Excerpt from Protestant Modernism: Or Religious Thinking for Thinking Men Ways of thinking have a history. The paternal grandfather of the author of this book was tried for heresy, and expelled from the Baptist church in Williamstown, Mass., known as "the stone church." One result was that the author's father was estranged from all churches, but was accustomed to discussions of theology as his daily intellectual exercise. The discussions led to wide reading and much thinking, to a devout spirit and an untrammelled mind. The author's mother led him early to the Methodist church, and he was reared in its theological atmosphere. When he decided to prepare for the ministry, his father, then suffering from mortal disease, placed upon him one simple injunction, that he should never teach anything which he had not investigated for himself, and which he was not convinced was reasonable. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.