volutions of opinion
which an experience of human life and the necessities of the human
heart work upon us! As I look around me, I see few of my youthful
contemporaries who have not survived their infidelity.

Far be it from me--(I spoke in a tone which, I imagine, they hardly
knew whether to take as compliment or irony)--to affirm that the
infidels of this day are like those I knew in my youth. I have no
hesitation in saying of us, that a perfectly natural recoil--partly
intellectual and partly moral--from the supernatural history, the
peculiar doctrines, but, above all, the severe morality of the
New Testament, was at the bottom of our unbelief. I have long felt
that the reception of that book on the part of any human being
is not the least of its proofs that it is divine, for I am persuaded
there never was a book naturally more repulsive either to the human
head or heart. All the prejudices of man are necessarily arrayed
against it. I felt these prejudice, I am now distinctly conscious;
nor was I insensible to the palpable advantages of infidelity;--its
accommodating morality; its Large margin for the passions and appetites;
its doubts of any future world, or its certainty that, if there were
one, it would prove a universal paradise (for doubts and certainties
are equally within the compass of human wishes); the absolute
abolition of hell and every thing like in. I say I saw clearly enough
the advantages which infidelity promised, and I acknowledge I was not
insensible to them. I think no young men are likely to be.

I do not insinuate that similar advantages have any thing to do with
those many peculiar revelations of religion which different oracles
have in our day substituted for the New Testament. The arguments
against Christianity, indeed, I do not find much altered; the
substitutions for it, though distractingly various, are, I confess,
in some respects different. Nay, we see that many of our "spiritualists"
complain chiefly of the moral and spiritual deficiencies of
Christianity; they are afraid, with Mr. Newman, of the conscience
of man being DEPRESSED to the Bible standard! So that we must
suppose that the aim of some, at least, of our infidel reformers,
are prompted by a loftier ideal of "spiritual" purity than
Christianity presents!

It certainly was not so then. I felicitate some of you, gentlemen,
on being so much holier and wiser, nor only than we were, but even
than Christ and his Apostles.

I h