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tained in the first book which I wrote after I took orders.[1] The experience of nineteen very eventful years in English Ecclesiastical history has led me to change some of the opinions which I expressed in that book. I would not impose our Articles upon the students in our Universities, because I see that by doing so we tempt them to dishonesty, and lead them to dislike a document which I believe they ought to love. But the other convictions which I maintained then, instead of being shaken, have been confirmed by all I have seen, heard, thought, and regretted since. I am more than ever persuaded that they whose zeal for progress leads them to preach that the Bible is a collection of obsolete Hebrew stories, are seeking to defraud the world of the treasure which it has owed its past and will owe its future progress; that those who tell us that we may not express the facts and principles of the Bible in popular Creeds and teach them to our children, leave us at the mercy of coteries, where men and women prostrate themselves before some newspaper oracle which allows them no freedom whatever;—that those who would take from us our intellectual formularies, under pretence that if we cast them off we shall do greater justice to the earnest convictions of those who dissent from us, are not just to these convictions themselves, but very intolerant of them; and that, on the contrary, we are bound by those forms, in spite of our own natural narrowness, sectarianism, and dogmatism, to recognise and honor the strivings after truth of every man whatsoever, even of the man who scorns us and hates us most.

  1. ↑ Subscription no Bondage; or, the Thirty-nine Articles guides in Academic Education. Oxford. 1835.
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