14 MEMOIR OF AUGUSTUS DE MORGAN. 



1824. would be to say nothing about it viva voce, but to send 

 Doctrines them uninvited ; and, having determined on that, an 



of salva- 



tion. explanatory note became necessary. I beseech you, for my 



sake, to read with attention these books, to utter a prayer 

 over them whenever you open them, "that they may be 

 blessed to you as they have been to thousands," many of 

 whom are now rejoicing in heaven, where you wish to go, 

 Vut where you never can go while you remain wilfully 

 ignorant of your state by nature, and of your need of a 

 Saviour. Your believing an atonement necessary in a 

 general sense ! will not avail you. You must go ly your- 

 self and for yourself to Christ for pardon and grace, and 

 until you do this you may rest assured you are in a most 

 awful state liable to be hurled into everlasting torment 

 by every little accident, every disease, nay, even by a 

 crumb of bread going the wrong way. Can you wonder 

 that a mother, doting as I do on you, feels miserable when 

 she contemplates a beloved child wantonly sporting on the 

 edge of so tremendous a precipice ? . . . Can you picture 

 to yourself any agonies like those which would take posses- 

 sion of your mind were you assured that before to-inorrow 

 morning you would be standing at the tremendous bar of 

 an angry God ? ' 



The young man thus appealed to was dutiful and 

 affectionate, and these exhortations troubled him much. 

 His reason and instinctive love of God told him that they 

 must arise from misinterpretations of Scripture, and from 

 human notions of Divine things. In many less logical and 

 fearless minds they would have produced disgust with 

 religion altogether ; but the intellect of the future logician 

 was too clear to confound the thing itself with its abuses, 

 or with the misrepresentations of ill-judging advocates. 



1 From this expression, and from what I have heard, I conclude 

 that Mr. De Morgan had assured his mother of his belief in the atone- 

 ment in the Scripture sense, namely, the reconciliation or at-one-ment 

 of sinning and repentant man to a loving God, not the reconciling 

 of an angry God to mankind, in consequence of intellectual belief. 

 This was his creed in after life. 



