suspicious that a preconceived opinion was being defended at the expense
of honest scrutiny, and was thus driven upon his own unaided
investigation. The result may be guessed: he began to go astray, and
strayed further and further. The children of God, he reasoned, the
members of Christ and inheritors of the kingdom of heaven, were no more
spiritually minded than the children of the world and the devil. Was
then the grace of God a gift which left no trace whatever upon those who
were possessed of it? A thing the presence or absence of which might be
ascertained by consulting the parish registry, but was not discernible in
conduct? The grace of man was more clearly perceptible than this.
Assuredly there must be a screw loose somewhere, which, for aught he
knew, might be jeopardising the salvation of all Christendom. Where then
was this loose screw to be found?

He concluded after some months of reflection that the mischief was caused
by the system of sponsors and by infant baptism. He, therefore, to my
mother's inexpressible grief, joined the Baptists, and was immersed in a
pond near Dorking. With the Baptists he remained quiet about three
months, and then began to quarrel with his instructors as to their
doctrine of predestination. Shortly afterwards he came accidentally upon
a fascinating stranger who was no less struck with my brother than my
brother with him, and this gentleman, who turned out to be a Roman
Catholic missionary, landed him in the Church of Rome, where he felt sure
that he had now found rest for his soul. But here, too, he was mistaken;
after about two years he rebelled against the stifling of all free
inquiry; on this rebellion the flood-gates of scepticism were opened, and
he was soon battling with unbelief. He then fell in with one who was a
pure Deist, and was shorn of every shred of dogma which he had ever held,
except a belief in the personality and providence of the Creator.

On reviewing his letters written to me about this time, I am painfully
struck with the manner in which they show that all these pitiable
vagaries were to be traced to a single cause--a cause which still exists
to the misleading of hundreds of thousands, and which, I fear, seems
likely to continue in full force for many a year to come--I mean, to a
false system of training which teaches people to regard Christianity as a
thing one and indivisible, to be accepted entirely in the strictest
reading of the letter, or