e, to read with avidity a number of books treating
on religious matters; and he perused them, both with artless ingenuity
and in the hope of their strengthening his faith. But, could he truly
find faith in their pages? Are not such books rather dangerous than
otherwise for some minds?

"The truth is," says the author of the "Essays," "that a mind which has
never entertained a doubt in revelation, may conceive some doubts by
reading books written in its defense." And he adds elsewhere, in
speaking of the writers of such controversial works, that "impatient of
the least hesitation, they deny with anger the value of their
adversary's arguments, and betray, in their way of getting over
difficulties, a humor which injures the effects of their reasoning, and
of the proofs they make use of to help their arguments." After reading
several of these books, he must have found, as did the great Pitt, "that
such readings provoke many more doubts than they dispel;" and, in fact,
they rather disquieted and shook, than strengthened his faith. At the
same time, he was alive to another striking contradiction. He noticed
that the men who taught the doctrines, too often forgot to make these
and their practice agree; and in losing his respect for his masters, he
still further doubted the sincerity of their teaching. Thus, while
remaining religiously inclined, he must have felt his faith becoming
more and more shaken, and in the memorandum of his early days, after
enumerating the books treating upon religious subjects which he had
read, he says: "All very tedious. I hate books treating of religious
subjects; although I adore and love God, freed from all absurd and
blasphemous notions."

In this state of mind, of which one especially finds a proof in his
earlier poems, the philosophy of Locke, which is that professed at
Cambridge, and which he had already skimmed, as it were, together with
other philosophical systems, became his study. It only added an enormous
weight in the way of contradictions to the already heavy weight of
doubt.

Could it be otherwise? Does not Locke teach that all ideas being the
creation of the senses, the notion of God, unless aided by tradition,
has no other basis but our senses and the sight of the external world?
If this be not the doctrine professed by Locke, it is the reading which
a logical mind may give to it.

He believes in God; yet the notion of God, as it appears from his
philosophical teaching, is not