said Bellamy, "Mr. X is a rough, passionate, swearing man,--I am sorry to say it; but I do believe," he said, hardly repressing the tears that started, "that there is more of the milk of human kindness in his heart than in all my parish put together!" I may observe, in passing, that I heard, in those days, a great deal of dissent expressed from the popular theology, beside my uncle's. I heard it often from my father and his friends. It was a frequent topic in our house, especially after a sermon on the decrees, or election, or the sinner's total inability to comply with the conditions on which salvation was offered to him. The dislike of these doctrines increased and spread here, till it became a revolt of nearly half the town, I think, against them; and thirty years ago a Liberal [39] society might have been built up in Sheffield, and ought to have been. I very well remember my father's coming home from the General Court [The Massachusetts Legislative Assembly is so called.--M. E. D.], of which he was a member, and expressing the warmest admiration of the preaching of Channing. The feeling, however, of hostility to the Orthodox faith, in his time, was limited to a few; but somebody in New York, who was acquainted with it,--I don't know who,--sent up some infidel books. One of them was lying about in our house, and I remember seeing my mother one day take it and put it into the fire. It was a pretty resolute act for one of the gentlest beings that I ever knew, and decisively showed where she stood. She did not sympathize with my father in his views of religion, but meekly, and I well remember how earnestly, she sought and humbly found the blessed way, such as was open to her mind. As my whole view of religion was changed from indifference or aversion to a profound interest in it, a change very naturally followed in my plan for future life, that is, in my choice of a profession,--very naturally, at least then; I do not say that it would be so now. I expected to be a lawyer; and I have sometimes been inclined to regret that I was not; for courts of law always have had, and have still, a strange fascination for me, and I see now that a lawyer's or physician's life may be [40] actuated by as lofty principles, and may be as noble and holy, as a clergyman's. But I did not think so then. Then, I felt as if the life of a minister of religion were the only sacred, the only religious life; as, in regard to the special objects with which it is engaged, it is. But what especially moved me to embrace it, I will confess, was a desire to vindicate for religion its rightful claim and place in the world, to roll off the cloud and darkness that lay upon it, and to show it in its true light. It had been dark to me; it had been something strange and repulsive, and even unreal,--something conjured up by fear and superstition. I came to see it as the divinest, the sublimest, and the loveliest reality, and I burned with a desire that others should see it.