ions corrupt good manners, I
myself, being young and impressionable, began to believe that I too was
an awful sinner. Not knowing where else to look for it, I concluded that
it consisted in my inability to learn mathematics. I do not distinctly
remember whether I prayed to Heaven that I might be able to cross the
Pons Asinorum, but "anyway" my prayer was granted when I graduated.

Another stock-piece in the _repertoire_ consisted of attacks on Voltaire,
Tom Paine, and other antiquated Deists or infidels. I had read with
great contempt a copy of "The Rights of Man" belonging to my genial uncle
Amos. I say with great contempt, for I always despised that kind of free
thought which consisted chiefly of enmity to Christianity. Now I can see
that Voltaire and his followers were quite in the right in warring on
terrible and immediate abuses which oppressed mankind; but I had learned
from Spinoza to believe that every form of faith was good in its way or
according to its mission or time, and that it was silly to ridicule
Christianity because the tale of Balaam's ass was incredible. Paine was
to me just what a Positivist now is to a Darwinian or Agnostic, and such
preaching against "infidels" seemed to me like pouring water on a drowned
mouse. There had always been in Mr. Furness's teaching a very decided
degree of Rationalism, and I had advanced far more boldly on the track. I
remember reading translations from Schleiermacher and buying Strauss's
"Life of Jesus" before I went to Princeton--I saw Strauss himself in
after years at Weinsberg, in Germany--but at Princeton the slightest
approach to explaining the most absurd story in the Old Testament was
regarded as out-and-out atheism. It had all happened, we were told, just
as it is described.

I may as well note here the fact that for many years in my early life
such a thing as only reading a book through once rarely happened, when I
could obtain it long enough. Even the translations of the
Neo-Platonists, with Campanella, Vanini, or the Italian naturalists, were
read and reread, while the principal English poets, and such books as I
owned, were perused daily.

And here in this great infant arithmetic school I was in due time set
down to study Paley's "Evidences of Christianity" and Locke on the
Understanding--like Carlyle's young lion invited to a feast of chickweed.
Apropos of the first, I have a droll reminiscence. There had been in
Philadelphia two years before