I fully expected that reviewers and opponents from the evangelical school would laboriously insinuate or assert, that I _never was_ a Christian and do not understand anything about Christianity spiritually. My expectations have been more than fulfilled; and the course which my assailants have taken leads me to add some topics to the last paragraph. I say then, that if I had been slain at the age of twenty-seven, when I was chased[8] by a mob of infuriated Mussulmans for selling New Testaments, they would have trumpeted me as an eminent saint and martyr. I add, that many circumstances within easy possibility might have led to my being engaged as an official teacher of a congregation at the usual age, which would in all probability have arrested my intellectual development, and have stereotyped my creed for many a long year; and then also they would have acknowledged me as a Christian. A little more stupidity, a little more worldliness, a little more mental dishonesty in me, or perhaps a little more kindness and management in others, would have kept me in my old state, which was acknowledged and would still be acknowledged as Christian. To try to disown me now, is an impotent superciliousness. At the same time, I confess to several moral changes, as the result of this change in my creed, the principal of which are the following. 1. I have found that my old belief narrowed my affections. It taught me to bestow peculiar love on "the people of God," and it assigned an intellectual creed as one essential mark of this people. That creed may be made more or less stringent; but when driven to its minimum, it includes a recognition of the historical proposition, that "the Jewish teacher Jesus fulfilled the conditions requisite to constitute him the Messiah of the ancient Hebrew prophets." This proposition has been rejected by very many thoughtful and sincere men in England, and by tens of thousands in France, Germany, Italy, Spain. To judge rightly about it, is necessarily a problem of literary criticism; which has both to interpret the Old Scriptures and to establish how much of the biography of Jesus in the New is credible. To judge wrongly about it, may prove one to be a bad critic but not a less good and less pious man. Yet my old creed enacted an affirmative result of this historical inquiry, as a test of one's spiritual state, and ordered me to think harshly of men like Marcus Aurelius and Lessing, because they did not adopt the conclusion which the professedly uncritical have established. It possessed me with a general gloom concerning Mohammedans and Pagans, and involved the whole course of history and prospects of futurity in a painful darkness from which I am relieved.