"If happiness have not her seat And centre in the breast, We may be wise, or rich, or great, But never can be blest. No treasures, nor pleasures. Can make us happy long; The _heart_ ay's the part ay That makes us right or wrong." And my heart was out of tune, and tended to put everything around me out of tune. CHAPTER XVI. THE STORY OF MY DESCENT FROM THE FAITH OF MY CHILDHOOD, TO DOUBT AND UNBELIEF. My parents were Methodists of the strictest kind, and they did their utmost to make their children Methodists. And they were very successful. They had eleven children, ten of which became members of the Methodist Society before they were twenty years of age; and even the odd one did not escape the influence of religion altogether. I was a believer in God and Christ, in duty and immortality, from my earliest days. And my faith was strong. Things spiritual were as real to me as things natural. Things seen and things unseen, things temporal and things eternal, formed one great whole,--one solemn and boundless universe. I lived and breathed in a spiritual world. My parents were rigorously consistent. They were true Christians. They not only talked, but looked and lived as persons who felt themselves in the presence of a great and holy God, and in the face of an awful eternity; and the influence of their godly life, and daily prayers, and solemn counsels fell on me with a power that was irresistible. If the doctrine taught me in my early days had been the doctrine of Christ, and the doctrine of Christ alone, in a form adapted to my youthful mind, the probability is, that I should have grown up to manhood, and passed through life a happy, useful and consistent Christian. But I was taught other doctrines. Though my father and mother taught me little but what was Christian, doctrines were taught me by others that shocked both my reason and my sense of right. I was taught, among other things, that in consequence of the sin of Adam, God had caused me to come into the world utterly depraved, and incapable, till I was made over again, of thinking one good thought, of speaking one good word, or of doing one good deed. I felt that I did think good thoughts, and that I had good feelings, and that I both said and did good things. But this I was told was a great delusion:--that nothing was good, and that nothing was pleasing to God, unless it came from faith in Christ. But I _had_ faith in Christ. I believed in Him with all my heart. I had believed in Him from the first. The answer was that I had believed with a _common_ kind of faith, but that it was another kind of faith that was necessary to salvation, and that whatsoever did not spring from this other kind of faith, was sin. And I was given to understand, that if I thought otherwise, it was because of the naughtiness of my heart, which, I was told, was deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. What