But I must tell you of my evolution along the line of rationalism. My rationalistic proclivities were given a free rein. And as a child, when left to run away, will soon stop and return to its mother, so this freedom was the natural cure for my intellectual delusion. To the statement of the creeds, "The Father is God, and the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God; and yet there are not three Gods, but one God," my rationalism replied, that is logically inconceivable, therefore I became a Unitarian. No sooner was I happy in this faith than a Universalist addressed me and said, "If you want to be rational, you must give up your belief in eternal punishment, for God could not give eternal punishment for a finite sin." As a rationalist, what could I do but yield, and so I became a universalist Unitarian. I felt I had at last found the truth, but my peace was short; for a student accused me of being irrational, "because," said he, "an omnipotent, loving God would give an infinitely large amount of good and an infinitely small amount of evil; but an infinitely small amount of evil is not perceptible, evil is perceptible, therefore there is no such God." This was an awful pill and gave a terrible shock to my religious sensibilities, but as rationalism was my guide, I had to follow on or stand accused as a superstitious coward. Again rationalism declared, through my teachers, that all the supernatural must be eliminated from the Bible as mythical and unreliable, and so I was robbed of my Christ, my God and my Bible. Misguided by rationalism, I thought it my conscientious duty to accept, step by step, the dictates of destructive criticism until the Bible was only inspired to me in religion as Kant in philosophy, Milton in poetry, and Beethoven in music. But when I came to the end of the matter I discovered that my conscience, which had urged me along, was gone also. For I was gravely taught that conscience is merely a creature of experience and education, and that it is right to lie or do anything else so long as you do it out of love. Doubtless you have all heard of the farmer and his wife at the World's Fair who went to see the "Exit." There was nothing in it, and of course they had to pay to get in again. This was my bitter experience with rationalism. I thought I was following a great light, but I discovered there was nothing in it, that I was following an _ignis fatuus_. Rationalism has indeed proven the "Exit" to multitudes, from the peace, joy and moral security that accompany faith in evangelical Christianity into the desert of doubt, darkness and despair.