Take the case of young men of condition, bred up by what we have termed nominal Christians. When children, they are carried to church, and thence they become acquainted with such parts of Scripture as are contained in our public service. If their parents preserve still more of the customs of better times, they are taught their Catechism, and furnished with a little farther religious knowledge. After a while, they go from under the eyes of their parents; they enter into the world, and move forward in the path of life, whatever it may be, which has been assigned to them. They yield to the temptations which assail them, and become, more or less, dissipated and licentious. At least they neglect to look into their Bible; they do not enlarge the sphere of their religious acquisitions; they do not even endeavour, by reflection and study, to turn into what may deserve the name of knowledge and rational conviction, the opinions which, in their childhood, they had taken on trust. They travel, perhaps, into foreign countries; a proceeding which naturally tends to weaken their nursery, prejudice in favour of the Religion in which they were bred, and by removing them from all means of public worship, to relax their practical habits of Religion. They return home, and commonly are either hurried round in the vortex of dissipation, or engage with the ardour of youthful minds in some public or professional pursuit. If they read or hear any thing about Christianity, it is commonly only about those tenets which are subjects of controversy: and what reaches their ears of the Bible, from their occasional attendance at church; though it may sometimes impress them with an idea of the purity of Christian morality, contains much which, coming thus detached, perplexes and offends them, and suggests various doubts and startling objections, which a farther acquaintance with the Scripture would remove. Thus growing more and more to know Christianity only by the difficulties it contains; sometimes tempted by the ambition of shewing themselves superior to vulgar prejudice, and always prompted by the natural pride of the human heart to cast off their subjection to dogmas imposed on them; disgusted, perhaps, by the immoral lives of some professed Christians, by the weaknesses and absurdities of others, and by what they observe to be the implicit belief of numbers, whom they see and know to be equally ignorant with themselves, many doubts and suspicions of greater or less extent spring up within them. These doubts enter into the mind at first almost imperceptibly: they exist only as vague indistinct surmises, and by no means take the precise shape or the substance of a formed opinion. At first, probably, they even offend and startle by their intrusion: but by degrees the unpleasant sensations which they once excited wear off: the mind grows more familiar with them. A confused sense (for such it is, rather than a formed idea) of