The Christian Evidences are an essential part of the course of religious study prescribed at Oxford, and they had engaged from an early period a large share of my attention. Each treatise on the subject, taken by itself, appeared to me to have great argumentative force; but when I tried to grasp them all together in a higher act of thought, I was sensible of a certain confusion, and inability to reconcile their fundamental assumptions. _One_ either formally stated, or virtually assumed, that the deepest basis of all religious knowledge was the testimony of sense to some fact, which is ascertained to be miraculous when examined by the light of Physics or Physiology; and that we must, at least in a great degree, distrust and abandon our moral convictions or auguries, at the bidding of sensible miracle. _Another_ treatise assumed that men's moral feelings and beliefs are, on the whole, the most trustworthy thing to be found; and starting from them as from a known and ascertained foundation, proceeded to glorify Christianity because of its expanding, strengthening, and beautifying all that we know by conscience to be morally right. That the former argument, if ever so valid, was still too learned and scholastic, not for the vulgar only, but for every man in his times of moral trial, I felt instinctively persuaded: yet my intellect could not wholly dispense with it, and my belief in the depravity of the moral understanding of men inclined me to go some way in defending it. To endeavour to combine the two arguments by saying that they were adapted to different states of mind, was plausible; yet it conceded, that neither of the two went to the bottom of human thought, or showed what were the real _fixed points_ of man's knowledge; without knowing which, we are in perpetual danger of mere _argumentum ad hominem_, or, in fact, arguing in a circle;--as to prove miracles from doctrine, and doctrine from miracles. I however conceived that the most logical minds among Christians would contend that there was another solution; which, in 1827, I committed to paper in nearly the following words: "May it not be doubted whether Leland sees the real circumstance that makes a revelation necessary? "No revelation is needed to inform us,--of the invisible power and deity of God; that we are bound to worship Him; that we are capable of sinning against Him and liable to his just Judgment; nay, that we have sinned, and that we find in nature marks of his displeasure against sin; and yet, that He is merciful. St. Paul and our Lord show us that these things are knowable by reason. The ignorance of the heathens is _judicial blindness_, to punish their obstinate rejection of the true God."