To Infidelity and Back | Page 5

a student at six educational institutions since I left the high school, but this was far ahead of the others for the development of the logical and philosophical faculties. Here there was absolutely no restraint to thought; and all kinds of systems and ideas were represented, from philosophical anarchy to socialism and from mysticism to materialism. The moral and spiritual earnestness I expected to find among the Unitarians I did not find, especially among the younger and more radical ones. Its effect, on the whole, was to relax rather than intensify the moral fiber. Their ideals seemed so grand and noble that I thought those possessed with them could scarcely find time to eat and sleep in their zeal to put them into practise; but I discovered that they not only had plenty of time to eat and sleep, but also for dancing, card-playing, theater-going, etc. Many of the young men studying for the ministry often spent a large part of the night in card-playing, and the Sunday-school room served also as a dancing-floor. Unitarians pride themselves upon the high standard of morality among their people and upon the few prisoners you find among their members, but this is due to the character of the people they reach rather than to the restraining influence of their teaching
My reading had given me a wrong impression as to the teaching of Unitarianism. Like many others, I was fascinated and enticed by the writings of conservative Unitarians, whose contention is largely against the bad theology of human creeds; but the present-day teaching of the vanguard of Unitarianism is an entirely different thing. It rejects all the miraculous in the Bible, and, in many cases, even denies the existence of a personal God. All the students were required to conduct chapel prayers in turn. Those who did not believe in a personal God explained that they were pronouncing an apostrophe to the great impersonal and unknowable force working in the universe. I had read Channing, Clark, Hale, Emerson, and other conservative Unitarians, and found much food for my soul, but I discovered that these were considered old "fogies" and back numbers by most of the students in attendance.
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