or a moment allow weight to the topic, that "it is
dangerous to _dis_believe wrongly;" for I felt, and had always
felt, that it gave a premium to the most boastful and tyrannizing
superstition:--as if it were not equally dangerous to _believe_
wrongly! Nevertheless, I tried to plead for farther delay, by asking:
Is not the subject too vast for me to decide upon?--Think how many
wise and good men have fully examined, and have come to a contrary
conclusion. What a grasp of knowledge and experience of the human mind
it requires! Perhaps too I have unawares been carried away by a love
of novelty, which I have mistaken for a love of truth.

But the argument recoiled upon me. Have I not been 25 years a reader
of the Bible? have I not full 18 years been a student of Theology?
have I not employed 7 of the best years of my life, with ample
leisure, in this very investigation;--without any intelligible earthly
bribe to carry me to my present conclusion, against all my interests,
all my prejudices and all my education? There are many far more
learned men than I,--many men of greater power of mind; but there are
also a hundred times as many who are my inferiors; and if I have been
seven years labouring in vain to solve this vast literary problem, it
is an extreme absurdity to imagine that the solving of it is imposed
by God on the whole human race. Let me renounce my little learning;
let me be as the poor and simple: what then follows? Why, then, _still
the same thing follows_, that difficult literary problems concerning
distant history cannot afford any essential part of my religion.

It is with hundreds or thousands a favourite idea, that "they have an
inward witness of the truth of (_the historical and outward facts of_)
Christianity." Perhaps the statement would bring its own refutation
to them, if they would express it clearly. Suppose a biographer of Sir
Isaac Newton, after narrating his sublime discoveries and ably stating
some of his most remarkable doctrines, to add, that Sir Isaac was a
great magician, and had been used to raise spirits by his arts, and
finally was himself carried up to heaven one night, while he
was gazing at the moon; and that this event had been foretold by
Merlin:--it would surely be the height of absurdity to dilate on the
truth of the Newtonian theory as "the moral evidence" of the truth of
the miracles and prophecy. Yet this is what those do, who adduce the
excellence of the precepts and spiritual