Among These I Found One Entitled, If I Remember Rightly, _An Answer_
To The Infidel, And This Work, Which I
Took up eagerly in the
expectation that it would allay those maddening doubts perpetually
rising in my mind and be
A help and comfort to me, only served to make
matters worse, at all events for a time. For in this book I was first
made acquainted with many of the arguments of the freethinkers, both
of the Deists who were opposed to the Christian creed, and of those
who denied the truth of all supernatural religion. And the answers to
the arguments were not always convincing. It was idle, then, to seek
for proofs in the books. The books themselves, after all their
arguments, told me as much when they said that only by faith could a
man be saved. And to the sad question: "How was it to be attained?"
the only answer was, by striving and striving until it came. And as
there was nothing else to do I continued striving, with the result
that I believed and did not believe, and my soul, or rather my hope of
immortality, trembled in the balance.
This, from first to last, was the one thing that mattered; so much was
it to me that in reading one of the religious books entitled _The
Saints' Everlasting Rest_, in which the pious author, Richard Baxter,
expatiates on and labours to make his readers realize the condition of
the eternally damned, I have said to myself:
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