It is the cause of the
contempt into which not merely sectarian Protestantism, but Christianity
altogether, has fallen in the minds of the thinking workmen. Clergymen, who
anathematize us for wandering into Unitarianism--you, you have driven us
thither. You must find some explanation of the facts of Christianity more
in accordance with the truths which we do know, and will live and die for,
or you can never hope to make us Christians; or, if we do return to the
true fold, it will be as I returned, after long, miserable years of
darkling error, to a higher truth than most of you have yet learned to
preach.
But those old Jewish heroes did fill my whole heart and soul. I learnt from
them lessons which I never wish to unlearn. Whatever else I saw about them,
this I saw,--that they were patriots, deliverers from that tyranny and
injustice from which the child's heart,--"child of the devil" though you
may call him,--instinctively, and, as I believe, by a divine inspiration,
revolts. Moses leading his people out of Egypt; Gideon, Barak, and Samson,
slaying their oppressors; David, hiding in the mountains from the tyrant,
with his little band of those who had fled from the oppressions of an
aristocracy of Nabals; Jehu, executing God's vengeance on the kings--they
were my heroes, my models; they mixed themselves up with the dim legends
about the Reformation martyrs, Cromwell and Hampden, Sidney and Monmouth,
which I had heard at my mother's knee.
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