2. I reviewed Church History. While under the influence of anti-Christian views and feelings, I had read the history of the Church and Christianity with a view to justify my unbelief, rather than with a desire to know the simple truth. I had looked more for facts which could be used to damage the Church, than for fair full views of things. My mind had dwelt particularly on the Church's quarrels, its divisions, its intolerance, and its wars;--on the favor which the clergy had sometimes shown to slavery and to despotism;--on their asceticisms, fanaticisms, and follies; and on cases of fraud, and selfishness, and impurity. I had read as an advocate retained to plead the cause of unbelief, rather than as a candid judge, or an unbiassed student, anxious to know and teach the whole truth. I was not conscious of my unfairness at the time, but I now began to see that I had been influenced by my irreligious passions and prejudices. I saw, on looking over my Guizot for instance, that I had marked the passages which contained matters not creditable to the clergy, and passed unnoticed those portions of the work which set forth the services which the Church and Christianity had rendered to civilization. I also remembered how eagerly I had swallowed the unfair representations and fallacious reasonings of Buckle with regard to Christianity and skepticism, and how impatiently I had hurried over what reviewers friendly to Christianity said on the other side of the subject. The balance of my mind was at length restored. I now saw that Christianity had proved itself the friend of peace and freedom, of learning and science, of trade and agriculture, of temperance and purity, of justice and charity, of domestic comfort and national prosperity. The history of Christianity was the history of our superior laws, of our improved manners, of our beneficent institutions, of our schools of learning, of our boundless wealth, of our constitutional governments, of our unequalled literature, of our world-wide influence, of our domestic happiness, and of all that goes to make up our highest forms of civilization. Imperfectly as it had been understood, and defectively as it had been reduced to practice, Christianity had placed the nations of Europe at the head of the human race. Christian nations were the most enlightened and virtuous, the most prosperous and powerful, the most free and happy of all the nations of the earth. The pious frauds, the intolerance and persecutions, the oppressions and wrongs, the selfishness and sin, which were found in the history of the Church, were not the effects of Christianity, but the effects of passions and principles directly opposed to its spirit and teachings.