strife instead of
easy victory over the common foe.

In the summer and autumn of 1872, I was a good deal in London with my
mother.--My health had much broken down, and after a severe attack of
congestion of the lungs, my recovery was very slow. One Sunday in London,
I wandered into St. George's Hall, in which Mr. Charles Voysey was
preaching, and there I bought some of his sermons. To my delight I found
that someone else had passed through the same difficulties as I about
hell and the Bible and the atonement and the character of God, and had
given up all these old dogmas, while still clinging to belief in God. I
went to St. George's Hall again on the following Sunday, and in the
little ante-room, after the service, I found myself in a stream of
people, who were passing by Mr. and Mrs. Voysey, some evidently known to
him, some strangers, many of the latter thanking him for his morning's
work. As I passed in my turn I said: "I must thank you for very great
help in what you have said this morning", for indeed the possibility
opened of a God who was really "loving unto every man", and in whose care
each was safe for ever, had come like a gleam of light across the stormy
sea of doubt and distress on which I had been tossing for nearly twelve
months. On the following Sunday, I saw them again, and was cordially
invited down to their Dulwich home, where they gave welcome to all in
doubt. I soon found that the Theism they professed was free from the
defects which revolted me in Christianity. It left me God as a Supreme
Goodness, while rejecting all the barbarous dogmas of the Christian
faith. I now read Theodore Parker's "Discourse on Religion", Francis
Newman's "Hebrew Monarchy", and other works, many of the essays of Miss
Frances Power Cobbe and of other Theistic writers, and I no longer
believed in the old dogmas and hated while I believed; I no longer
doubted whether they were true or not; I shook them off, once for all,
with all their pain, and horror, and darkness, and felt, with relief and
joy inexpressible, that they were all but the dreams of ignorant and
semi-savage minds, not the revelation of a God. The last remnant of
Christianity followed swiftly these cast-off creeds, though, in parting
with this, one last pang was felt. It was the doctrine of the Deity of
Christ. The whole teaching of the Broad Church School tends, of course,
to emphasise the humanity at the expense of the Deity of Christ, and when
the eternal p