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[Letter of Francis William Newman to W. H. Burrow]

Weston-super-Mare,
October 31/77

    Dear Sir,

        I thank you for your kind letter.

        In my youthful days I grew up an Evangelical of the Church of England. Next I became a Baptist, and a thoroughgoing Biblist. But I never for a moment imagined that I was set free from the duty of searching for and following truth. I thought myself and was in heart, God's freeman; though plenty of persons, like our men of material science, had they known me, would have counted my mind enslaved, because I looked up to the Bible as a divine authority. But it taught me to enlarge, not contract my heart; and I never learned from it to disuse my faculties,—however timidly I used them, when I perceived incipient difficulties.

        My belief is that numbers of the younger Congregationalists are in the state of mind that I then was, and readily perceive the impropriety of compulsory trust deeds which dictate a creed. I therefore have high hope of the part which the Nonconformists of the coming generation will play.

I am sincerely yours,     
F. W. Newman