I was not too young to subscribe, I was not too young to refuse
subscription. The argument that the article was "unpractical" to me,
goes to prove, that if I were ordered by a despot to qualify myself
for a place in the Church by solemnly renouncing the first book of
Euclid as false, I might do so without any loss of moral dignity.
Altogether, this humiliating affair showed me what a trap for the
conscience these subscriptions are: how comfortably they are passed
while the intellect is torpid or immature, or where the conscience is
callous, but how they undermine truthfulness in the active thinker,
and torture the sensitiveness of the tenderminded. As long as they
are maintained, in Church or University, these institutions exert a
positive influence to deprave or eject those who ought to be their
most useful and honoured members.

It was already breaking upon me, that I could not fulfil the dreams of
my boyhood as a minister in the Church of England. For, supposing that
with increased knowledge I might arrive at the conclusion that Infant
Baptism was a fore-arranged "development,"--not indeed practised in
the _first_ generation, but expedient, justifiable, and intended
for the _second_, and probably then sanctioned by one still living
apostle,--even so, I foresaw the still greater difficulty of Baptismal
Regeneration behind. For any one to avow that Regeneration took place
in Baptism, seemed to me little short of a confession that he had
never himself experienced what Regeneration is. If I _could_ then
have been convinced that the apostles taught no other regeneration,
I almost think that even their authority would have snapt under the
strain: but this is idle theory; for it was as clear as daylight to me
that they held a totally different doctrine, and that the High Church
and Popish fancy is a superstitious perversion, based upon carnal
inability to understand a strong spiritual metaphor. On the other
hand, my brother's arguments that the Baptismal Service of the Church
taught "spiritual regeneration" during the ordinance, were short,
simple, and overwhelming. To imagine a _twofold_ "spiritual
regeneration" was evidently a hypothesis to serve a turn, nor in any
of the Church formulas was such an idea broached. Nor could I hope for
relief by searching through the Homilies or by drawing deductions from
the Articles: for if I there elicited a truer doctrine, it would never
show the Baptismal Service not to teach the Popi