"Doctrines" are either spiritual truths, or are statements of external history.

Of the former we may have an inward witness;--that is their proper evidence;--but the latter must depend upon adequate testimony and various kinds of criticism.
How quickly might I have come to my conclusion,--how much weary thought and useless labour might I have spared,--if at an earlier time this simple truth had been pressed upon me, that since the religious faculties of the poor and half-educated cannot investigate Historical and Literary questions, _therefore_ these questions cannot constitute an essential part of Religion .-- But perhaps I could not have gained this result by any abstract act of thought, from want of freedom to think: and there are advantages also in expanding slowly under great pressure, if one _can_ expand, and is not crushed by it.
I felt no convulsion of mind, no emptiness of soul, no inward practical change: but I knew that it would be said, this was only because the force of the old influence was as yet unspent, and that a gradual declension in the vitality of my religion must ensue.

More than eight years have since past, and I feel I have now a right to contradict that statement.

To any "Evangelical" I have a right to say, that while he has a _single_, I have a _double_ experience; and I know, that the spiritual fruits which he values, have no connection whatever with the complicated and elaborate creed, which his school imagines, and I once imagined, to be the roots out of which they are fed.

That they depend directly on _the heart's belief in the sympathy of God with individual man_,[7] I am well assured: but that doctrine does not rest upon the Bible or upon Christianity; for it is a postulate, from which every Christian advocate is forced to start.