When he stood before us, and, lifting his hands almost to the ceiling, said, "And so they reared him up!" it seemed as if he described the catastrophe of the world, not its redemption. Indeed, Mr. Judson appeared to think that anything drawn from the Bible was good, whether he made any moral application of it or not. I have heard him preach a whole sermon, giving the most precise and detailed description of the building of the Tabernacle, without one word of comment, [16] inference, or instruction. But he was a good and kindly man; and when, as I was going to college at the age of eighteen, he laid his hand upon my head, and gave me, with solemn form and tender accent, his blessing, I felt awed and impressed, as I imagine the Hebrew youth may have felt under a patriarch's benediction. With such an example and teacher of religion before me, whose goodness I did not know, and whose strangeness and preternatural character only I felt; and indeed with all the ideas I got of religion, whether from Sunday-keeping or catechising, my early impressions on that subject could not be happy or winning. I remember the time when I really feared that if I went out into the fields to walk on Sunday, bears would come down from the mountain and catch me. At a later day, but still in my childhood, I recollect a book-pedler's coming to our house, and when he opened his pack, that I selected from a pile of story-books, Bunyan's "Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners." Religion had a sort of horrible attraction for me, but nothing could exceed its gloominess. I remember looking down from the gallery at church upon the celebration of the Lord's Supper, and pitying the persons engaged in it more than any people in the world,--I thought they were so unhappy. I had heard of "the unpardonable sin," and well do I recollect lying in my bed a mere child--and having thoughts and words injected into my mind, which I [17]imagined were that sin, and shuddering, and trembling, and saying aloud, "No, no, no; I do not,--I will not." It is the grand mystery of Providence that what is divinest and most beautiful should be suffered to be so painfully, and, as it must seem at first view, so injuriously misconstrued. But what is universal, must be a law; and what is law, must be right,--must have good reasons for it. And certainly so it is. Varying as the ages vary, yet the experience of the individual is but a picture of the universal mind,--of the world's mind. The steps are the same, ignorance, fear, superstition, implicit faith; then doubt, questioning, struggling, long and anxious reasoning; then, at the end, light, more or less, as the case may be. Can it, in the nature of things, be otherwise? The fear of death, for instance, which I had, which all children have, can childhood escape it? Far onward and upward must be the victory over that fear. And the fear of God, and, indeed, the whole idea of religion,--must it not, in like manner, necessarily