"But though he rid himself of this cause of trouble, he was far from tranquility. His religious propensities were strong, and his education had been such as to associate ideas of the highest importance with the subject. His reverence for God was deep and habitual, his belief in a future state fixed, and his conviction that God had revealed himself to the world was too deep rooted to be easily removed. There was a great deal, too, sublime and beautiful and delightful in the history, character and teaching of Jesus, which he could not reconcile with his imposture, any more than he could reconcile the doctrines he had been taught with his truth. Here, then, was another distressing embarrassment. At length he strove to escape from it by avoiding the subject altogether. He put away his Bible, he neglected public worship, he involved himself in other studies and active pursuits, and tried to forget all he had ever known or thought about revealed religion. But he could not succeed. It came to his thoughts in spite of him, and never suffered him to be at rest. His mind often misgave him; he became anxious, melancholy, fitful, unsettled; an unbeliever yet longing to believe- striving to think himself wiser and happier than others, yet secretly hoping he should one day be like them; with a fixed abhorrence of what had been urged on him as the peculiar doctrines of the gospel, yet conscious that human wisdom could have no light, and human weakness no hope, except from the declared mercy of Heaven....
"Who has tried to believe more than I?" he continued. "Who has more earnestly longed to believe? And who has been more wretched for want of believing? Yet I might as well have tried to persuade myself that I could walk upon a sunbeam. But it is all past: let us say no more about it. It is a subject on which I have not talked nor read for years. I cannot bear it."
- Excerpt from 'The Recollections of Jotham Anderson' by Henry Ware