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honour which these distinguished men have bestowed upon me that suggests the wish I now express. In my copy of the Errors of Romanism you may still read what I wrote on the fly-leaf, when the arrival of the book at Kensington, where I was staying on a visit to my friend Mr. Senior, made me acquainted with the public testimony of esteem given to me by Dr. Whately. I do not complain that the public testimony is withdrawn; I trust the affection which produced it is still fully alive. I have reasons to believe it is. I know that Dr. Whately has numerous and bitter enemies, who would draw inferences injurious to the Orthodoxy of their Prelate, if they saw my name at the head of one of his best works. My wish in stating these facts is only to explain these untoward events of my theological life, by the confession of my own weaknesses.

"In regard to the development of my views against Orthodoxy, after I had submitted to the acute pain of an external separation, I believe I can make the internal process almost visible by an illustration which I think I have employed somewhere else. Like seeds kept from germination by a superincumbent mass of earth, the accumulated principles of denial which had so long lain deep in my mind could not but expand with a rapid growth. Even before I took the resolution of declaring myself a Unitarian, the serious meditation and study which produced my work on Heresy and Orthodoxy had delivered me from all fear of sin in drawing theological con

clusions. The check, nevertheless, which I constantly felt from my public connection with the Church, and my daily intercourse with a high Dignitary and his truly pious family, made that conviction of but small practical effect. I certainly did not dissemble; I showed myself as I was. In Christ, I worshipped the Deity: I conceived his humanity as an emblem of the only God. I generally read a prayer every morning to the family of the Archbishop. The collection of family prayers used in that family was written by the Archbishop himself. One, however, of them, I remember, was written by me, addressed to Jesus, and relating to his resurrection. It burst, as it were, out of my heart, as soon as I joined the family, during one of my strong aspirations after unity of faith with them.

"In this state of mind and heart I had persuaded myself that the New Testament afforded as much evidence for, as against the Divinity of Jesus, and that, in such a doubt, an honest man might remain in a Church professedly Trinitarian, without as

"The progress of intellectual superstition, that fear of sin in reasoning, is clearly to be seen in the few documents of early Christian freedom which escaped the destructive hands of the Church. The tyranny of Orthodoxy was not fully established till the Council of Nice had played the oracle under the influence and protection of Constantine, and that able sophist Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, had introduced the system which bears at present the name of Calvin. I will translate a passage of Gregory of Nazianzum. 'Speculate away about the world or the worlds, about matter, and soul, about rational natures both good and evil, about the resurrection, the judgment, the satisfaction of the sufferings of Christ. For on these subjects though to hit (the truth) is not useless, to miss it is free from danger.'-Orat. 33, (de Theol. I.) in fine.”

senting to the theological quibbles connected with that doctrine. So strongly did I imagine that I could thus remove all practical difficulties, that remembering the good offices which the Rev. George Armstrong had rendered me (though we were personally unknown to each other) when during my residence at Oxford, a Dublin paper abused and calumniated me for several days together; and knowing that soon after this friendly service, Mr. Armstrong had resigned his living, and declared himself a Unitarian, I conceived a desire of bringing him back to the Church. For this purpose I made inquiries as to his residence, and having discovered it, I wrote to him a letter, conceived in accordance with my view. To this letter I received a very powerful answer, in which my crude and unsifted notion of the equality of evidence on both sides of the question, was utterly demolished. I could not dissemble my defeat; but still endeavoured to find some reason for not declaring myself a Unitarian. Another, and another unanswerable refutation of my arguments, which I received in the course of a few weeks, made me perfectly aware of the self-deception by which I wished to spare myself the truly awful pain of the separation which honesty demanded from me. In my private meditations I had never given distinct utterance to, I had not embodied the state of, my own thoughts; everything had been resolved into feeling; but the moment that a written discussion obliged me to express my ideas distinctly, I could not hesitate a mo

ment as to my conduct. I instantly determined to tear myself from my friends. I knew well that great sufferings awaited me; but alas! they have exceeded my conception. You saw a few days ago, a few lines I had written in a Book which I keep by me, as an irregular Journal. In a fit of agony, such as I cannot well describe, I remembered that my friend Dr. Whately used to say, that in me he had seen a martyr to truth. This recollection suggested the following note: (July 19th, 1839,) 'I am at that stage of my martyrdom, when the flame, which has not been able to extinguish life by suffocation, subsides, and the burning coals melt the limbs.' But I must not

digress. What I say respecting the contents of my letters to Mr. Armstrong is from memory. It is probable he preserves them: if my conjecture be true, and if, upon publishing my Memoirs, you think that those letters throw light upon the object of the Memoirs, which is to make myself known such as I am, do not hesitate to insert them.* They prove my defeat; but I never fought for victory, unless the victory was Truth's own.

"My journals of that period are copious in details; I do not believe that I have recorded anything which implies reproach to my friends. I am sure I have not, since I never had any feeling that would make me express dissatisfaction If in the agony of pain which I suffered, any complaint dropped from me, let it not appear after my death. All my feelings con

[* Vol. ii. pp. 41, 48, 49, 58, 68.]

tradict it: Love and Regret (Desiderium) fill up my heart so as to exclude all other sentiments.

"The Letters on Heresy and Orthodoxy were written before my separation from the Church. I considerably altered their tone when, free from my engagements, I prepared them for the press in Liverpool. But whoever may take the trouble impartially to examine the substance of those letters, and the spirit of the SECOND TRAVELS OF AN IRISH GENTLEMAN, far from being surprised at my leaving the Church soon after I had written those works, will find it difficult to explain, except in the way I have done it, how, with an honest mind, I continued any longer in it. Add to this the fact of my having composed about the same time a Letter on BAPTISM, which you have seen inserted in the CHRISTIAN TEACHER. That letter contains the result of a laborious examination of all the passages of the New Testament which mention Baptism. The conclusion at which I arrived is, that neither Jesus, nor the writers of the New Testament, ever considered baptism in the light of a sacrament; that they did not demand it from all; that the manner of performing it was not fixed; and that though Christians may use it without blame as a ceremony of initiation, they may omit it without danger. This was enough to exclude me from the Church.

"These instances of conviction, derived from the study of the New Testament, tend to show the foundation on which my mind was working. The theo

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