nfess to several moral changes, as the result of
this change in my creed, the principal of which are the following.

1. I have found that my old belief narrowed my affections. It taught
me to bestow peculiar love on "the people of God," and it assigned an
intellectual creed as one essential mark of this people. That creed
may be made more or less stringent; but when driven to its minimum, it
includes a recognition of the historical proposition, that "the Jewish
teacher Jesus fulfilled the conditions requisite to constitute him
the Messiah of the ancient Hebrew prophets." This proposition has been
rejected by very many thoughtful and sincere men in England, and by
tens of thousands in France, Germany, Italy, Spain. To judge rightly
about it, is necessarily a problem of literary criticism; which has
both to interpret the Old Scriptures and to establish how much of the
biography of Jesus in the New is credible. To judge wrongly about it,
may prove one to be a bad critic but not a less good and less pious
man. Yet my old creed enacted an affirmative result of this historical
inquiry, as a test of one's spiritual state, and ordered me to think
harshly of men like Marcus Aurelius and Lessing, because they did
not adopt the conclusion which the professedly uncritical have
established. It possessed me with a general gloom concerning
Mohammedans and Pagans, and involved the whole course of history and
prospects of futurity in a painful darkness from which I am relieved.

2. Its theory was one of selfishness. That is, it inculcated that my
first business must be, to save my soul from future punishment, and
to attain future happiness; and it bade me to chide myself, when I
thought of nothing but about doing present duty and blessing God for
present enjoyment.

In point of fact, I never did look much to futurity, nor even in
prospect of death could attain to any vivid anticipations or desires,
much less was troubled with fears. The evil which I suffered from
my theory, was not (I believe) that it really made me selfish--other
influences of it were too powerful:--but it taught me to blame
myself for unbelief, because I was not sufficiently absorbed in the
contemplation of my vast personal expectations. I certainly here feel
myself delivered from the danger of factitious sin.

The selfish and self-righteous texts come principally from the three
first gospels, and are greatly counteracted by the deeper spirituality
of the apostoli