1. In the Preface to the third volume I alluded to the conviction daily gaining ground upon me, of the need of a more accurately logical education of our youth. Truly among the most pitiable and practically hurtful weaknesses of the modern English mind, its usual inability to grasp the connection between any two ideas which have elements of opposition in them, as well as of connection, is perhaps the chief. It is shown with singular fatality in the vague efforts made by our divines to meet the objections raised by free-thinkers, bearing on the nature and origin of evil; but there is hardly a sentence written on any matter requiring careful analysis, by writers who have not yet begun to perceive the influence of their own vanity (and there are too many such among divines), which will not involve some half-lamentable, half-ludicrous, logical flaw,—such flaws being the invariable consequence of a man's straining to say anything in a learned instead of an intelligible manner.

Take a sentence, for example, from J. A. James's Anxious Inquirer:—“It is a great principle that subjective religion, or in other words, religion in us, is produced and sustained by fixing the mind on objective religion, or the facts and doctrines of the Word of God.”

Cut entirely out the words I have put in italics, and the sentence has a meaning (though not by any means an important one).