' Here was another error. Grotius was not aware,
it would seem, that there are forces continually at work in the interior
of the earth making _new_ mountains,--that some portions of the earth
are continually rising, and others gradually subsiding.
4. Several of the arguments which I met with in Doddridge's great work I
found to be unsound. And there were others which, if I did not discover
to be fallacious, I felt to be unsatisfactory. They were, in truth, as I
afterwards found, mere metaphysical puzzles.
5. Among the most honest and earnest works on the evidences that came in
my way, were those of Richard Baxter. But many of his arguments were
unsatisfactory. Among other things of doubtful value, he gave a number
of ghost stories, and accounts of witches and their doings, and of
persons possessed by evil spirits, and even of men and women who had
sold themselves to the devil, and who had been seized and carried away
by him bodily, in the presence of their neighbors and friends. Then
some of his arguments took for granted points of importance which I was
particularly anxious to have proved. Much of his reasoning seemed
conclusive enough, but when sound and unsound arguments are so blended
in the same book, the unsound ones seem to lessen the credit and the
force of the sound ones.
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