y how I "found subjects to
write upon;" and my answering, "I don't find subjects; they find me."
I may say they pursued me. It may be owing to this that my sermons
have possibly a somewhat peculiar character; what, I do not know, but
I remember William Ware's saying, when my first volume of Discourses
appeared, "that they were written as if nobody ever wrote sermons
before," and something so they were written. I do not suppose there
is much originality of thought in them, nor any curiosa felicitas of
language, I could not attend to it; it was as much as I could do to
disburden myself, but original in this they are, that they were wrought
out in the bosom of my own meditation and experience. The pen was dipped
in my heart, I do know that. With burning brain and bursting tears I
wrote. Little fruit, perhaps, for so much struggle; be it so, though it
could not be so [61] to me. But so we work, each one in his own way; and
altogether something comes of it.

Early in my professional life, too, I met certain questions, which every
thinking man meets sooner or later, and which were pressed upon my mind
by the new element that came into our religious society. The Friends are
trained up to reverence the inward light, and have the less respect for
historical Christianity. The revelation in our nature, then, and the
revelation in the Scriptures; the proper place of each in any just
system of thought and theology; what importance is to be assigned to
the primitive intuitions of right and wrong, and what to the
supernaturalism, to the miracles of the New Testament, these were the
questions, and I discussed them a good deal in the pulpit, as matters
very practical to many of the minds with which I was dealing. I admitted
the full, nay, the supreme value of the original intuitions, of the
inward light, of the teachings of the Infinite Spirit in the human
soul; without them we could have no religion; without them we could not
understand the New Testament at all, and Christianity would be but as
light to the blind; but I maintained that Christ's teaching and living
and dying were the most powerful appeal and help and guidance to the
inward nature, to the original religion of the soul, that it had ever
received. And I believed and maintained that this help, at once most
divine and most human, was commended to the world by miraculous
[62] attestations. Not that the miracle, or the miracle-sanctioned
Christianity, was intended to supersede