Part 19 (1/2)

I returned to my hoht I had been afraid that in the excitement of controversy, and under the sone too far But here were people who had gone immeasurably farther I was afraid I had been too rash But here were pleasant looking and educated people, compared hom I was the perfection of sobriety And the sense of my comparative ation, and prepared o still farther in the way of doubt New books were placed in ot new friends and acquaintances, and all were of the doubting, unbelieving class Several of theard to the foundation of all religious belief Till my settlement in America I had continued to believe, not only in God, and providence, and prayer, but in immortality; and to look on Atheism as the extrean to be shaken Instead of drawing back fro ot farther astray; and though I did not plunge headlong into Atheism, I came near to the dreadful abyss, and was not a little bewildered with the horrible mists that floated round its brink

Thus ht, and of a sober reconsideration of the steps I had taken in the path of doubt and unbelief, were all, alas! exploded, and the last state of s worse, I got into trouble with hbors My alienation from Christ had already produced in me a deterioration of character I was not exactly aware of it at the tiht not have been able to believe it; but such was really the case The matter is clear to me now past doubt I had becoreeable I had discarded, to some extent, the Christian doctrines of meekness and humility My teiving, I was hts, and hts ere no such things And I ot into unhappy disputes and painful exciteland, that the disturbers of my peace were all outside me, and that when I went to America I should leave them all behind; but I see now that many of them ithin me, and that I carried theave iven me in my old one It is the state of our minds that determines the measure of our bliss As Burns says,

”If happiness have not her seat And centre in the breast, We reat, But never can be blest

No treasures, nor pleasures

Can ; The _heart_ ay's the part ay That ”

Andaround me out of tune

CHAPTER XVI

THE STORY OF MY DESCENT FROM THE FAITH OF MY CHILDHOOD, TO DOUBT AND UNBELIEF

My parents were Methodists of the strictest kind, and they did their utmost to make their children Methodists And they were very successful

They had eleven children, ten of which became members of the Methodist Society before they were twenty years of age; and even the odd one did not escape the influence of religion altogether

I was a believer in God and Christ, in duty and i Things spiritual were as real to s tereat whole,--one solemn and boundless universe I lived and breathed in a spiritual world

My parents were rigorously consistent They were true Christians They not only talked, but looked and lived as persons who felt thereat and holy God, and in the face of an awful eternity; and the influence of their Godly life, and daily prayers, and solemn counsels fell on me with a power that was irresistible

If the doctrine taught me in my early days had been the doctrine of Christ, and the doctrine of Christ alone, in a form adapted to rown up to h life a happy, useful and consistent Christian But I was taught other doctrines Though ht ht ht I was taught, as, that in consequence of the sin of Adam, God had caused me to come into the world utterly depraved, and incapable, till I wasone good word, or of doing one good deed I felt that I did think good thoughts, and that I had good feelings, and that I both said and did good things

But this I was told was a great delusion:--that nothing was good, and that nothing was pleasing to God, unless it came from faith in Christ

But I _had_ faith in Christ I believed in Him with all my heart I had believed in Him from the first The ansas that I had believed with a _common_ kind of faith, but that it was another kind of faith that was necessary to salvation, and that whatsoever did not spring froiven to understand, that if I thought otherwise, it was because of the naughtiness of s, and desperately wicked What this other kind of faith was, I did not know, and could not learn I was then told that the natural s of the Spirit, and that before I could understand therace; all of which was past my comprehension I was then infors unto me by His Spirit But this ht, that I was, in some way, answerable for Adam's sin,--that God made Adam the federal head of all mankind, and that all were bound by what he did;--that if he had done right, all would have coood, and happy, and sure of eternal life; but that through his sin, ore all born, not only utterly depraved, but guilty and liable to eternal das about satisfaction to offended justice, trust in Christ's eneration, and sanctification, all ht

Sometime after, I found in my Catechise,--the doctrine that from eternity God kneho should be saved and who should be lost This gave me the most terrible shock of all It was plain that my doom was fixed forever For if it was certainly foreknown, it eably fixed

These dreadful doctrines filled me with horror They all but drove ht or nine years old, they _did_ drive me mad They were s were as these doctrines represented them to be, the ways of God were horribly unjust And as I could do no other than believe the doctrines, ainst God I supposed, as a matter of course, that I should be sent to hell for my rebelliousness; still I rebelled It see one's eternal destiny on things that were not in one's oer I thought that if people could not do all that God required of theinal nothingness My ement which God was said to have made with Adam, and the terrible consequences entailed thereby on his posterity To bring , and force the their eternal destiny on another, or on so beyond their power, seeht to be allowed a fair trial for hi could make me feel that I was really answerable for the sin of Adam, any more than that Adam was answerable for my sins And how God could impute one man's sin to another, was past all coed as they were represented to be, the govern that God had a right to do as He pleased, and not knowing that He was so good that it was i, I suffered in silence But I often said to myself, 'God does not deal fairly withbut those of love and gratitude So far was I froation to Him, that I looked on ladly have consented to undergo any ath of ti allowed to return to ht that even this was too eably that I must live on forever, and that there was but one dark path, which I ht never be able to find, by which I could escape the unbounded and unending torments of hell, darkened all the days of ly miserable Some kind of blind unbelief, or a partial spiritual sluth came over me, and made it possible forbut a happy one

I cannot give the story of ot over the difficulties of ed the blasphes of Christ, and became a cheerful, joyous Christian, and a happy and successful Christian arded the Bible as the Word of God from my early childhood I believed every word to be true, and every co My faith, at first, rested on the testi whom I lived Every one I heard speak of the Book, spoke of it as divine, and the thought that it ht be otherwise did not, that I remember, ever enter thened by the instinctive tendencies of reat doctrines which the book inculcated

The first attempt to _prove_ the divinity of the Bible, of which I have any recollection, was made by my mother, while I was yet a child What _led_ her to ht be so question that I had asked her; for I used to propose to her puzzling questions souood men _would_ not It ument that I remember to have heard in those days was,--'No man would write the Bible who did not know it to be true; because it tells liars that their portion will be in the lake of fire and bri such people as ood a book, and that it wrought with such a blessed power upon their souls, that it was impossible it should be written by any one but God The last had probably the greatest effect upon their s in harmony with their best affections, their s, that they felt as if they had proof of its heavenly origin in their own souls I cauive theical habits, they would require qualification, and considerable illustration But they are none of them so foolish as I once supposed As for the last two, they are, when presented in a proper way, unanswerable

There was another arguh the different portions of the Bible ritten by persons of widely distant ages, of different occupations and ranks, and of very different degrees of culture, they all aiood and happy to the last degree This is a great fact, and when properly considered, may well be accepted as a proof that the Bible, as a whole, is frouments had on my mind in my early days, I do not exactly rethen in of the Bible

This reat and beneficent power, and would have proved an inestih life And I am sorry it was not I have no sy, and who recommend people to demolish their first belief, that they may raise a better structure in its place We do not destroy our first and lower life, to prepare the way for a higher spiritual life Nor do we kill the body to secure the developuish our natural home affections, in order to kindle the fires of friendshi+p, patriotisrows out of the lower The lower nourishes and sustains the higher At first we are little etables: then we becoels But the vegetable nature lives through all, and is the basis and strength of the anith of the huth of the spiritual and divine And the higher foror and fulness of those by which they are preceded