_To Christ by Way of Rationalism, Unitarianism and Infidelity._

I inherited on the one hand a strong religious nature, and on the
other a tendency to be independent in thought and to question
everything before adopting it as a part of my belief. Ever since I
can remember I was a praying boy, and early in life there came to me
the desire to devote myself to the ministry of the gospel.

Among my earliest religious impressions were those received by having
the story of the Patriarchs and Jesus read to me in German by a
saintly old Mennonite for whom I worked on the farm for a year. Among
the first things that aroused my reason in religion was the
declaration of my Sunday-school teacher that before we are born we
are predestined by God either to go to heaven or to hell, and that
anything we might do would not alter our eternal destiny. This
declaration came like a thunderbolt into my religious life, and
stirred up a violent agitation from which it took me ten years to
fully deliver myself. I was now about fourteen years old, and already
had a desire to measure everything in the crucible of logic or cause
and effect, and to accept nothing which did not come within the range
of my reason. Looking at things from the standpoint of cause and
effect, I was naturally caught in the meshes of fatalism, and this
aggravated the religious agitation above referred to.

At this time in my life there arose many religious questions, and the
answers I received from religious teachers tended to drive me away
from the church rather than to it. I feel to-day that if my case had
been clearly understood and the nature and the limits of the finite
mind had been patiently pointed out to me, in its relation to faith
and revelation, I could have been saved years of agony on the sea of