fiction; and his conclusions were to me so marvellous and painful,
that I constantly thought I had mistaken him. In short, he was my
senior by a very few years: nor was there any elder resident at
Oxford, accessible to me, who united all the qualities which I wanted
in an adviser. Nothing was left for me but to cast myself on Him who
is named the Father of Lights, and resolve to follow the light which
He might give, however opposed to my own prejudices, and however I
might be condemned by men. This solemn engagement I made in early
youth, and neither the frowns nor the grief of my brethren can make me
ashamed of it in my manhood.

Among the religious authors whom I read familiarly was the Rev.
T. Scott, of Aston Sandford, a rather dull, very unoriginal,
half-educated, but honest, worthy, sensible, strong-minded man, whose
works were then much in vogue among the Evangelicals. One day my
attention was arrested by a sentence in his defence of the doctrine
of the Trinity. He complained that Anti-Trinitarians unjustly charged
Trinitarians with self-contradiction. "If indeed we said" (argued he)
"that God is three _in the same sense_ as that in which He is one,
that would be self-refuting; but we hold Him to be _three in one
sense, and one in another_." It crossed my mind very forcibly, that,
if that was all, the Athanasian Creed had gratuitously invented an
enigma. I exchanged thoughts on this with an undergraduate friend, and
got no fresh light: in fact, I feared to be profane, if I attempted
to understand the subject. Yet it came distinctly home to me, that,
whatever the depth of the mystery, if we lay down anything about
it _at all_, we ought to understand our own words; and I presently
augured that Tillotson had been right in "wishing our Church well rid"
of the Athanasian Creed; which seemed a mere offensive blurting out
of intellectual difficulties. I had, however, no doubts, even of a