to escape from their control.
His gigantic mind was held in perpetual bondage. His natural
temperament was fostered throughout the whole period which moulds
and fixes the character, by his holding little converse with human
beings beyond the sphere of a particular religious community in an
obscure American town, and by an almost uninterrupted contemplation
of nature in her gloomy and awful forms, amid the silence of
uncultivated plains, and the solitude of interminable forests. The
profound feeling, the intense excitement, which accompanied his
early devotional exercises, were such as to insure a permanent
attachment to every principle and every impression of that
susceptible age. The visions of a warm, and often morbid,
imagination continued to be cherished with religious confidence and
love for ever afterwards. Every doubt, of what he once had received
for truth, was anxiously suppressed in the manhood of his mind as an
infernal suggestion; and the acuteness of his reasoning powers, by
supplying him at all times with an argument, for what he conceived
it _his duty_ to believe, served, not to emancipate him from false
apprehensions of truth, but to rivet upon him more firmly the chains
of ignorance or error. When argument was doubtful, a dogged
fanaticism supplied its place. This may be illustrated by a
particular instance, and bearing directly on the subject of our
present discussion.

It cannot be doubted, by any person qualified to appreciate his
writings, that his views of the Divine sovereignty are resolvable
into a system of absolute fatalism, so far as the actions and
destinies of men are concerned. Reason and conscience revolt from
the consequences involved in such a system; all our moral instincts
condemn it. But it was instilled into his mind by Calvinistic
instructors in the days of his boyhood; his imagination was
perpetually haunted by it; and having identified it with the truth
of divine revelation, which he held in religious veneration and awe,
he finally vanquished every doubt respecting it, not by the
deliberate exercise of his judgment, on a calm investigation of
evidence, but by the force of his religious feelings, and of his
ascendant imagination. Let him tell his own story.

"From my childhood up," he says, "my mind had been full of
objections against the doctrine of God's sovereignty, in choosing
whom He would to eternal life, and rejecting whom He pleased;
leaving them eternally to perish, an