I believe Jesus Christ to be the Son of God. The miracles which He wrought establish in my mind His personal authority, and render it proper for me to believe whatever He asserts; I believe, therefore, all His declarations, as well when He declares Himself the Son of God as when He declares any other proposition. And I believe there is no other way of salvation than through the merits of His atonement. I believe that things past, present, and to come are all equally present in the mind of the Deity; that with Him there is no succession of time nor of ideas; that, therefore, the relative terms past, present, and future, as used among men, cannot, with strict propriety, be applied to Deity. I believe in the doctrines of foreknowledge and predestination, as thus expounded. I do not believe in those doctrines as imposing any fatality or necessity on men's actions, or any way infringing free agency. I believe in the utter inability of any human being to work out his own salvation without the constant aids of the Spirit of all grace. I believe in those great peculiarities of the Christian religion,--a resurrection from the dead and a day of judgment. I believe in the universal providence of God; and leave to Epicurus, and his more unreasonable followers in modern times, the inconsistency of believing that God made a world which He does not take the trouble of governing. Although I have great respect for some other forms of worship, I believe the Congregational mode, on the whole, to be preferable to any other. I believe religion to be a matter not of demonstration, but of faith. God requires us to give credit to the truths which He reveals, not because we can prove them, but because He declares them. When the mind is reasonably convinced that the Bible is the word of God, the only remaining duty is to receive its doctrines with full confidence of their truth, and practise them with a pure heart. I believe that the Bible is to be understood and received in the plain and obvious meaning of its passages, since I cannot persuade myself that a book intended for the instruction and conversion of the whole world should cover its true meaning in such mystery and doubt that none but critics and philosophers can discover it. I believe that the experiments and subtleties of human wisdom are more likely to obscure than to enlighten the revealed will of God, and that he is the most accomplished Christian scholar who has been educated at the feet of Jesus and in the College of Fishermen. I believe that all true religion consists in the heart and the affections, and that therefore all creeds and confessions are fallible and uncertain evidences of Evangelical piety.