except a belief in the personality and providence of the Creator.

On reviewing his letters written to me about this time, I am
painfully struck with the manner in which they show that all these
pitiable vagaries were to be traced to a single cause--a cause which
still exists to the misleading of hundreds of thousands, and which, I
fear, seems likely to continue in full force for many a year to come-
-I mean, to a false system of training which teaches people to regard
Christianity as a thing one and indivisible, to be accepted entirely
in the strictest reading of the letter, or to be rejected as
absolutely untrue. The fact is, that all permanent truth is as one
of those coal measures, a seam of which lies near the surface, and
even crops up above the ground, but which is generally of an inferior
quality and soon worked out; beneath it there comes a layer of sand
and clay, and then at last the true seam of precious quality and in
virtually inexhaustible supply. The truth which is on the surface is
rarely the whole truth. It is seldom until this has been worked out
and done with--as in the case of the apparent flatness of the earth--
that unchangeable truth is discovered. It is the glory of the Lord
to conceal a matter: it is the glory of the king to find it out. If
my brother, from whom I have taken the above illustration, had had
some judicious and wide-minded friend to correct and supplement the
mainly admirable principles which had been instilled into him by my
mother, he would have been saved years of spiritual wandering; but,
as it was, he fell in with one after another, each in his own way as
literal and unspiritual as the other--each impressed with one aspect
of religious truth, and with one only. In the end he became perhaps
the widest-minded and most original thinker whom I have ever met; but
no one from his early manhood could have augured this result; on the
contrary, he shewed every sign of being likely to develop into one of