1. In the first place, the works I read weakened, in time, and then destroyed, my instinctive and hereditary faith, and gave me nothing so satisfactory in its place. They filled my mind with thoughts of things outside me, and even outside Christianity itself, which did not take a firm and lasting hold of my affections. They seemed to take me from solid ground and living realities, into regions of cold, thin air, and bewildering mists and clouds. 2. In the second place, the writers disagreed among themselves. They differed as to the value of different kinds of evidence. Some were all for external evidences, and some were all for internal evidences. Some said there was no such thing as internal evidence. 'The very idea of such a thing,' said they, 'supposes that man is able to judge what doctrines are true, or rational, or worthy of God; and what precepts, laws, institutions, and examples are right and good; and man has no such power. Reason has no right to judge revelation. All that reason has a right to do is to judge as to the matter of fact whether the Bible and Christianity be really a revelation from God or not, and, if it be, what is its purport. As to the reasonableness of the doctrines, and the goodness of the precepts, reason has no right or power to judge at all.' Others contended that miracles could never prove the truth or divinity of any system of doctrines or morals that did not commend itself to the judgments and consciences of enlightened, candid, and virtuous men. These two parties, between them, condemned both kinds of evidence. 3. Then thirdly; some used unsound arguments. They used arguments founded on mistakes with regard to matters of fact. Grotius, for instance, based two of his arguments for the existence of God on misconceptions of this kind. 'That there is a God,' said Grotius, 'is evident from the fact, that water, which naturally runs downward to the level of the sea, is made to run upwards through subterranean channels, from the sea to the tops of the mountains, and thus supply springs and streams to water the earth, and supply the wants of its inhabitants.' But the waters are _not_ forced upwards from the sea to the mountains in this way: they are carried to the hills in the form of vapors. True, the evidence for the existence of God supplied by the conversion of water into vapor, and by the many beneficent ends answered thereby, is as real and as convincing a proof of God's existence as any evidence that could have been furnished by such an arrangement as that imagined by Grotius. But I did not see this at the time; hence the discovery that the argument of Grotius was unsound, had an unfavorable effect on my mind.