A little more stupidity, a little more worldliness, a little more mental dishonesty in me, or perhaps a little more kindness and management in others, would have kept me in my old state, which was acknowledged and would still be acknowledged as Christian.
To try to disown me now, is an impotent superciliousness.
At the same time, I confess to several moral changes, as the result of this change in my creed, the principal of which are the following.
1.

I have found that my old belief narrowed my affections.

It taught me to bestow peculiar love on "the people of God," and it assigned an intellectual creed as one essential mark of this people.

That creed may be made more or less stringent; but when driven to its minimum, it includes a recognition of the historical proposition, that "the Jewish teacher Jesus fulfilled the conditions requisite to constitute him the Messiah of the ancient Hebrew prophets." This proposition has been rejected by very many thoughtful and sincere men in England, and by tens of thousands in France, Germany, Italy, Spain.

To judge rightly about it, is necessarily a problem of literary criticism; which has both to interpret the Old Scriptures and to establish how much of the biography of Jesus in the New is credible.