However, the hold which the apostolic belief then took of me, subjected my conscience to the exhortations of the Irish clergyman, whenever he inculcated that the highest Christian must necessarily decline the pursuit of science, knowledge, art, history,--except so far as any of these things might be made useful tools for immediate spiritual results.
Under the stimulus to my imagination given by this gentleman's character, the desire, which from a boy I had more or less nourished, of becoming a teacher of Christianity _to the heathen_, took stronger and stronger hold of me.

I saw that I was shut out from the ministry of the Church of England, and knew not how to seek connexion with Dissenters.

I had met one eminent Quaker, but was offended by the violent and obviously false interpretations by which he tried to get rid of the two Sacraments; and I thought there was affectation involved in the forms which the doctrine of the Spirit took with him.
Besides, I had not been prepossessed by those Dissenters whom I had heard speak at the Bible Society.

I remember that one of them talked in pompous measured tones of voice, and with much stereotyped phraseology, about "the Bible only, the religion of Protestants:" altogether, it did not seem to me that there was at all so much of nature and simple truth in them as in Church clergymen.

I also had a vague, but strong idea, that all Dissenting churches assumed some special, narrow, and sectarian basis.