expression to the contempt which I entertained for the vulgar and tasteless sceptics who, with Paine at their head, could speak of it as a weak or foolish book. Further, reared in a family circle, some of whose members were habitually devout, and all of whom respected and stood up for religion, and were imbued with the stirring ecclesiastical traditions of their country, I felt that the religious side in any quarrel had a sort of hereditary claim upon me. I believe I may venture to say, that previous to this time I had never seen a religious man badgered for his religion, and much in a minority, without openly taking part with him; nor is it impossible that, in a time of trouble, I might have almost deserved the character given by old John Howie to a rather notable "gentleman sometimes called Burly," who, "although he was by some reckoned none of the most religious," joined himself to the suffering party, and was "always zealous and honest-hearted." And yet my religion was a strangely incongruous thing. It took the form, in my mind, of a mass of indigested theology, with here and there a prominent point developed out of due proportion, from the circumstance that I had thought upon it for myself; and while entangled, if I may so speak, amid the recesses and under cover of the general chaotic mass, there harboured no inconsiderable amount of superstition, there rested over it the clouds of a dreary scepticism. I have sometimes, in looking back on the doubts and questionings of this period, thought, and perhaps even spoken of myself as an infidel. But an infidel I assuredly was not: my belief was at least as real as my incredulity, and had, I am inclined to think, a much deeper seat in my mind. But wavering between the two extremes--now a believer, and anon a sceptic--the belief usually exhibiting itself as a strongly-based instinct,--the scepticism as the result of some intellectual process--I lived on for years in a sort of uneasy see-saw condition, without any middle ground between the two extremes, on which I could at once reason and believe.