onversion, and sanctification,--that reading
the Scriptures, and hearing sermons, and singing hymns, and offering
prayers,--that church fellowship, and religious ordinances, were all
nothing except so far as they tended to make people good, and then to
make them better, and at last to perfect them in all divine and human
excellence. No one taught us that goodness was beauty, that goodness was
greatness, that goodness was glory, that goodness was happiness, that
goodness was heaven. The truth was never pressed on us that the want of
goodness was deformity, dishonor and shame,--that it was pain, and
wretchedness, and torment, and death,--that goodness in full measure
would make earth heaven--that its decline and disappearance would make
earth hell. Yet a careful and long-continued perusal of the Scriptures
left the impression on my mind, that this was really the case. When I
compared the eternal talk about all our goodness being of no account in
the sight of God,--of all our righteousness being but as filthy
rags,--with the teachings of Scripture, I felt as if theologians were
anti-christ, and their theology the gospel of the wicked one. I have no
wish to do injustice to theology, or to theologians either; but the more
I knew of them, the less I thought of them. And even when the Christian
and theologian got blended, as they did, to some extent, in such men as
Baxter and Wesley, I pitied the theologian while I esteemed and loved
the Christian. Theological works are poor contemptible things. It would
have been no great loss to the world if nineteen-twentieths of them had
been burnt in the Chicago fire.

I was often grievously harassed with prevailing theories of Scripture
inspiration. All those theories seemed inconsistent with
facts,--inconsistent with what every man of any information, knew to be
true in reference to the Scriptures. They all lay open to infidel
objections,--unanswerable objections. They made it impossible for a man
to argue with the abler and better informed class of infidel assailants
with the success and satisfaction desirable. The theories did not
_admit_ of a successful defence. And when the theories were refuted, the
Bible and Christianity suffered. On searching the Scriptures I found
they gave no countenance to those theories. They taught the _doctrine_
of Scripture inspiration, but not the prevailing _theories_ of the
doctrine. The doctrine I could defend with ease: the defence of the
theories was