rational, you must give up your belief in eternal punishment, for God
could not give eternal punishment for a finite sin." As a
rationalist, what could I do but yield, and so I became a
universalist Unitarian. I felt I had at last found the truth, but my
peace was short; for a student accused me of being irrational,
"because," said he, "an omnipotent, loving God would give an
infinitely large amount of good and an infinitely small amount of
evil; but an infinitely small amount of evil is not perceptible, evil
is perceptible, therefore there is no such God." This was an awful
pill and gave a terrible shock to my religious sensibilities, but as
rationalism was my guide, I had to follow on or stand accused as a
superstitious coward.

Again rationalism declared, through my teachers, that all the
supernatural must be eliminated from the Bible as mythical and
unreliable, and so I was robbed of my Christ, my God and my Bible.
Misguided by rationalism, I thought it my conscientious duty to
accept, step by step, the dictates of destructive criticism until the
Bible was only inspired to me in religion as Kant in philosophy,
Milton in poetry, and Beethoven in music. But when I came to the end
of the matter I discovered that my conscience, which had urged me
along, was gone also. For I was gravely taught that conscience is
merely a creature of experience and education, and that it is right
to lie or do anything else so long as you do it out of love.
Doubtless you have all heard of the farmer and his wife at the
World's Fair who went to see the "Exit." There was nothing in it, and
of course they had to pay to get in again. This was my bitter
experience with rationalism. I thought I was following a great light,
but I discovered there was nothing in it, that I was following an
_ignis fatuus_. Rationalism has indeed proven the "Exit" to