the scope and issue of his doctrine,
"Holiness before peace," and "Growth is the only evidence of life."

Calvinists make a sharp separation between the elect and the world;
there is much in this that is parallel or cognate to the Catholic
doctrine; but they go on to say, as I understand them, very
differently from Catholicism,--that the converted and the unconverted
can be discriminated by man, that the justified are conscious of
their state of justification, and that the regenerate cannot fall
away. Catholics on the other hand shade and soften the awful
antagonism between good and evil, which is one of their dogmas, by
holding that there are different degrees of justification, that there
is a great difference in point of gravity between sin and sin, that
there is the possibility and the danger of falling away, and that
there is no certain knowledge given to any one that he is simply in a
state of grace, and much less that he is to persevere to the end:--of
the Calvinistic tenets the only one which took root in my mind was
the fact of heaven and hell, divine favour and divine wrath, of the
justified and the unjustified. The notion that the regenerate and the
justified were one and the same, and that the regenerate, as such,
had the gift of perseverance, remained with me not many years, as I
have said already.

This main Catholic doctrine of the warfare between the city of God
and the powers of darkness was also deeply impressed upon my mind by
a work of a very opposite character, Law's "Serious Call."

From this time I have given a full inward assent and belief to the
doctrine of eternal punishment, as delivered by our Lord Himself, in
as true a sense as I hold that of eternal happiness; though I have
tried in various ways to make that truth less terrible to the reason.

Now I come to two other works, which produced a deep impression on me
in the same autumn of 1816, when I was fifteen years old, each
contrary to each, and planting in me the seeds of an intellectual
inconsistency which disabled me for a long course of years. I read
Joseph Milner's Church History, and was nothing short of enamoured
of the long extracts from St. Augustine and the other Fathers which
I found there. I read them as being the religion of the primitive
Christians: but simultaneously with Milner I read Newton on the
Prophecies, and in consequence became most firmly convinced that the
Pope was the Antichrist predicted by Daniel, St. Paul, a