defect, shall I say? No, but the only) omission I have
felt in this divine Writer--for him we understand by feeling,
experimentally--that he doth not notice the horrible tyranny of habit.
What the Archbishop says, is most true of beginners in sin; but this is
the foretaste of hell, to see and loathe the deformity of the wedded
vice, and yet still to embrace and nourish it.

Ib. p. 122.

He calls those times wherein Christ was unknown to them, 'the times of
their ignorance'. Though the stars shine never so bright, and the moon
with them in its full, yet they do not, altogether, make it day: still
it is night till the sun appear.

How beautiful, and yet how simple, and as it were unconscious of its own
beauty!

Ib. p. 124.

You were running to destruction in the way of sin, and there was a
voice, together with the Gospel preaching to your ear, that spake into
your heart, and called you back from that path of death to the way of
holiness, which is the only way of life. He hath severed you from the
mass of the profane world, and picked you out to be jewels for
himself.

O, how divine! Surely, nothing less than the Spirit of Christ could have
inspired such thoughts in such language. Other divines,--Donne and
Jeremy Taylor for instance,--have converted their worldly gifts, and
applied them to holy ends; but here the gifts themselves seem unearthly.

Ib. p. 138.

As in religion, so in the course and practice of men's lives, the
stream of sin runs from one age to another, and every age makes it
greater, adding somewhat to what it receives, as rivers grow in their
course by the accession of brooks that fall into them; and every man
when he is born, falls like a drop into this main current of
corruption, and so is carried down it, and this by reason of its
strength, and his own nature, which willingly dissolves into it, and
runs along with it.

In this single period we have religion, the spirit,--philosophy, the
soul,--and poetry, the body and drapery united;--Plato glorified by St.
Paul; and yet coming as unostentatiously as any speech from an innocent
girl of fifteen.

Ib. p. 158.

The chief point of obedience is believing; the proper obedience to
truth is to give credit to it.

This is not quite so perspicuous and single-sensed as Archbishop
Leighton's sentences in general are. This effect is occasioned by the
omission of the word "this," or "divine," or the trut