Phases of Faith

Phases of Faith, or Passages from the History of My Creed, is by Francis William Newman. The preface to the first edition says the book is perhaps an egotistical book, egotistical certainly in its form, yet not in its purport and essence. The preface says the difference between the writer and those who are unjustly alienated from him turns on questions of Learning, History, Criticism and Abstract Thought.

The Rev. T. Scott, of Aston Sandford, is named as arguing that it would be self-refuting to say that God is three in the same sense as that in which He is one, but that “we hold Him to be three in one sense, and one in another”. The text says that in later times the first public act against slavery came from republican France, in the madness of atheistic enthusiasm. A first-person statement says that if anyone could show that a Moral Theism and a Future Life were essentially combined, the speaker would joyfully embrace the second as a fit complement to the first.