Yet I had not an easy conscience, nor can I now defend my compromise; for I believe that my repugnance to Infant Baptism was really intense, and my conviction that it is unapostolic as strong then as now.

The topic of my "youth" was irrelevant; for, if I was not too young to subscribe, I was not too young to refuse subscription.

The argument that the article was "unpractical" to me, goes to prove, that if I were ordered by a despot to qualify myself for a place in the Church by solemnly renouncing the first book of Euclid as false, I might do so without any loss of moral dignity.
Altogether, this humiliating affair showed me what a trap for the conscience these subscriptions are: how comfortably they are passed while the intellect is torpid or immature, or where the conscience is callous, but how they undermine truthfulness in the active thinker, and torture the sensitiveness of the tenderminded.

As long as they are maintained, in Church or University, these institutions exert a positive influence to deprave or eject those who ought to be their most useful and honoured members.
It was already breaking upon me, that I could not fulfil the dreams of my boyhood as a minister in the Church of England.

For, supposing that with increased knowledge I might arrive at the conclusion that Infant Baptism was a fore-arranged "development,"-- not indeed practised in the _first_ generation, but expedient, justifiable, and intended for the _second_, and probably then sanctioned by one still living apostle,--even so, I foresaw the still greater difficulty of Baptismal Regeneration behind.