thought or a feeling that was worth a straw. An old woman, with whom he
had once lived, and with whom he was a great favorite, said to me after
the service, 'Well, how did you like our young man?' 'He talked away,'
said I. 'I think he did,' she answered, 'he grows better and better. _I_
couldn't understand him.' His teacher, my superintendent, published a
volume of sermons; but I never met with anybody that had read them. I
read one or two of them myself, and was astonished;--perhaps not so much
astonished as something else,--to find, that at the end of one of his
tall-worded, long-winded, round-about sentences, he contradicted what he
had said at the beginning.




CHAPTER V.

CHANGES IN THE AUTHOR'S VIEWS.


My studies led me to make considerable changes both in my views and way
of speaking.

1. With regard to my views. I found that some of the doctrines which I
had been taught as Christian doctrines, were not so much as hinted at by
Christ and His Apostles,--that some doctrines which Christ and His
Apostles taught with great plainness, I never had been taught at all;
and that some of the doctrines of Christ and His Apostles which I had
been taught, I had been taught in very different forms from those in
which they were presented in the New Testament.