becomes a punishment on delicacy-an instrument to blunt the moral sense, by multiplying the subjects of remorse, and directing its greatest terrors against imaginary crimes."-Doblado's Letters, p. 77.

There was not originally any strong impulse in his own nature leading him to become a Priest, but in a country where only the clerical profession have access to more than the elements of learning, his insatiable desire for intellectual pursuits, after a vain attempt to apply himself to commercial life, forced him into the Priesthood. Yet though by nature full of devotional sensibility, and easily brought under the dominion of mere feelings, he was not made for a Devotee, a religious slave; and even in the boy Reason disturbed the supremacy of blind Faith, and his earliest years of preparation, with the irrevocable vows of the Priesthood in the distance, were embittered by some faint visitings of that fuller light which afterwards arose upon his soul. These doubts and disturbances he suppressed, or they were suppressed for him, by the usual contrivances of an Authoritative Religion; by ascetic practices, by voluntary efforts to reduce himself under the dominion of enthusiastic feelings, and by studiously inflaming the affections and the imagination to the extinction of the reason. For a time these artificial means prevailed; knowing nothing of Religion under any other form, reared in this hot-bed of Roman Catholicism, and stimulated by his parents in every way that could subdue an affectionate heart, he at last took the vows of a Priest.

"No language," he says, "can do justice to my own feelings at the ceremony of ordination, the performance of the first mass, and during the interval which elapsed between this fever of Enthusiasm and the cold scepticism that soon followed it. For some months previous to the awful ceremony I voluntarily secluded myself from the world, making religious reading and meditation the sole employment of my time. The Exercises of Saint Ignatius (ascetic practices of the most violent kind), which immediately preceded the day of ordination, filled my heart with what appeared to me a settled distaste for every worldly pleasure. When the consecrating rites had been performed-when my hands had been anointed-the sacred vesture, at first folded on my shoulders, let drop around me by the hands of the bishop-the sublime hymn to the allcreating Spirit uttered in solemn strains, and the power of restoring sinners to innocence conferred upon me-when at length raised to the dignity of a 'fellow worker with God,' the bishop addressed me in the name of the Saviour: Henceforth I call you not servant. . . .but I have called you friend;' I truly felt as if, freed from the material part of my being, I belonged to a higher rank of existence. . . . In vain did I exert myself to check exuberance of feelings at my first mass. My tears bedewed the corporals on which, with the eyes of faith, I beheld the disguised lover of

mankind whom I had drawn from heaven to my hands. There are dreams, indeed, the illusions of an overheated fancy; but dreams they are which some of the noblest minds have dreamt through life without waking— dreams which, while passing vividly before the mental eye, must entirely wrap up the soul of every one who is neither more nor less than a man. -Doblado's Letters, p. 125.

"To exercise the privileges of his office for the benefit of his fellow creatures," was now the exclusive purpose of his life,— and he neglected no means that the Church appointed for keeping his mind within its power. But the crisis came at last. He

has related it himself:

"When I examine the state of my mind previous to my rejecting the Christian faith, I cannot recollect any thing in it but what is in perfect accordance with that form of religion in which I was educated. I revered the Scriptures as the word of God; but was also persuaded that, without a living, infallible interpreter, the Bible was a dead letter, which could not convey its meaning with any certainty. I grounded therefore my Christian faith upon the infallibility of the Church. No Roman Catholic pretends to a better foundation. 'I believe whatever the Holy Mother Church holds and believes,' is the compendious creed of every member of the Roman Communion. Had my doubts affected any particular doctrine, I should have clung to the decisions of a Church which claims exemption from errors, but my first doubts attacked the very basis of Catholicism. I believe that the reasoning which shook my faith is not new in the vast field of theological controversy. But I protest that, if such be the case, the coincidence adds weight to the argument; for I am perfectly certain that it was the spontaneous suggestion of my own mind. I thought within myself that the certainty of the Roman Catholic faith had no better ground than a fallacy of that kind which is called reasoning in a circle; for I believed the infallibility of the Church because the Scripture said she was infallible; while I had no better proof that the Scripture said so, than the assertion of the Church, that she could not mistake the Scripture. In vain did I endeavour to evade the force of this argument; indeed I still believe it unanswerable. Was then Christianity nothing but a groundless fabric, the world supported by the elephant, the elephant standing on the tortoise? Such was the conclusion to which I was led by a system which impresses the mind with the obscurity and insufficiency of the written Word of God. Why should I consult the Scriptures? My only choice was between revelation explained by the Church of Rome, and no revelation. Catholics who live in Protestant countries may, in spite of the direct tendencies of their systems, practically perceive the unreal nature of this dilemma. But wherever the religion of Rome reigns, there is but one step between it and complete infidelity."

-Ten years of my life did I pass in this hot and cold fever, this ague of the heart, without a hope, without a drop of that cordial which cheers the very soul of those who sacrifice their desires to their duty under the blessed influence of Religion. . . . Ten years, the best of my life, were

passed in this insufferable state, when the approach of Buonaparte's troops to Seville enabled me to quit Spain, without exciting suspicion as to the real motive which tore me, for ever, from every thing I loved. I was too well aware of the firmness of my resolution, not to endure the most agonizing pain when I irrevocably crossed the threshold of my father's house, and when his bending figure disappeared from my eyes, at the first winding of the Guadalquiver, down which I sailed. Heaven knows that time has not had power to heal the wounds which this separation inflicted on my heart; but such was the misery of my mental slavery, that not a shadow of regret for my determination to expatriate myself has ever exasperated the evils inseparable from the violent step by which I obtained my freedom."-Poor Man's Preservative; and Internal Evidence, p. 9—11.

His temporary unbelief in Christianity was only the necessary result of the view, imprinted by Education, which identified Revelation with Roman Catholicism. When he came to this country he saw Christianity under other forms, not open as he conceived to the objections that were fatal to Romanism, and his devotional tendencies, which had never deserted him, and had always sought a rest, rejoiced to be again under spiritual allegiance to Christ. What could be more natural than that the Church of England, that great opponent, in profession, to the radical errors of Popery, should receive the first acknowledgments of his reviving faith? It was not the doctrines which are considered orthodox that had made him doubt of Christianity; but the persecuting spirit of Popery, which he had supposed to be identical with Christianity,-and the theory of Church Infallibility. He did not then perceive, what he perceived afterwards, that the Church of England stood in fact upon the same foundations, though the ground is somewhat disguised, that it regards Christianity as intended to reveal a system of doctrines, belief in which is necessary for salvation, whilst it provides no authorized Judge upon questions of faith, to make it certain that its own system of doctrines are infallibly the contents of the Revelation. As long as he believed all the principal doctrines of the Church of England, he was not led to examine this essential weakness in its foundations, but the moment his study of the Scriptures had shaken his faith in the superstructure, he saw at once that it was an imperfect imitation of the Church of Rome, demanding, like it, the infallible Truth, but, unlike it, not providing the supposed infallible Judge. This is admirably explained by himself:

Abhorrence of the persecuting spirit which made me renounce my native country is, perhaps, the most active sentiment of my heart. It was natural, therefore, that as soon as I became acquainted with the

most powerful antagonist which Popery had ever met, I should cling to it with my whole heart. The church of England was to me what I conceive the Maltese knights must have been to a Christian slave who had escaped from the prisons of Algiers into one of the Order's gallies. A long experience must have been necessary, both to myself and the subject of my illustration, to make us perceive that neither of our places of refuge was the dwelling of the full liberty we sought. But having originally examined the Church of England in its unquestionable character of a most powerful opponent of the encroachments of Rome, my eyes were too dazzled to perceive the essential defects of her constitution and the narrowness of her toleration till the (political) events of the year 1829 disabused me, not without resistance and pain on my part."Preface to Heresy and Orthodoxy.

He was a convert too remarkable not to be received with distinguished favour by the Church of England. He rose into rapid celebrity, his writings enjoyed a popularity rarely accorded to works chiefly theological,-the University of Oxford “in consideration," as it then declared, "of his eminent talents and learning, of his exemplary conduct, and of those able and well-timed publications by which he powerfully exposed the errors and corruptions of the Church of Rome," conferred on him the Degree of Master of Arts by Diploma,-and if he had not made a solemn resolution, as a test of his sincerity, never to accept preferment, it is certain that the highest honours were open to him in this country, as they had previously been in Spain.

It is impossible here to trace at length the long process by which his mind came to the conclusion, that the doctrines of Orthodoxy were not scriptural. That process is recorded by himself, and will, I trust, ere long see the light. It was a conclusion that he resisted as long as with honesty he could. Influenced by his affections, and by his desire for assimilation with those he loved, he tried every means to keep himself righteously within the Church of England, as he had before tried to keep himself righteously within the Church of Rome. This struggle between his affections and the more advanced views of his mind was the source of some of the severest sufferings of his life. He was not a man to follow the cold light of the understanding, unstopped by the thought of what connections it might loosen, what sympathies it might destroy. Those only who saw him intimately could believe, with what wonderful humility so vast a mind made the attempt to conform himself to the desires of those he loved. In a life of nearly seventy years he took two steps, both of them in the same direction, and the interval was filled up by his affections contending against the light that was forcing him away from those to whom his heart still clung. But neither was he

a man to make these attempts for ever; enough that he paid the tribute to Christian love as long as honestly he could, as soon as the failure of all such attempts was manifest, he was prepared to take up his cross, and follow Christian Truth. The affections never were intended to make man a deceiver;-and if Christian truth requires painful separations, let those answer for it who create the necessity.

It would be an insult to his simple and unworldly nature to dwell upon so poor a thing, as heightening his sacrifice, as that from an archbishop's palace he went forth, a lonely man, to contented obscurity and neglect. That the worldly differences cost him a struggle, is a thought that will not even occur to any one who knew him. These were not the vulgar elements over which his true soul triumphed. No; it was the disturbance of friendship and affection that alone made his heart sink, and that, not so much for his own sufferings, as for the deeply-rooted and widely-spread religious evils that exact so many bleeding sacrifices. Though he never dissembled on religious subjects, yet "he could not conceal from himself that his horror of losing the affections of those whose hearts had been drawn closely to his own, had more than once enabled his feelings to disturb his judgment." And this was the noble victory he achieved over himself. We find the following entry in his private journal, when he saw that no longer could he truthfully surrender himself to these forced sympathies:

Sincerely, though inconsiderately, and under the influence of unsuspected popish prejudices favourable to the English Establishment, did I join myself to that Church. For more than twenty years have I struggled within myself against the growing objections which, in the course of uninterrupted theological studies, I found against her doctrines. But old and infirm as I am, and strongly tempted by the affections of those with whom I live in the closest habits of friendship, not to break openly with a Church, with which they are so identified as to have lost their choice of keeping an Unitarian as an inmate-I feel it my bounden duty to show, by my sufferings, to the world, how injurious to the cause of religion, of Christian Charity and of humanity itself, that Church system must be, which makes such sacrifices to the love of truth unavoidable to me; and imposes on them the duty of acting towards an unoffending friend,—a friend whose promise of not attempting to proselyte they would certainly trust-with the reluctant severity which their intimate connection with the Church establishment demands. For the sake of opening the eyes of people to the evils of this kind of orthodoxy, I trust in heaven, I should have fortitude enough to go to the stake."

Two days after this record, the step is taken, and he lands an utter stranger on the quays of Liverpool, as the nearest spot