The young heresiarch, we will suppose to have spent the earliest season of life, while yet the ingenuousness of youth remained unimpaired, in the pursuits of literature or science, and to have been ignorant of Christianity otherwise than as a system of forms and offices. But the moment of awakening arrives; some appalling accident or piercing sorrow sets the interests of time in abeyance, and opens upon the soul the vast objects of immortality. Or the eloquence of a preacher may have effected the change. In these first moments of a new life, the great and common doctrines of religion, perceived in the freshness of novelty, afford scope enough to the ardor of the spirit; and perhaps, also, a new sentiment of submission quells, in some measure, that ardor: the craving of the mind does not yet need heresy; truth has stimulus enough; and even after truth has become somewhat vapid, the restraints of connection and friendship have force to retain the convert three years, or five, in the bosom of humility. But the first accidental contact with doctrinal paradox kindles the constitutional passion, and rouses the slumbering faculties to the full activity of adult vigor; contention ensues; malign sentiments, although perhaps foreign to the temper, are engendered, and these impart gloom to mysticism, and add rancor to extravagance. And now, no dogma that is obnoxious, terrific, intolerant, schismatical, fails to be, in its turn, avowed by the delirious bigot, who burns with ambition to render himself the enemy—not so much of the world, as of the church. But will even the last extravagance of false doctrine allay the diseased cravings of the brain? Not unless that physical inertness which, towards the middle period of life, sometimes effects a cure of folly, or perhaps some motive of secular interest, supervenes. Otherwise a progression must take place, or a retrogression; and when the heart is sick and faint from the exhaustion of over-activity, and when the whispers of conscience have long ceased to be heard, and when the emotions of genuine piety have become painfully strange to the soul, nothing is so probable as an almost sudden plunge from the pinnacle of high belief, into the bottomless gulf of universal scepticism. A lamentable catastrophe of this kind, and which is only the natural issue of an intellectual enthusiasm, would, no doubt, much oftener take place than it does, if slender reasons of worldly prudence were not usually found to be of firmer texture than all the logic of theology. * * * * *