n food can.

As to morbid habits of mind, to which isolated seminaries are exposed,
I had also some experience. What complaints of our spiritual dulness
constantly arose among us! And there was other dulness, too,--physical,
moral, social. I remember, at one time, the whole college fell into a
strange and unaccountable depression. The occasion was so serious that
the professors called us together in the chapel to remonstrate with us;
and, after talking it all over, and giving us their advice, one of them
said: "The evil is so great, and relief so indispensable, that I
will venture to recommend to you a particular plan. Go to your rooms;
assemble some dozen or twenty in a room; form a circle, and let the
first in it say 'Haw!' and the second 'Haw!' and so let it go round; and
if that does n't avail, let the first again say 'Haw! haw!' and so on."
We tried it, [44] and the result may be imagined. Very astonishing it
must have been to the people without, but the spell was broken.

But more serious matters claim attention in connection with Andover. I
was to form some judgment upon questions in theology. I certainly was
desirous of finding the Orthodox system true. But the more I studied it,
the more I doubted. My doubts sprung, first, from a more critical study
of the New Testament. In Professor Stuart's crucible, many a solid text
evaporated, and left no residuum of proof. I was startled at the small
number of texts, for instance, which his criticism left to support the
doctrine of "the personality of the Holy Spirit." I remember saying to
him in the class one day, when he had removed another prop,--another
proof-text: "But this is one of the two or three passages that are left
to establish the doctrine." His answer was: "Is not one declaration of
God enough? Is it not as strong as a thousand?" It silenced, but it did
not satisfy me. In the next place, I found difficulties in our theology
from looking at it in a point of view which I had not before considered,
and that was the difference between words and ideas, between the terms
we used and the actual conceptions we entertained, or between the
abstract thesis and the living sense of the matter. Thus with regard to
the latter point, I found that the more I believed in the doctrine of
literally eternal punishments, the more [45] I doubted it. As the living
sense of it pressed more and more upon my mind, it became too awful to
be endured; it darkened the day and the very wo