a sale of a fine library, and I had been
heart-broken because my means had not permitted me to buy the works of
Sir Kenelm Digby. However, I found them in the Princeton College
Library. The first thing I came to in Paley was his famous simile of the
watch--taken bodily and without acknowledgment from Digby. The theft
disgusted me. "These be your Christian champions!" I thought--

"Would any of the stock of infidels
Had been my evidence ere such a Christian!"

And, moreover, Paley forgets to inform us what conclusion the finder
might draw if he had picked up a badly made watch which did not keep good
time--like this our turnip of a world at times!

As we were obliged to attend divine service strictly on Sunday, I was
allowed to go to the Episcopal church in the village, which agreed very
well with my parents' views. I quite fell into the sentiment of the
sect, and so went to Professor Dodd to ask for permission from the
Faculty to change my religion. When he asked me how it was that I had
renegaded into Trinitarianism, I replied that it was due to reflection on
the perfectly obvious and usual road of the Platonic hypostases eked out
with Gnosticism. I had found in the College Library, and read with great
pleasure almost as soon as I got there, Cudworth's "Intellectual System"
(I raided a copy as _loot_ from a house in Tennessee in after years,
during the war), and learned from it that "it was a religious instinct of
man to begin with a Trinity, in which I was much aided by Schelling, and
that there was no trace of a Trinity in the Bible, or rather the
contrary, yet that it _ought_ consistently to have been there"--a
sentiment which provoked from Professor Dodd a long whistle like that of
Uncle Toby with Lilliburlero. "For," as I ingeniously represented, "man
or God consists of the Monad from which developed spirit or intellect and
soul; for _toto enim in mundo lucet Trias cujus Monas est princeps_, as
the creed of the Rosicrucians begins (which is taken from the Zoroastrian
oracles)"--here there was another long subdued whistle--"and it is set
forth on the face of every Egyptian temple as the ball, the wings of the
spirit which rusheth into all worlds, and the serpent, which is the
_Logos_." Here the whistle became more sympathetic, for Egypt was the
professor's great point in his lectures on architecture. And having thus
explained the true grounds of the Trinity to the most learned theologian
of the Pr