PREFACE.
This is perhaps an egotistical book; egotistical certainly in its form, yet not in its purport and essence.
Personal reasons the writer cannot wholly disown, for desiring to explain himself to more than a few, who on religious grounds are unjustly alienated from him. If by any motive of curiosity or lingering remembrances they may be led to read his straightforward account, he trusts to be able to show them that he has had no choice but to adopt the intellectual conclusions which offend them; that the difference between them and him turns on questions of Learning, History, Criticism and Abstract Thought;—and that to make their results (if indeed they have ever deeply and honestly investigated the matter) the tests of his spiritual state, is to employ unjust weights and a false balance, which are an abomination to the Lord. To defraud one’s neighbour of any tithe of mint and cummin, would seem to them a sin: is it less to withhold affection, trust and free intercourse, and build up unpassable barriers of coldness and alarm, against one whose sole offence is to differ from them intellectually?
But the argument before the writer is something immensely greater than a personal one. So it happens, that to vindicate himself is to establish a mighty truth; a truth which can in no other way so well enter the heart, as when it comes embodied in an individual case. If he can show, that to have shrunk from his successive convictions would have been “infidelity” to God and Truth and Righteousness; but that he has been “faithful” to the highest and most urgent duty;—it will be made clear that Belief is one thing and Faith another ; that to believe is intellectual, nay possibly, “earthly, devilish;” and that to set up any fixed creed as a test of spiritual character is a most unjust, oppressive and mischievous superstition . The historical form has been deliberately selected, as easier and more interesting to the reader: but it must not be imagined that the author is giving his mental history in general, much less an autobiography. The progress of his creed is his sole subject; and other topics are introduced either to illustrate this, or as digressions suggested by it.
March 22nd, 1850.