at a picture of myself!

Ib. p. 22.

In the storm of this temptation I questioned awhile whether I were
indeed a Christian or an Infidel, and whether faith could consist with
such doubts as I was conscious of.

One of the instances of the evils arising from the equivoque between
faith and intellectual satisfaction or insight. The root of faith is in
the will. Faith is an oak that may be a pollard, and yet live.

Ib.

The being and attributes of God were so clear to me, that he was to my
intellect what the sun is to my eye, by which I see itself and all
things.

Even so with me;--but, whether God was existentially as well as
essentially intelligent, this was for a long time a sore combat between
the speculative and the moral man.

Ib. p. 23.

Mere Deism, which is the most plausible competitor with Christianity,
is so turned out of almost all the whole world, as if Nature made its
own confession, that without a Mediator it cannot come to God.

Excellent.

Ib.

All these assistances were at hand before I came to the immediate
evidences of credibility in the sacred oracles themselves.

This is as it should be; that is, the evidence 'a priori', securing the
rational probability; and then the historical proofs of its reality.
Pity that Baxter's chapters in 'The Saints' Rest' should have been one
and the earliest occasion of the inversion of this process, the fruit of
which is the Grotio-Paleyan religion, or 'minimum' of faith; the maxim
being, 'quanto minus tanto melius'.

Ib. p. 24.

And once all the ignorant rout were raging mad against me for
preaching the doctrine of Original Sin to them, and telling them that
infants, before regeneration, had so much guilt and corruption as made
them loathsome in the eyes of God.

No wonder;--because the babe would perish without the mother's milk, is
it therefore loathsome to the mother? Surely the little ones that Christ
embraced had not been baptized. And yet 'of such is the Kingdom of
Heaven'.

Ib. p. 25.

Some thought that the King should not at all be displeased and
provoked, and that they were not bound to do any other justice, or
attempt any other reformation but what they could procure the King to
be willing to. And these said, when you have displeased and provoked
him to the utmost, he will be your King still. * * * The more you
offend him, the less you can trust him; and when mutual confidence is