Sceptical thoughts as to revealed religion had assailed his mind, while with expanding powers it "communed with the glorious universe;" and in 1787 he writes from Edinburgh to a "Mr. James M'Candlish, student in physic, College, Glasgow," who had favored him with a long argumentative infidel letter, "I, likewise, since you and I were first acquainted, in the pride of despising old women's stories, ventured on 'the daring path Spinoza trod;' but experience of the weakness, not the strength of human powers, _made me glad to grasp at revealed religion_." When at Ellisland, he writes to Mrs. Dunlop, "My idle reasonings sometimes make me a little sceptical, but the necessities of my heart always give the cold philosophizings the lie. Who looks for the heart weaned from earth; the soul affianced to her God; the correspondence fixed with heaven; the pious supplication and devout thanksgiving, constant as the vicissitudes of even and morn; who thinks to meet with these in the court, the palace, in the glare of public life! No: to find them in their precious importance and divine efficacy, we must search among the obscure recesses of disappointment, affliction, poverty and distress." And again, next year, from the same place to the same correspondent, "That there is an incomprehensibly Great Being, to whom I owe my existence, and that he must be intimately acquainted with the operations and progress of the internal machinery, and consequent outward deportment of this creature he has made--these are, I think, self-evident propositions. That there is a real and eternal distinction between vice and virtue, and consequently, that I am an accountable creature; that from the seeming nature of the human mind, as well as from the evident imperfection, nay positive injustice, in the administration of affairs, both in the natural and moral worlds, there must be a retributive scene of existence beyond the grave, must, I think, be allowed by every one who will give himself a moment's reflection. I will go farther and affirm, that from the sublimity, excellence, and purity of his doctrine and precepts, unparalleled, by all the aggregated wisdom and learning of many preceding ages, though _to appearance_ he was himself the obscurest and most illiterate of our species: therefore Jesus was from God." Indeed, all his best letters to Mrs. Dunlop are full of the expression of religious feeling and religious faith; though it must be confessed with pain, that he speaks with more confidence in the truth of natural than of revealed religion, and too often lets sentiments inadvertently escape him, that, taken by themselves, would imply that his religious belief was but a Christianized Theism. Of the immortality of the soul, he never expresses any serious doubt, though now and then, his expressions, though beautiful, want their usual force, as if he felt the inadequacy of the human mind to the magnitude of the theme. "Ye venerable sages, and holy