Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story by Joseph Barker
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page 46 of 547 (08%)
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wonderful periods in which they flourished. I was especially fond of
Cicero, Seneca, and Epictetus. All subjects bearing on the great interests of mankind, and all works revealing the workings of the human mind and the laws of human nature, seemed to me to bear important relations to religion and the Bible; and the writings of the great philosophers, lawyers, and historians, appeared to be almost as much in my line as Baxter's Christian Directory, or Wesley's Notes on the New Testament. Tales of wars and intrigues, and of royal and aristocratic vices and follies I hated. Yet I was interested in accounts of religious controversies, and read with eagerness, though with pain and horror, the tragic and soul-harrowing stories of the deadly conflicts between Christian piety and anti-Christian intolerance. Above all I loved well-written books on the beneficial influence of Christianity on the temporal interests and the general happiness of mankind. I liked good biographies, especially of celebrated students, great philosophers, and remarkable Christian philanthropists. Of works of fiction I read very few, and evermore still fewer as I got older, until at length I came to view them generally as a great nuisance. There are few, I suppose, that can say they read the whole, not only of Wesley's works, but of his Christian Library, in fifty volumes; yet I went through the whole, though one of the books was so profound, or else so silly, that I could not find one sentence in it that I could properly understand. I read the greater part of the books of my friends. I went through nearly the whole library of a village about two miles distant from my native place. My native place itself could not boast a library in those days. I read scores, if not hundreds of books that taught me nothing but the ignorance and self-conceit of the writers, and the various forms of literary and religious insanity to which poor weak humanity is liable. |
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