He thought he saw among the evangelical party symptoms of the original and primitive spirit of Christianity; and he used to say so very freely, and to think so very seriously. And his mother used to say, he would know better as he grew older: and in process of time he did grow older; and whether he thought better or not we presume not to say; but we do know, that as he grew older, he acquired a habit of analysing motives and looking into principles. And it came to pass that he found among these evangelicals divers manifestations of a worldly spirit, which did not exactly coincide with his notions of extraordinary spiritual purity. In the mercantile part of that class he saw much that bordered very closely on trickery; in the class a little higher, he found a mighty spirit of conceit and priggishness. Towards their neighbours he saw that many of them were mightily censorious. In conversing with some of them, and those the ringleaders, he found that they were prodigiously ignorant of the very principles on which their peculiarities were founded, and he found them to be unanimous only on one point; namely, that their favorite clergyman was a _nice man_.
At this discovery he was somewhat tempted to smile; and as in some cases tears lead to thought, so in others do smiles lead to reflection. And is not this the order and ordinance of nature? The human infancy, which is the vestibule of intellect, is a scene commingled of smiles and tears, of passionate sorrows and of noisy joys; then comes reflection. So it had been with Markham in what may be called his theological infancy. Led by circumstances to reflect and to think, he perhaps carried reflection and thought farther than he first intended, or was aware of. But it was something, and indeed a very great matter, that he had penetration enough to see through, what he had charity enough to call, the unconscious mask of fanaticism.
Thus led to reflection, his mind did not hastily settle. He was entertained by various speculations, and he made many inquiries, and was forced to find answers for them as well as he could. He had, as people say, his own opinions. What those opinions were we know not, and perhaps Markham himself did not exactly know; and therefore, as he apprehended these opinions indistinctly, he could not communicate them, and thus they were likely to continue his own. Whatever were his literal opinions, the spirit of his theological feeling was catholic; not Roman Catholic, gentle reader, but catholic in its widest acceptation. He did at one time reprobate sectarianism not as a nurse of dangerous heresies, but as a violation of the spirit of nature’s catholicism, and an unauthorised earth-born enclosure of heaven’s free blessings; but he, in time, so far surmounted that feeling, as to discern in the constitution of the human mind the elements of sectarianism; and he at length came to the dangerous conclusion, that there must needs be diversity of opinion so long as there was diversity of minds.