Far be it from me—­(I spoke in a tone which, I imagine, they hardly knew whether to take as compliment or irony)—­to affirm that the infidels of this day are like those I knew in my youth.  I have no hesitation in saying of us, that a perfectly natural recoil—­partly intellectual and partly moral—­from the supernatural history, the peculiar doctrines, but, above all, the severe morality of the New Testament, was at the bottom of our unbelief.  I have long felt that the reception of that book on the part of any human being is not the least of its proofs that it is divine, for I am persuaded there never was a book naturally more repulsive either to the human head or heart.  All the prejudices of man are necessarily arrayed against it.  I felt these prejudice, I am now distinctly conscious; nor was I insensible to the palpable advantages of infidelity;—­its accommodating morality; its Large margin for the passions and appetites; its doubts of any future world, or its certainty that, if there were one, it would prove a universal paradise (for doubts and certainties are equally within the compass of human wishes); the absolute abolition of hell and every thing like in.  I say I saw clearly enough the advantages which infidelity promised, and I acknowledge I was not insensible to them.  I think no young men are likely to be.

I do not insinuate that similar advantages have any thing to do with those many peculiar revelations of religion which different oracles have in our day substituted for the New Testament.  The arguments against Christianity, indeed, I do not find much altered; the substitutions for it, though distractingly various, are, I confess, in some respects different.  Nay, we see that many of our “spiritualists” complain chiefly of the moral and spiritual deficiencies of Christianity; they are afraid, with Mr. Newman, of the conscience of man being depressed to the Bible standard!  So that we must suppose that the aim of some, at least, of our infidel reformers, are prompted by a loftier ideal of “spiritual” purity than Christianity presents!

It certainly was not so then.  I felicitate some of you, gentlemen, on being so much holier and wiser, nor only than we were, but even than Christ and his Apostles.

I have said I was not insensible to the advantages of infidelity; but nature had endowed me with prudence as well as passions; and I wanted evidence for what appeared to me its most gratuitous philosophy of the future,—­for its too uncertain doubts of all futurity, and its too doubtful certainty of none but a happy one!  I also wanted evidence of the falsehood of Christianity itself.  As to the former, I shall not trouble you with my difficulties; there were indeed then, as now, an admirable variety of theories; but if I could have been convinced of the futility of the claims of Christianity, I believe I should have been easily satisfied as to a substitute; or rather, unable to decide between Chubb and Bolingbroke, Voltaire and Rousseau, I should most likely have tossed up for my religion.