a cloud of prejudices we have at least learned to love and value
above all others, new beauties dawn on us from day to day, till at
length we wonder how we could at any time have thought it other than
most beautiful. Studying the sacred volume in the light and in the
freedom of a faith already secured, at every fresh meeting my sceptic
friend has to tell me of some new passage, formerly viewed by him as
a dry stick on a rotten branch, which has BUDDED and, like the rod of
Aaron, BROUGHT FORTH BUDS AND BLOOMED BLOSSOMS, AND YIELDED ALMONDS.
Let these results, I say, be supposed--and shall I still be told that
my friend is nevertheless an alien in the household of Faith?
Scrupulously orthodox as I know you to be, will you tell me that I
ought to have left this sceptic as I found him, rather than attempt
his conversion by such means; or that I was deceiving him, when I
said to him:-

"Friend! The truth revealed through Christ has its evidence in
itself, and the proof of its divine authority in its fitness to our
nature and needs; the clearness and cogency of this proof being
proportionate to the degree of self-knowledge in each individual
hearer. Christianity has likewise its historical evidences, and
these as strong as is compatible with the nature of history, and with
the aims and objects of a religious dispensation. And to all these
Christianity itself, as an existing power in the world, and
Christendom as an existing fact, with the no less evident fact of a
progressive expansion, give a force of moral demonstration that
almost supersedes particular testimony. These proofs and evidences
would remain unshaken, even though the sum of our religion were to be
drawn from the theologians of each successive century, on the
principle of receiving that only as divine which should be found in
all--quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus. Be only, my friend!