got the hardy training of the foot-ball ground and the river, the grand influence of Dr. Arnold, and that companionship with fresh youthful spirits which he so charmingly portrays in the "Bothie." For him, the unsparing quest for absolute truth was postponed until his sinews had been knit and he had been fortified by generous comradeships against the loneliness which besets the thinker.

But no such kindly apprenticeship fell to the boy of our story. Glasgow College and Dr. Chalmers had already set him to thinking. Such thought led into fields infinitely attractive to a mind like his. Now there were no counter attractions, and the entire energies of his nature were swept along into a world of such fascination, its splendors so enthralling, its terrors so enchaining, that under its spell the whole external world, its law-books, its drudgery, its London streets, its men and women, and even its home companionships, became in comparison far away and dim. As the children of Hamelin followed the piper's music, so this boy followed the mysterious musician whose melodies are reverie and speculation, and passed into a realm apart from the workaday world.

There is nothing to indicate with certainty the precise course of his early thinking. But one of the characters in “Thorndale” affords a clue which we may follow with reasonable confidence that under the name of Cyril we have in substance, if not in form, a part of the youthful experience of William Smith.

A pious and affectionate youth may, without blame on his part, commence his career of independent thinking by a rebellion against some of his most sacred feelings, by a violence done to his best affections. His peace of mind is disturbed, and the harmony of the family circle is broken by an invisible enemy, who has stolen upon him in the very hours of study and meditation. Those earliest and dearest friendships, as well as those first and sacred convictions, which should have lasted him his whole life, are put in jeopardy at the very outset.

For some time our inquiring youth keeps his doubt a close prisoner within his own bosom. At length, one day, being more daring or more despondent than usual, he gives expression, in the family circle, to some of those sceptical questionings he has been secretly revolving. As soon as the words have passed his lips how those lips trembled as he spoke! he feels that it was not an opinion only he has uttered, but a defiance. And it is not an answer, but a reproof, that he receives. An elder brother frowns, a sister weeps, a parent solemnly rebukes. Sad and inauspicious entrance on the paths of inquiry. He retreats into himself, perturbed, disdainful, with a rankling sense of injustice done to him.

In gen

Beyond the family circle the case is little better. eral society he soon learns that the subject of religion is altogether inadmissible. There is but one thing more distasteful to well-bred people than a religious sentiment or opinion, and that is the least show of opposition to it. You must think over these matters if you must think in perfect retirement. The one half of society requires that you respect. its faith, the other half that you respect its hypocrisy.

... Such an one, when I knew him, was Cyril. A youth of more blameless manners there could not be. His parents were distinguished for their evangelical piety, and were delighted to watch the development of his ardent and unaffected devotion. His nature had entirely responded to the religious training he had received. How came doubt, it will be asked, in such a mind? What sceptical works was he likely to read? And if he had been persuaded to read any such works, would they have produced any other impression on a person of this description than pain and offence? Let their statements or reasonings be what they might, such a person would only have been stung, irritated, wounded by them not convinced or shaken.

But the enemy may approach in a far more insidious manner than by a direct attack. His father took a great interest in the subject of reformatory punishment, as it is sometimes called. (The combination of reformatory and educational measures with punishment, would be a more accurate expression for the object which such philanthropists have in view.) Schemes of prison discipline formed the most frequent topic of conversation at his

own home. The house was full of books treating upon this subject in every possible manner, either investigating the rationale of punishment, or proposing new methods for the moral restoration of the criminal. In short, it was the paternal hobby. Now, in works treating on the subject of criminal jurisprudence, there will invariably be intermingled ethical discussions on the nature and objects of punishment itself, and on the meaning which is attached to such words, for instance, as retributive punishment, and of penalty, when imposed in order to secure obedience to a promulgated law. As I understood him, the perusal of these books, together with the constant reiteration in the family circle that the reformation of the criminal himself was never to be lost sight of as one of the ends of punishment, forced upon his mind the perception of a strange contrast between the ethical principles which his father advocated when discoursing upon this favourite topic, and the ethical principles which he advanced or implied when he expounded his Calvinistic divinity. Cyril, at least, could not reconcile the two. He could not help saying to himself though he recoiled at first with horror from his own suggestions — that his father claimed for a human legislator principles more noble and enlightened than those he attributed to the Divine Governor. The idea was at first repudiated; it was thrust back; but it would return. The subject was not allowed to sleep, for every fresh visitor at the house called forth from his father an exposition of what he deemed to be the true principles of criminal jurisprudence. To punish for revenge, he pronounced unchristian and irrational; he admitted no ends for punishment but the protection of society and the reformation of the criminal, which also was the best protection for society; nor would he allow that the first of these was an end which could be legitimately pursued without being coupled with the second.

That the future punishments of God should have for one end the reformation of the offender does not appear to be a heresy of a very deep dye, nor one that ought to have disturbed a pious mind; but it shook the whole system of theology in which Cyril had been brought up. If punishment has in itself wise and merciful ends, if it is conducive, or accompanied by measures that are conducive, to the restoration of the

criminal, what becomes of all those ideas attached to the word salvation, in which he had been educated? I only indicate the train of thought awakened in Cyril's mind. Those only who have been educated as he was can understand the terror and anguish of heart which such a train of thought brought with it.

The first murmur of dissent he ventured to raise against the system in which he had been educated was on the doctrine of eternal punishment. It was the doctrine he most frequently discussed with me. The more he studied it, whether in works of ethics or works of religion, the less could he assent to it. Yet the denial of it shook all the rest of the system; his doctrine of Atonement must be entirely remodelled; in short, he was plunged into the miseries of doubt.

...

To appreciate the distress of Cyril it must be borne in mind that he had been brought up in the conviction that unbelief was a sin of the greatest magnitude; that it could not fail to incur all the penalties of extreme guilt, as the unbeliever was cut off from the only means of salvation. Say that he was wrong, then his very denial had sentenced him directly or indirectly to that final doom he called in question. His unbelief had incapacitated him from seizing upon the sole means of escape. This terrible responsibility was forever with him. voice would peal incessantly in his ears, "You may be wrong,

A

I cannot describe, and do not wish to describe, the depth of terror and affliction which Cyril felt as his earliest faith was being rent from him. A soul athirst for piety seemed driven from the only temple in which it could worship. He grew restless, gloomy, at times even morose.

[At Oxford.] The cloud was darkening over him. At length he rarely came to my room. Hearing he was unwell I went to see him. I asked him after his health; he did not answer the question took no heed of it; his thoughts were elsewhere. "Oh, Thorndale!" he said, "to pass long sleepless nights sleepless and in pain and not to know how to pray!" And as he pressed my hand he burst into an agony of tears.

With some few men this gloomy contest, carried on apart and alone, has absorbed all the energies of their intellect.

Coerced into silence, they gain no help from other minds; the cloud hangs over them perpetually; no word from another disperses it for a moment; perhaps they are ashamed to confess the secret terrors they more than occasionally feel. They seek no distraction; for them there is no oblivion; they must front their enemy with a steady eye, or they sink vanquished, and lose entirely their self-respect. Perhaps there is no interest or pleasure so absorbing as to shelter them during one whole day from some recurrence of their sad and interminable controversy. They live on, knowing nothing of philosophy but its doubts, and retaining nothing of religion but its fears.