made to
me, that I knew more than other youths who were considered well educated,
was to me a piece of information, to which, as to all other things which
my father told me, I gave implicit credence, but which did not at all
impress me as a personal matter. I felt no disposition to glorify myself
upon the circumstance that there were other persons who did not know what
I knew; nor had I ever flattered myself that my acquirements, whatever
they might be, were any merit of mine: but, now when my attention was
called to the subject, I felt that what my father had said respecting my
peculiar advantages was exactly the truth and common sense of the matter,
and it fixed my opinion and feeling from that time forward.

CHAPTER II

MORAL INFLUENCES IN EARLY YOUTH. MY FATHER'S CHARACTER AND OPINIONS

In my education, as in that of everyone, the moral influences, which
are so much more important than all others, are also the most
complicated, and the most difficult to specify with any approach to
completeness. Without attempting the hopeless task of detailing the
circumstances by which, in this respect, my early character may have
been shaped, I shall confine myself to a few leading points, which
form an indispensable part of any true account of my education.

I was brought up from the first without any religious belief, in the
ordinary acceptation of the term. My father, educated in the creed of
Scotch Presbyterianism, had by his own studies and reflections been
early led to reject not only the belief in Revelation, but the
foundations of what is commonly called Natural Religion. I have heard
him say, that the turning point of his mind on the subject was reading
Butler's _Analogy_. That work, of which he always continued to speak
with respect, kept him, as he said, for some considerable time, a
believer in the divine authority of Christianity; by proving to him
that whatever are the difficulties in believing that the Old and New
Testaments proceed from, or record the acts of, a perfectly wise and
good being, the same and still greater difficulties stand in the way
of the belief, that a being of such a character can have been the
Maker of the universe. He considered Butler's argument as conclusive
against the only opponents for whom it was intended. Those who admit
an omnipotent as well as perfectly just and benevolent maker and ruler
of such a world as this, can say little against Christianity but what
can, with at le