethren can make me ashamed of it in my manhood.

Among the religious authors whom I read familiarly was the Rev. T. Scott, of Aston Sandford, a rather dull, very unoriginal, half-educated, but honest, worthy, sensible, strong-minded man, whose works were then much in vogue among the Evangelicals.  One day my attention was arrested by a sentence in his defence of the doctrine of the Trinity.  He complained that Anti-Trinitarians unjustly charged Trinitarians